AsianScientist (Mar. 18, 2019) – The National Research Foundation (NRF) of Singapore has set aside S$200 million (~US$150 million) to boost the nation’s high performance computing capabilities. The injection of new funds was announced by Mr Heng Swee Keat, Singapore minister of finance and chairman of the NRF, during the Supercomputing Asia 2019 conference which ran from 11-14 March 2019 in Singapore.
Singapore already owns a supercomputer—the Aspire 1—housed at the National Supercomputing Centre (NSCC) Singapore. Built by Fujitsu Asia Pte Ltd, the Aspire 1 has a one petaFLOP system consisting of approximately 1,200 servers, of which 128 are enabled with Graphics Processing Units, or GPUs.
With the new funding, the capacity for high performance computation will be increased by 15-20 petaPLOPS, supporting research on complex problems such as the modeling and prediction of climate patterns as well as the analysis of mobility conditions on Singapore’s roads.
“How we transform all our industries, sector by sector, systematically, and search for new engines of growth, will be key to our future economy. In this regard, high performance computing can play a key role. I am pleased to announce that to support the next phase of this development, the National Research Foundation will allocate S$200 million under the Research, Innovation and Enterprise 2020 plan to upgrade both our supercomputing capability, network speed and quality for access by all institutions of higher learning and research institutions,” said Heng.
In addition, the investment will open opportunities for companies to collaborate with academia to solve industry pain points, said Heng. For example, NSCC and Keppel Corporation are working together on optimizing the design of rigs and vessels.
“Whether our national supercomputers are modeling climate change, or designing digital twins of manufactured products from tiny chips to the largest oil rigs or aerospace engines, our research scientists and engineers are working together with our computer specialists to solve problems digitally and physically across industries. This cyber-physical convergence holds much promise,” Heng added.
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Source: National Supercomputing Centre Singapore; Photo: Shutterstock.
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