MILPITAS, CA, Nov. 6 – Appro, a leading provider of supercomputing solutions, today announced the successful delivery of a 113.2 TFlops, Appro Xtreme-X Supercomputer based on a subcontract awarded from CSC’s North American Public Sector in support of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Hurricane Forecast Improvement Project (HFIP). The new supercomputer went live in early September. This work is under the NOAA Research and Development High Performance Computing System contract that CSC won in 2010 to build a supercomputer for modeling weathering patterns. The $317 million contract is an indefinite-delivery, indefinite quantity vehicle that has a four-year base period, a four-year option and one-year transition option.

The HFIP supports NOAA and other agencies’ goals to provide hurricane research needed to significantly improve guidance for hurricane track, intensity, and storm surge forecasts using advanced High Performance Computing (HPC) technologies. NOAA will use the Appro Xtreme-X Supercomputer for weather and climate modeling, which involves managing, analyzing and visualizing vast amounts of data. The goal is to improve reliability and higher accuracy of forecasts that are expected to lead to improved public response, including saving both life and property.

As a subcontractor to CSC on this work, Appro provided the Xtreme-X Supercomputer with the Appro complete Solution Delivery and On-Site Professional Installation Services to NOAA. CSC will provide overall systems administration and 5x9 On-site Maintenance Service with 4 hour response time for ongoing support. Together, Appro and CSC will help NOAA reduce complexity and lower its total cost of ownership in deploying, managing and servicing their open standards HPC solutions.

Appro Xtreme-X Supercomputer system configuration for NOAA features single rail QDR InfiniBand interconnect based on a dual socket, 8-core Intel® Xeon® processor E5 Family providing a total of 113.2 TFlops of computing performance and 10.9 TB of memory. The system has been built for Resiliency, Reliability, Availability and Serviceability (RRAS) requirements providing energy-efficient, redundant and hot swappable platinum rated power supplies, and no single point of failure from compute nodes to network links. In addition, the system was shipped with Field Replacement Units (FRU’s) that have been placed in a spare parts cache to meet the customer’s exceptionally high system availability requirements. In general, the system configuration provides the best use of NOAA’s floor space, cooling and power distribution.

"We are proud to complete the installation and deployment of the Appro Xtreme-X Supercomputer, delivering high performance and high availability features to NOAA to support weather and climate prediction,” said Daniel Kim, CEO of Appro.

“By installing the Appro Xtreme-X Supercomputer as part of the NOAA’s Hurricane Forecast Improvement Project (HFIP), CSC and Appro are working together to improve the reliability, fault tolerance and redundancy of the HPC solution, as well as flexibility for system scalability for future installations.” said Steve Baxter, program manager of CSC’s North American Public Sector.

Appro provides dependable supercomputing solutions offering greater performance, scalability and reliability allowing scientific meteorology research to take advantage of the latest technologies to improve weather forecasts.

About Appro

Appro is a leading developer of innovative supercomputing solutions. Appro is uniquely positioned to support High-Performance Computing (HPC) markets focusing on medium to large-scale deployments where lower total cost of ownership is essential. Appro accelerates technical applications and business results through outstanding price/performance, power efficient and fast time-to-market solutions based on the latest open standards technologies, innovative cluster tools and management software packaged with HPC professional services and support. Appro supercomputing solutions enables scientists and engineers to use data-intensive, capacity, capability and hybrid computing for scientific research, data modeling, engineering simulations, and seismic visualization. Appro’s headquarters is located in Milpitas, CA with offices in Korea, Japan and Houston, TX.

About CSC

CSC is a global leader in providing technology-enabled business solutions and services. Headquartered in Falls Church, Va., CSC has approximately 96,000 employees and reported revenue of $15.8 billion for the 12 months ended June 29, 2012.

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Source: Appro