Thailand’s National Science and Technology Development Agency Bolsters R&D and Strengthens Nation’s Economy with New Supercomputer from Hewlett Packard Enterprise

By: Hewlett Packard Enterprise via Business Wire

November 30, 2021 at 04:00 AM EST

New supercomputer speeds time-to-insight and accelerates innovation for Thailand’s efforts in medicine, energy sources, weather forecasting and more with advanced modeling, simulation, AI and analytics capabilities

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (NYSE: HPE) today announced that it is building a new supercomputer for Thailand’s National Science and Technology Development Agency (NSTDA) that is 30X faster than its existing system. The new supercomputer will be hosted in the NSTDA Supercomputer center (ThaiSC), which is one Thailand’s leading national science and technology infrastructure (NSTI) centers within the NSTDA that delivers cutting-edge high performance computing (HPC) resources for the national R&D’s efforts. The system will support all research communities in Thailand across public and private organizations.

NSTDA’s new supercomputer will be built using the HPE Cray EX system, an end-to-end, scalable high performance computing platform to deliver next-generation supercomputing capabilities to improve modeling, simulation, AI and analytics. By harnessing new insights, scientists and engineers using the new supercomputer will advance research to innovate in key areas such as pharmaceuticals, weather forecasting and renewable energy to bolster Thailand’s economy and self-reliance.

“The HPE Cray EX system delivers a comprehensive, end-to-end high performance computing (HPC) solution that is transforming research with advanced approaches to modeling and simulation, and powers AI initiatives that generate major insights and breakthroughs,” said Bill Mannel, vice president and general manager, High Performance Computing, at HPE. “We are honored to collaborate with the National Science and Technology Development Agency (NSTDA) to design its new supercomputer using the HPE Cray EX system. NSTDA’s new supercomputer, which will deliver a new set of capabilities for researchers, scientists and engineers, represents a significant leap in innovation for Thailand that will unlock new economic and societal value for the nation and its people.”

New Supercomputer Fuels Innovation for Thailand to Increase Competition and Self-Reliance

NSTDA’s new supercomputer will support ongoing R&D in the following areas to strengthen a range of industries for Thailand, including:

Boosting Thailand’s healthcare industry with advanced biopharmaceutical techniques – In an effort to support affordable healthcare and create new drug therapies that can be manufactured at scale, researchers use the power of supercomputing to focus on a range of drug design development for COVID-19. This process includes everything from modeling and simulating various biomolecular interactions with drug candidates to supporting the development, production, and quality control of biopharmaceuticals, biosimilars and vaccines.
Increasing Thailand’s energy supply with renewable and sustainable sources – Thai researchers also turn to supercomputing to address sustainable energy solutions, which include analyzing data to improve sourcing for renewable energy, such as with solar power, and energy storage, such as with batteries and accumulator. Researchers are also focused on alternative diesel fuels to improve ignition and combustion efficiency, while reducing pollutant emissions, using a diesel hydrotreating process.
Creating real-time awareness of weather conditions by speeding up weather predictions – The supercomputer will allow researchers to speed up forecasting for various weather events such as air quality, flooding, earthquakes, and tsunamis. For example, Thai researchers can simulate data to forecast concentration of fine particulate matter (PM2.5), which is an air pollutant made up of tiny particles in the air that impacts visibility and causes haziness in the air. By generating timely and accurate PM2.5 forecasting to share with the public, local decision makers can help guide air quality control and management for safety and environmental sustainability.

Delivering an End-to-End Supercomputing Design to Tackle Next-Generation Applications

As part of NSTDA’s new system design, HPE will also feature 496 3^rd Gen AMD EPYC processors to run modeling and simulation workloads at a faster rate, and 704 NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPUs to improve graphics in image-intensive data and accelerate AI in traditional HPC workloads.

The new system will gain an additional boost of performance through HPE Slingshot, an Ethernet fabric purpose-built for next-generation supercomputing to address higher speed and congestion control for larger data-intensive and AI workloads. To help store and share a higher volume of complex data, HPE will also integrate its Cray Clusterstor E1000 storage system for expanded storage and intelligent tiering capabilities. The combined advanced technologies will deliver 13 petaflops of peak performance.

NSTDA’s new supercomputer will be installed and operational in 2022.

About Hewlett Packard Enterprise

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (NYSE: HPE) is the global edge-to-cloud company that helps organizations accelerate outcomes by unlocking value from all of their data, everywhere. Built on decades of reimagining the future and innovating to advance the way people live and work, HPE delivers unique, open and intelligent technology solutions as a service. With offerings spanning Cloud Services, Compute, High Performance Computing & AI, Intelligent Edge, Software, and Storage, HPE provides a consistent experience across all clouds and edges, helping customers develop new business models, engage in new ways, and increase operational performance. For more information, visit: www.hpe.com

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