HPE scores £22 million Singapore supercomputer contract

HPE has been awarded $40 million SGD (£22 million) to build a new supercomputer for the National Supercomputing Centre (NSCC) Singapore which will be operational in early 2022.

The new system will reportedly be 8x faster than the NSCC’s existing pool of HPC resources. It will use the system to unlock scientific discoveries across medicine, diseases, climate, engineering and more.

The new supercomputer will be built and powered using the HPE Cray EX supercomputer, deliver 10 petabytes of storage with over 300GB/s of read/write performance speeds, use 3rd Gen AMD EPYC processors and contain 352 Nvidia A100 Tensor Core GPUs for HPC and AI workloads.

Furthermore, the system will be housed in a data centre designed to increase sustainability and reduce energy consumption, according to HPE. The new system will have liquid-cooling capabilities to increase energy efficiency and power density by transferring heat generated by the new supercomputer with a liquid-cooled process.

“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.” said associate professor Tan Tin Wee, CEO at the NSCC Singapore.

Earlier this month, the Met Office signed a multimillion-pound agreement with Microsoft for a new supercomputer to be built also using HPE’s Cray supercomputer hardware. It is set to provide highly-accurate weather forecasts, will be powered by renewable energy, and will save 7,415 tonnes of CO2 in its first year of operational service.

Dell and Nvidia are also set to power new supercomputers to help researchers at Cambridge and Durham universities investigate the universe’s biggest questions. The move was part of a deal with the Distributed Research utilising Advanced Computing (DiRAC) project, which operates as a distributed computing network with several deployments across the UK.