Taiwan’s fastest supercomputer “ALPS” (short for Advanced Large-scale Parallel Supercluster, also nicknamed Windrider), built by the NARL’s National Center for High-performance Computing (NCHC) in cooperation with Acer was ranked 42 in the 37th edition of the TOP500 List released on June 20 at the 2011 International Supercomputing Conference in Hamburg, Germany.

Based on the latest technologies the ALPS works at 177 trillion floating point operations per second (TFLOPS) and is available to government agencies and academic institutions. Performing at 8.5 times the current capacity of the most powerful high-performance computing (HPC) computer in Taiwan, the ALPS is expected to meet the HPC demands of the academic and research sectors and assist them to resolve larger and more complex research problems.Researchers are expected to use the power and resources for a range of scientific and engineering projects including climate studies, a priority for officials and citizens weary of deadly typhoons that hit Taiwan almost every year, and application of biotechnology, a priority economic development for the nation.

The ALPS will be in full operation in August of 2011. The experience learned from this joint effort has offered a great deal of knowledge to both NARL-NCHC and Acer. Most importantly, this effort not only enhances the expertise of HPC community but also will further strengthen the capacity of scientific and engineering computing in Taiwan.