New Benchmark Center Strengthens HP's Leadership in HPC

HP today announced the opening of its new High-Performance Computing (HPC) Benchmark Centre, a joint venture between HP and Intel, located in Grenoble, France. The new center will be integrated into HP's worldwide HPC Benchmarking Grid with existing sites in Grenoble in France, Boeblingen in Germany, Richardson in Texas, USA, and Nashua in New Hampshire, USA. The total Intel-based compute power in HP’s worldwide HPC Benchmarking Grid exceeds 33 Tflops. Fifty percent of this capacity is accommodated in the new center through state-of-the-art HPC systems based on the most advanced Intel multi-core processor technologies. Supercomputing performance continues to foster more, better and faster scientific discovery and engineering. The benchmarking center will help customers to further advance the power of computing with scalable solutions for high-performance computation, data management, and visualization. Customers in HPC-reliant industries such as life and materials sciences, computer-aided engineering, electronic design automation, geo-sciences, defense and security and scientific research – will also be hosted there to learn about implementation, management and tuning of large High-Performance Computing environments. Further highlights of HP’s and Intel’s HPC commitment and market leadership:

• Customers continue to select Intel-based HP solutions over competitors for their HPC needs. Recent joint customer wins include the Joint Supercomputing Centre (JSCC) in Russia, Italy’s national supercomputing center CINECA, Istanbul Technical University (ITU) in Turkey, Saudi Aramco in Saudi Arabia, Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics (SIB) in Switzerland, Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique (INRIA) Lorraine as well as Laboratoire de Mécanique et Acoustique (LMA) in France, Cranfield University in the UK, and the Universities of Muenster and Leipzig in Germany.
• In the high-performance computing market, HP was No. 1 worldwide in terms of revenue for calendar year 2006 with 16.7 percent year-over-year growth. This marks the fourth consecutive year of HP revenue leadership in the high-performance computing market.
• Intel in turn has led the market with key HPC platform building blocks like processors with high performance and low average power consumption for integration into the HP HPC solutions, as well as HPC specific systems, boards and software tools.
• As key sponsors at Europe's premier HPC event, the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC) 2006, HP and Intel supported the ISC Award which honors the work of scientists applying HPC to real life problems in innovative ways. The 2006 ISC Award Winner, Friedrich-Alexander University of Erlangen-Nuernberg, was among the first visitors of the new center. Recognized for their expertise in a broad spectrum of HPC-based research, this university benefits from a recently installed 9 Tflops Intel-based HPC cluster from HP for applications ranging from fundamental research in nuclear science to studies with high economic potential. The Bioinformatics group, for example, uses molecular dynamics simulations to explore biological systems of HIV-protease as well as bacterial and viral regulatory proteins, to advance medicine and treatment options for this disease.

“HP and Intel together are delivering affordable, easy-to-use industry standard-based HPC solutions to an increasingly broad range of scientists and engineers in diverse application areas across EMEA,” said Eugen Volbers, director HPC EMEA, HP. “Our customers recognize the importance of this collaboration and its implications for helping them advance important medical, scientific, social, economic and other issues important to their work and on behalf of society in large.”

More information about HP in high-performance computing is available at www.hp.com/go/hptc.