Acer has been awarded the contract for Taiwan?s National Center of High-performance Computing?s (NCHC) overhaul of its major supercomputer in Taichung, central Taiwan.

Scheduled for completion at the end of March 2011, the supercomputer will offer High-Performance Computing (HPC) services to a wide range of research and industrial customers in Taiwan. The installation is expected to place in the top 50 of the TOP500 fastest supercomputers around the world.

For this contract Acer, in conjunction with Acer e-Enabling Data Center (eDC), who run one of the largest data center of its kind in the Asia-Pacific region, will provide entire system integration encompassing Servers, storage, switches, software, and construction of NCHC?s high-density data center with over 600 Acer servers.

The NCHC tender offer was contested among a total of 10 applicants, and Acer was announced the winner after six months of intense competition.

Acer is working closely leading HPC solution providers to provide the required clustered computing performance for NCHC. These include QLogic (TrueScale Infiniband host adaptors and switches), DataDirect (storage, Lustre deployment), Platform Computing, Allinea Software (parallel debugging software).

The solution includes over 600 servers with a combination of Acer?s AMD Opteron 6100 Series processor-based AR585 F1 server, and Acer?s Intel Xeon based AR360 F1 server. The system will have over 25,000 computing cores, over 70 TB of memory and over 1.1 PB of storage capacity.

HPC is one of the fastest growing computing fields and its uses are expanding all the time. Modern HPC designs make use of clustered computing systems, which combine the power of multiple servers to achieve performance levels far beyond those of a single machine.