Taiwan Readies 70-Teraflop Supercomputer

By Robert Gelber

February 29, 2012

Taiwan’s National Center for High-Performance Computing (NCHC) has announced that their newest supercomputer, known as Formosa 4, will go into production in June. According to a report in the China Post, it will be used to supply processing power to the center’s recently minted render farm. The article says the system cost $1.25 million.

Since its founding in 1991, NCHC has held the goal of being an HPC center of international caliber. The center was initially funding by the Taiwanese government to provide HPC services to the public. In 2003 it transitioned into a non-profit organization.

Over the years, NCHC has joined in a variety of projects with industry and academia in the fields of photovoltaics, bioinformatics, water resource computing, medical computation and scientific visualization. Starting this past November, NCHC established a cloud-based render farm for the local film and animation industry.

At 70.4 Linpack teraflops (148.3 peak teraflops), Formosa 4 should provide a lot of image-rendering muscle for such work. The system, which will be provided by Asus, is an HPC InfiniBand-connected cluster equipped with a blend of 6-core Xeon X5670 CPUs and NVIDIA Tesla M2070 GPUs. Although the machine is not yet in production, it was ranked as the 234th most powerful supercomputer in the world on the latest TOP500 list.

Formosa 4 will also be the speediest system at NCHC, by far. The center has collected a variety of HPC systems over the years (mostly HP and IBM machines), but up until now the fastest was Formosa 3, which provided 8 teraflops. Prior to that was Formosa 2, an IBM eServer cluster, whose AMD dual-core Opteron nodes delivered 1.68 teraflops. And its predecessor, Formosa 1, was a self-made Pentium 4 Xeon cluster, which also hit 1.68 teraflops. When that cluster was installed in 2003, it was Taiwan’s most powerful computer.

Takeaway

The Formosa 4 may not be raising any eyebrows in the HPC community with a sub-100-teraflop Linpack performance. However, it represents a top-of-the line machine for animation and filmmaking, which is big business in Taiwan. Computational power aside, the NCHC has shown consistent efforts to invest in HPC and engage local industry and academia.

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