Appro Xtreme-X Gets 2007 Product of the Year Award

Appro, a leading provider of high-performance enterprise computing systems, today announced that the company's Appro Xtreme-X Supercomputer has received the "Editors' and Readers' Choice 2007 Product of the Year Award" from SuperComputing Online, the home page for high-performance computing, networking and storage professionals. The SuperComputing Online "Readers' and Editors' Choice Product of the Year Award" is given annually to products with outstanding innovation in design, value and performance. Products receiving the award were judged by the web site's readers, using an online poll in conjunction with a team of high-performance computing experts. The products were evaluated based on their ability to change the competitive landscape of the market, whether through innovative features, exceptional value for the price/performance, remarkable ease of use, or a demonstrable boost to users' productivity. The Appro Xtreme-X Supercomputer is a modular and highly scalable architecture that groups together clusters to make a unified, fully integrated Scalable Unit (SU), which can be provisioned and managed as a stand-alone supercomputer system to deliver sustained capacity computing performance. It is designed to scale out datacenters for medium to large-scale HPC deployments, ranging from 6TF to >1000 TF of computing capacity, delivering reduced TCO in an energy efficient architecture. In October 2007, Appro was awarded with the Tri-Labs (TLCC07) procurement to deliver the Appro Xtreme-X Supercomputer clusters to three National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) weapons laboratories: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratories. The win represented the first time, under a single contract, that the tri-Labs purchased the same high-performance computing systems for deployment at all three sites. "The ability to provide a scalable unit in multiple scalable clusters to all three national Lab sites with a 30-50% lower TCO is of great value to NNSA's effort to apply high performance computing to time-urgent national security challenges," said Mark Seager, Advanced Computing Technology lead for LLNL. "In the past, high-end Linux clusters were more expensive and difficult to integrate and deploy. By defining this Scalable Unit 'building block' approach to structure these multiple cluster deployments using COTS parts, the tri-Labs are able to significantly reduce TCO, simplify the integration and deployment of multiple Linux clusters at all three laboratories and put highly-needed capacity clusters into production on an accelerated timeline." (www.supercomputingonline.com/article.php?sid=14507) "We are very pleased that Appro Xtreme-X has been recognized by SuperComputing Online's editors and readers as one of the best products of the year. We are very proud to highlight that the world's top three supercomputing sites are taking advantage of the performance and productivity gains of Appro's high-performance computing solutions to reduce TCO, while simplifying the deployment of large Linux supercomputing clusters," said Daniel Kim, CEO of Appro. "Appro's Xtreme-X Supercomputer Series addresses our customers' demand for larger capacity computing architecture with excellent performance, flexibility and investment protection to scale across the enterprise." "Since 2001, SuperComputing Online has aspired to cover the world's greatest products in the worldwide high performance computing market. We hold products to a high standard, because we know users do, too. The Appro Xtreme-X Supercomputer based on scalable units impresses us like none other. In 2007, the world's top supercomputing sites at the NNSA tri-Labs have made a historic contract breakthrough and opted for Appro's Xtreme-X high performance computing clusters based on scalable units. One of the beauties of Appro's supercomputing strategy using the scalable units concept is that it makes today's modern supercomputing more accessible, scalable and affordable to worldwide companies of all sizes, budgets and needs. So it's very clear to us why the Appro Xtreme-X Supercomputer was selected to receive the Editors' Choice and Readers' Choice Award for SuperComputing Online's 2007 Product of the Year Award, which we believe identifies the world's absolute best products," said Chris O'Neal, Editor-in-Chief of SuperComputing Online.