Singapore's A*CRC Joins the OpenPOWER Foundation to Accelerate HPC Research
Published on Thursday 17 March 2016
By Ganesan Narayanasamy, Senior Manager, IBM Systems
Singapore’s Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR) is the largest government funded research organization in Singapore, with over 5,300 personnel in 14 research institutes across the country.
A*STAR Computational Resource Centre (A*CRC) provides high performance computational (HPC) resources to the entire A*STAR research community. Currently A*CRC supports HPC needs of an 800 member user community and manages several high-end computers, including an IBM 822LC system with NVIDIA K80 GPU Cards and Mellanox EDR switch to port and optimize the HPC applications. It is also responsible for very rapidly growing data storage resources.
A*CRC will work with IBM and the OpenPOWER Foundation to hasten its path to develop applications on OpenPOWER Systems leveraging the Foundation’s ecosystem of technology.
Experts it A*CRC will explore the range of scientific applications that leverage the Power architecture as well as NVIDIA’s GPU and Mellanox’s 100 GB/sec Infiniband switches. The switches are designed to work with IBM’s Coherent Application Processor Interface (CAPI), an OpenPOWER technology that allows attached accelerators to connect with the Power chip at a deep level.
A*CRC also will work with the OpenPOWER Foundation on evolving programming models such as OpenMP, the open multiprocessing API designed to support multi-platform shared memory.
“We need to anticipate the rise of new high performance computing architectures that bring us closer to exascale and prepare our communities,” A*CRC CEO Marek Michalewicz noted in a statement.
This week, A*STAR is hosting the Singapore Supercomputing Frontiers Conference. To learn more about their work, take part in our OpenPOWER workshop on March 18 and stay tuned for additional updates.