Appro Supercomputer to Support Renault's F1 Team

Xtreme-X2 supercomputer to increase CFD computing capacity fivefold in UK.

by DE Editors | Published March 4, 2008

On the heels of Appro (Milpitas, CA) launching its second Xtreme-X Supercomputer offering, the company announced that it was awarded a contract for a 38-teraflop (TF) Appro Xtreme-X Supercomputer for the ING Renault Formula 1 Team Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) Centre based in the UK.

The Appro Xtreme-X2 Supercomputer, to be installed by Appro at the Renault F1 CFD Centre by the end of June 2008, will provide the ING Renault F1 Team's CFD Centre with a fivefold increase in CFD computing capacity, says the company, enabling full-car simulations to be run as well as aerodynamic testing of front and rear wings, turning vanes, brake ducts, fuel tanks, and more. According to the company, the expanded facility is expected to provide 50 percent of the gains of a fully efficient wind tunnel for less than 50 percent of the investment.

The Appro Xtreme-X2, based on dual-socket, Quad-Core AMD (Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.; Sunnyvale, CA ) Opteron processors, offers a reliable and scalable architecture with 128 nodes/512 Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors and 4.5 teraflops (TF) of computing power in a single 44U equipment rack. As configured for the Renault F1's CFD Centre, the supercomputer has a peak capability of 38 teraflops (TF) and is provisioned as a single unified supercomputing system.

The Appro Xtreme-X2 supercomputer has 4.4 terabytes (TB) of high-performance local memory with a usable aggregate bandwidth of more than 8TBps. Each dual processor node has a peak capability of more than 70 gigaflops (GF). Plus the Xtreme-X2 comes pre-configured with the Appro Management System that supports a dual-rail InfiniBand network as a load-balanced fault-tolerant interconnect and allows the use of shared receive queues with multi-channel operation. The system is managed by the Appro Cluster Engine (ACE) management software.

While Appro's announcement of the Xtreme-X2 Supercomputer being selected by Renault F1 Team is current, its general availability in March 2008 has configurations starting at 64 nodes, with 128 Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors per rack cabinet. Pricing information may vary by system configuration. To read the full release " Appro Unleashes Xtreme-X2 Supercomputer for Better Reliability and System Performance 2/26/08 ," please visit Appro.

Sources: Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company's website.

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