The National Supercomputing Centre (NSCC) Singapore has awarded a $40 million SGD (AED111 million) contract to Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) to build a new supercomputer.
The national high-performance computing (HPC) resource center is dedicated to supporting science and engineering computing needs for academic, research and industry communities and the new system, which will be 8X faster compared to NSCC’s existing pool of HPC resources, will expand and augment ongoing research efforts by enabling tools such as artificial intelligence (AI) and deep machine learning to optimise modeling, simulation and even software simulation for quantum computing.
NSCC will use the system to unlock scientific discoveries across medicine, diseases, climate, engineering and more.
The new supercomputer was funded through a SGD200 million investment that was announced by the Singapore government in March 2019 to boost Singapore’s high-performance computing resources.
The NSCC’s new supercomputer will be built and powered using the HPE Cray EX supercomputer, which is an HPC system designed to support next-level supercomputing, such as Exascale-class systems that also features a full stack of purpose-built technologies across compute, software, storage and networking to harness insights from complex data more quickly and efficiently.
The new system will be housed in a new data center designed to increase sustainability and reduce energy consumption. To further support NSCC’s mission for a greener data center, the new system will leverage liquid-cooling capabilities made possible through the HPE Cray EX supercomputer to increase energy efficiency and power density by transferring heat generated by the new supercomputer with a liquid-cooled process.
The combination of these advanced technologies will enable the NSCC’s existing community of researchers and scientists further their R&D efforts to make breakthroughs in areas like understanding the spread of airborne cough droplets as in the COVID-19 pandemic; accelerating insights into weather forecasting and climate patterns for Singapore and Southeast Asia and advancing safety in autonomous driving with optimised AI training.
Bill Mannel, vice president and general manager, HPE, commented: “We are inspired by how Singapore’s community of scientists have leveraged high performance computing to improve ongoing research efforts. We are honored to continue empowering their mission by building them a powerful system using the HPE Cray EX supercomputer that delivers comprehensive, purposely-engineered technologies for demanding research.
“The new system will deliver a significant boost to R&D, allowing Singapore’s community of scientists and engineers to make greater contributions that will unlock innovation, economic value, and overall, strengthen the nation’s position in becoming more digitally-driven.”
Associate Professor Tan Tin Wee, Chief Executive at the National Supercomputing Centre (NSCC) Singapore added: “Supercomputers have enabled the scientific community in Singapore to make significant strides in their research. The new system will provide the necessary resources to meet the growing supercomputing needs of our researchers, and to enable more of such significant scientific breakthroughs at the national and global level.”
The HPE Cray EX supercomputer powering NSCC’s new supercomputer is a purpose-built system designed specifically to deliver petaflop to exaflop performance with the world’s most energy-efficient footprint. It also includes the HPE Cray EX software stack for software-defined capabilities that allow the NSCC’s users to gain the high-performance of a supercomputer, but through the operational experience of a cloud.
It will have expanded storage to support and share complex workloads. The new supercomputer will deliver 10 petabytes of storage with over 300GB/s of read/write performance speeds and also give the ability of powerful compute to improve modeling and simulation using 3rd Gen AMD EPYC processors, as well as targeted accelerated computing capabilities with 352 NVIDIA® A100 Tensor Core GPUs.
