SCIENCE

New Quad-Core Intel Xeon Processors Power up HPC Applications in the Oil and Gas Industry:

Appro (http://www.appro.com), a leading provider of supercomputing solutions, today announced the award of a mid-sized Appro HyperGreen Intel Cluster Ready certified solution for Rice University's Ken Kennedy Institute for Information Technology in Houston. Located in the world's energy capital, Rice is a leader in the application of high-performance computing (HPC) for the oil and gas industry, and the university also boasts cutting-edge computational research in disciplines as diverse as biomedicine, energy, the environment, nanotechnology and materials science.

Rice University needed a modern, energy-efficient, high performance cluster capable to provide both high memory bandwidth and a fast interconnection network with full bisection bandwidth critical for their diverse tightly-coupled data-intensive parallel applications.

Rice's Appro HyperGreen Cluster solution will be shipped and installed this spring. The entire system consists of two fully integrated high-performance computing clusters based on the latest Quad-Core Intel Xeon 5500 series processors. It will contain 94 nodes with 752 processing cores using InfiniBand switches and Mellanox dual-port DDR InfiniBand HCAs. The system will be pre-configured with Appro BladeDome remote server management software designed to provide simplified administration along with cluster installation services and support.

"We are proud to provide Rice University with our Appro HyperGreen Cluster Solution for science computational research," said Daniel Kim, president and CEO of Appro. "Today, end-users can get a full range of high-performance computing taking advantage of Appro's mid-range innovative cluster solution packaged with the latest green technologies."

"Appro HyperGreen Cluster offers a dense, modular and Intel Cluster Ready certified solution that simplifies and accelerates HPC cluster deployment," said Richard Dracott, general manager of high-performance computing at Intel Corporation. "For this award, the Appro HyperGreen Cluster takes full advantage of Intel's QuickPath Technologies by providing Rice University researchers the expanded memory capacity and improved system I/O memory they need to continue producing world-class results allowing the Kennedy Institute to support a growing portfolio of computational science and engineering research."