The following is a release Inspur issued this morning.

BEIJING, China, June 18 —  Inspur HPC I2I program is a comprehensive market exploration project with the direct goal to take over the IBM x86 server market share. In this project, Inspur will take the emerging markets as the entry points and motivate global HPC users and partners to cooperate with Inspur. The project is believed to be a success, according to Inspur’s abilities in R&D of the fastest supercomputers, Tianhe2 and Tianhe-1A, and on the high-quality support for HPC applications and services. More importantly, the complete HPC products and solutions family and the quick expanding global operating chain of Inspur will undoubtedly inspire confidence in the project.

As analyzed by HPC experts, it is very probable that Tianhe2 will be crowned as the first out of 500 again. Inspur also learned that many international users have expressed their intense interests in purchasing the Tianhe2 series products and lots of procurements are ongoing. Tianhe2 promisingly represents the output of Chinese hi-tech products.

The latest data from Gartner, the IT market research company, showed that in the first quarter of 2014, Inspur server shipments reached 80,929 units, ranking No.1 in China and No.5 worldwide with an increase of 288 percent, becoming the world’s fastest growing server vendor. Many of those shipments came from the customized server solutions for IPDC, Cloud, and HPC.

Wondering or Moving? The True Hesitation of Global HPC Users

HPC supercomputers play an indispensible role in oil, energy, weather climate, new materials, designing & manufacturing, pharmaceutics, aerospace, and more. It is the fundamental IT equipment for national science research and engineering innovation. In recent years, HPC has become one of the two fastest growing areas of the global server market (the other is the Internet Data Center). IDC predicts that by 2016, the global HPC market will reach $ 13.7 billion.

x86 cluster has become the mainstream in HPC architecture, with more than 90 percent of HPC users using x86 architecture. In the Top 500, IBM is the leading vender by a 32 percent performance share. Unfortunately, earlier this year, IBM announced the sale of its x86 server business. This indicates that IBM, the largest global HPC vendor, will formally withdraw from the x86 HPC market.

Mr. Liu Jun, GM of Inspur HPC, said that due to the sale of IBM’s x86 server business, many existing and potential users have to rethink their vendor selection. Wondering or moving is their real hesitation. For most HPC users, providing hardware is only a basic capability. Users pay more attention to the vendor’s capabilities to design and build reliable supercomputers, optimize applications, develop the HPC system software, and provide quick and thoughtful HPC service. Inspur can completely cover the above user’s demands, and is the right choice for HPC users.

To this aim, Inspur will open a HPC consulting and trial service worldwide, including free HPC systems solutions consulting, free application test, and free trial of HPC system software. At the same time, Inspur will start the “Visit & Try” plan for the Tianhe-2 supercomputer. Users will have the opportunity to try the world’s fastest supercomputer.

Inspur has successfully deployed several HPC systems in many regions including the Asia-Pacific, Middle East, Africa, and South America.

Leading Capabilities in HPC Design, Application, and Service

As a participant in the world’s fastest supercomputer, Inspur has reached a world class level in HPC system design, development, and deployment. Inspur has a full range of server nodes products, such as air-cooled and water cooling infrastructure, 2-way, 4-way, 8-way, 32-way, and massive storage. Inspur is also able to provide adaptive solutions according to the HPC application characteristics, and create a customized system design.

Considering the poor infrastructure of many emerging markets, Inspur puts forward the HPC container solution. The solution makes rapid deployment possible. With this solution, the HPC construction period would be shortened from years to months. Self-developed administration software, ClusterEngine and Teye, precisely manage the HPC cluster system and significantly increase the efficiency of the HPC supercomputer.

As the world’s leader in heterogeneous computing in application optimization, Inspur has parallel computing joint laboratories with Intel and NVidia, respectively. Based on Xeon Phi and GPU, the labs develop and optimize parallel applications in oil and gas, numerical weather forecasting, life sciences, computational fluid dynamics, financial risk analysis, electromagnetic simulation, CAE, and many other fields. As for professional applications support, Inspur has over 10 years’ experience in application tuning. The applications serves in 10+ industries for 300+ software databases. The professional application expert team at Inspur HPC can offer comprehensive HPC applications optimizations support.

As for service capabilities, with over a hundred service team members, Inspur HPC provides professional application services of HPC program selection, application requirements analysis, system architecture design, and special product technology verification. Meanwhile, Inspur conducts systematic after-sale service, regular inspections every three months, and has local spare parts storage. Those services ensure rapid trouble-shooting of the customer’s hardware and application failures. For VIP customers, Inspur also provide the free on-site services by engineers.

BP Recruitment Plans Open Global Competition Layout

Global network layout is undoubtedly the key of the Inspur HPC I2I program. For the layout, Inspur has started the global HPC BP (Business Partner) recruitment program called “Leaders of Excellence.” In this program, Inspur wants to help local BPs to grow into Leader-Class HPC integrators by building HPC joint testing and validation centers, timely sharing of the most advanced HPC technology, setting up a HPC market innovation fund, and prior support for large projects. The goal of the program is to develop 15+ national partners at Leader-Class in 2014.

“Leaders of Excellence” program will be divided into technical support and marketing support. In technical support, Inspur will timely share forward-looking technologies and applications, and provide training, technical support, and other specialist services. Inspur will also deepen the BP cooperation to R&D level, including setting up a joint center for HPC testing and validation, and jointly developing high-quality and customized products and service for local users. In the market support, Inspur will offer up to$100,000 USD grant for market development and help BPs speedily expand their market share. For giant projects, Inspur offers special funds, experts, and technology service support to educate BPs in the deployment of giant projects.

Mr. Huang Gang, vice president for Inspur overseas business, said the core purpose of the “Leaders of Excellence”program is “equality, openness, and growing together.” Inspur will offer investment and support to build up long-term and stable partnerships with BPs, and then develop the most promising emerging markets together.

Inspur has successfully established five major overseas business centers in the Asia Pacific, Middle East, Africa, South America, and Europe; founded sales and service organizations in 59 countries, and sold servers, storage, HPC, and intelligent terminals. In 2014, Inspur plans to have the organizations in 100 countries and regions.

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Source: Inspur