AsianScientist (Dec. 22, 2016) – Singapore has joined the ranks of countries with petascale supercomputing capabilities with the National Supercomputing Centre Singapore’s (NSCC) Advanced Supercomputer for Petascale Innovation, Research and Enterprise or ASPIRE 1. The one petaFLOPS system was unveiled by Mr. Peter Ho, chairman of the NSCC steering committee, at a ceremony held on December 20, 2016.

ASPIRE 1 is based on x86 architecture supplied by Fujitsu Asia Pte Ltd and comprises 1,288 nodes and 30,912 cores. The system has 13 petabytes of storage with an input/output burst rate of 500 gigabytes per second and a total memory of 229 terabytes.

The facility is connected to research institutes at the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR) locally, while users at the National University of Singapore (NUS) and Nanyang Technological University (NTU) can access the system via the Singapore Advanced Research and Education Network (SingAREN) Lightwave Internet Exchange network.

ASPIRE 1 serves both academic and industry high performance computing (HPC) users, including the Technology Centre for Offshore and Marine Singapore (TCOMS), a national center of excellence launched in October 2016. The TCOMS core powers the next-generation Deepwater Ocean Basin research facility which uses advanced wave and current generation systems to simulate ocean environments.

Established in 2016 by founding stakeholders A*STAR, NUS, NTU and Singapore University of Technology and Design, NSCC is Singapore’s first national facility of petascale standard.

“NSCC’s long-term vision is to continually make HPC accessible by all, thereby democratising HPC and building a healthy ecosystem of supercomputing users,” Mr. Jon Lau, NSCC deputy director (business development) told Asian Scientist Magazine. “Our national agenda also extends to building a data transfer fabric that will facilitate ease of access, sharing and control of resources common to all researchers. We aim to play a leading role in global efforts to build an integrated research platform that will support research at the speed of thought.”

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Copyright: Asian Scientist Magazine.

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