In order to solve Taiwan’s problem of insufficient high-speed computing resources, NARLabs’ National Center for High-Performance Computing constructed this new-generation supercomputer, which is entitled “Taiwania” after an endemic species of coniferous trees in Taiwan. Similarly to the “Taiwania” species of tree, the Peta-level supercomputer is expected to function as an important cornerstone for stabilizing scientific and technological research in Taiwan.

Taiwania is equipped with 630 pure CPU computing nodes along with 64 CPU GPU accelerator computing nodes, 25,200 Intel CPU cores, 256 NVIDIA P100 GPU and a gigantic storage capacity of 3.4 Pbytes (1 Pbyte is the equivalent of 1,024 Tbytes).

In terms of CPU computational capacity, it can perform up to 1.33 PFLOPS of calculation measurements; however, with the addition of the GPU calculation capacity, it can exceed 1.7 PFLOPS of calculations. “Taiwania” is the first public computing host with Peta-level computational capacity.

In addition to featuring faster computational speeds, “Taiwania” is also more energy efficient and takes up less space, giving it the benefits of better usability additional safety. In terms of energy usage, if features energy efficiency of up to 4 GFLOPS/W and offers as many as 10 times more computations per watt that the previous generation of supercomputers. Meanwhile, it covers an area of approximately 10 pings, which is only one third of the space required for the previous generation of supercomputers.

(TR/ Phil Sweeney)