Foxconn Electronics has unveiled what it claims as Taiwan's first commercial HPC (high performance computing) system capable of delivering up to 4.13Gflops/sec per watt, in cooperation with Asia Pacific Telecom (APT), according to Lu Fang-ming, group vice president of Foxconn and chairman of APT.
Lu said that the HPC features integration of CPU and GPU, with its computing performance equivalent to the combined computing capacities of as many as 5.4 million iPhone X via connections of green modules. It is now the most power-saving supercomputer system available in Taiwan, he claimed.
Foxconn's HPC is designed to serve as a fundamental equipment platform for high-performance computing operations, allowing customers in different industries to incorporate applications of HPC, Lu said, adding that Foxconn will first focus on promoting HPC applications to the health, scientific research and animation segments.
With its computing performance 250 times as powerful as general computer systems, the HPC can drastically reduce the time needed for DNA sequencing to only 30 minutes from three days. It can also help medical experts easily extract useful information from big data to better explore the cancer-causing genes and find ways to attack cancer cells, according to Lu.
As to Foxconn itself, the company will focus on analyzing industrial-use big data for applications in industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), Internet of Medicine, and Internet of Security in the future, Lu indicated.
APT chairman Lu Fang-ming
Photo: Michael Lee, Digitimes, December 2017
Article translated by Willis Ke
