Taiwan motherboard specialist Tyan Computer, which concentrates on server and workstation products, is currently developing a concept which the company calls “the personal supercomputer.” The company is aiming for an official launch of products under the concept in March-April 2006, and some form of the personal supercomputer is expected to be on display at the CeBIT 2006 trade fair in Hannover (Germany), the company indicated.
According to Tyan special project director Jeff Lin, the company is currently forming a new division focused on high-performance computing (HPC). Earlier this month at the Supercomputing 2005 conference in Seattle, Tyan showcased some products related to its personal supercomputer project. The showcased products included rackmount servers, chassis kits and server motherboards.
Tyan sees HPC as a promising and growing market, and the company is now preparing to enter this market with system-level and barebone products, Lin stated. Offering its “desk-size” supercomputers, Tyan will not attempt to replace traditional HPC clusters, but instead position the personal supercomputer as augmenting traditional large-size clusters. According to Lin, the personal supercomputer can be used for “small highly-complex math problems” and auxiliary tasks such as bug hunting. Target customers include academic societies, scientific bodies and large corporations. Having their own “personal” smaller-size HPC system, researchers can continue their computations while waiting for time-slots on a larger-scale machine, Lin said.
Lin defined this project as oriented on business rather than R&D, but stressed that Tyan will use its existing R&D resources to support the concept of personal supercomputing.
The products will be manufactured by Mitac International in China (Mitac International has currently two large-scale production bases in China, and these bases are located in Shunde, Guangdong Province and Kunshan, Jiangsu Province). Power supplies will be provided by Taiwan vendors Delta Electronics and Zippy Technology, Lin mentioned.
Tyan will provide customers a choice of two platforms, AMD Opteron and Intel Xeon. When asked about which platform better fits which sort of task, the company answered that Opteron is the optimal choice for memory-intensive applications, but Xeon processors beat Opteron in terms of performance measured in FLOPS (floating-point operations per second).
Tyan stated it will not determine any performance score as a target for its personal supercomputers, but the company will support the new HPC Challenge set of benchmarks (one in this set, the well-known Linpack, is used for the TOP500 ranking), according to Lin. Other HPC Challenge benchmarks include DGEMM (measures the floating point rate of execution of double precision real matrix-matrix multiplication), STREAM (measures sustainable memory bandwidth), PTRANS (exercises the communications where pairs of processors communicate with each other simultaneously), RandomAccess (measures the rate of integer random updates of memory), FFTE (measures the floating point rate of execution of double precision complex one-dimensional Discrete Fourier Transform) and a set of tests based on the Effective Communication Bandwidth (b_eff) benchmark to measure latency and bandwidth of a number of simultaneous communication patterns.
Designed by Jack Dongarra and Piotr Luszczek of the University of Tennessee, with collaborators from the US, Europe and Japan, the HPC Challenge benchmark suite has been released by the DARPA High Productivity Computing Systems (HPCS) program to help define performance boundaries of future “Petascale” computing systems.
Tyan special project director Jeff Lin: “Tyan will not determine any performance score as a target for its personal supercomputers, but our company will support the new HPC Challenge set of benchmarks.”
Photo: Vyacheslav Sobolev, DigiTimes.com, November 2005.
Article edited by Vyacheslav Sobolev
