Appro was a developer of supercomputing supporting

High Performance Computing High-performance computing (HPC) uses supercomputers and computer clusters to solve advanced computation problems. Overview HPC integrates systems administration (including network and security knowledge) and parallel programming into a multid ...

(HPC) markets focused on medium- to large-scale deployments. Appro was based in

Milpitas, California Milpitas (Spanish for "little milpas") is a city in Santa Clara County, California, in Silicon Valley. As of the 2020 census, the city population was 80,273. The city's origins lie in Rancho Milpitas, granted to Californio ranchero José Mar� ...

with a computing center in

Houston, Texas Houston (; ) is the most populous city in Texas, the most populous city in the Southern United States, the fourth-most populous city in the United States, and the sixth-most populous city in North America, with a population of 2,304,580 in ...

, and a manufacturing and support subsidiary in

South Korea South Korea, officially the Republic of Korea (ROK), is a country in East Asia, constituting the southern part of the Korea, Korean Peninsula and sharing a Korean Demilitarized Zone, land border with North Korea. Its western border is formed ...

and

Japan Japan ( ja, 日本, or , and formally , ''Nihonkoku'') is an island country in East Asia. It is situated in the northwest Pacific Ocean, and is bordered on the west by the Sea of Japan, while extending from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north ...

Cray Inc. Cray Inc., a subsidiary of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, is an American supercomputer manufacturer headquartered in Seattle, Washington. It also manufactures systems for data storage and analytics. Several Cray supercomputer systems are listed i ...

purchased Appro in November 2012.

Company history

Appro was founded in 1991 by President and CEO Daniel Kim. Mr. Kim expanded the company in the US market as OEM high performance rackmount computer systems manufacturer. Appro quickly became one of the fastest growing rackmount computer companies. In 2002, Appro produced and marketed its own line of branded high-density servers for the high-performance and Internet computing markets in a transition from OEM to Appro branded products. In 2005, Appro expanded manufacturing, engineering and product development teams in South Korea and introduced its first blade cluster, the Appro HyperBlade Server Cluster Solution and the Appro 1142H, the first 1U 4-processor server available to the HPC market. In 2006, Appro launched its first flagship product, the Xtreme-X Supercomputer based on

x86 x86 (also known as 80x86 or the 8086 family) is a family of complex instruction set computer (CISC) instruction set architectures initially developed by Intel based on the Intel 8086 microprocessor and its 8088 variant. The 8086 was introd ...

processors. The system combines high performance and high availability in a balanced architecture for scaling out data centers from medium to large-sized systems. The supercomputer features the Appro Cluster Engine (ACE) Management Software, a complete lights-out remote management system. In 2008 and 2009, Appro announced the Appro HyperPower Cluster, a hybrid CPU/GPU computing based on

NVIDIA Tesla Nvidia Tesla was the name of Nvidia's line of products targeted at stream processing or general-purpose graphics processing units (GPGPU), named after pioneering electrical engineer Nikola Tesla. Its products began using GPUs from the G80 ser ...

and NVIDIA Cuda software technology and including professional services and cluster management options. Appro also launched the Appro GreenBlade System. In 2011, Appro revealed the next generation Xtreme-X Supercomputer. The system featured the latest processing and accelerator technologies, increased performance/watt, multiple high performance network connectivity, I/O and disk options along with specialized professional services. The system addressed four critical HPC workloads: capacity, hybrid, data intensive, and capability computing. The reinvented system won several major supercomputing contracts for customers such as San Diego Supercomputer Center, Lockheed Martin (Department of Defense), NNSA (Department of Energy), University of Tsukuba, and Lawrence Livermore, Sandia, Los Alamos National Laboratories. On November 9, 2012,

announced plans to acquire Appro for $21.8 million to strengthen the company's HPC cluster system offerings. On November 21, 2012 Cray announced it had completed the acquisition of Appro International, Inc.

Customers and Supercomputing Projects

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (abbreviated as NOAA ) is an United States scientific and regulatory agency within the United States Department of Commerce that forecasts weather, monitors oceanic and atmospheric conditio ...

(NOAA) – 113TF supercomputer for NOAA's Hurricane Forecast Improvement Project (HFIP) (2012) *

Virginia Tech Virginia Tech (formally the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University and informally VT, or VPI) is a Public university, public Land-grant college, land-grant research university with its main campus in Blacksburg, Virginia. It also ...

, Advanced Research Computing (ARC) – Blue-Ridge Supercomputer (2011) featuring Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors * Kyoto University – 210TF supercomputer (2011) for the Academic Center for Computing and Media Studies (ACCMS) at Kyoto University *

San Diego Supercomputer Center The San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) is an organized research unit of the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). SDSC is located at the UCSD campus' Eleanor Roosevelt College east end, immediately north the Hopkins Parking Structure. ...

(SDSC) – 35M IOPS Gordon Supercomputer (2011), 100TF Trestles (2010), and DASH (2009). * TLCC Projects for the NNSA – Tri-lab Linux Capacity Cluster: TLCC2 (2011) and TLCC07 (2007) at Lawrence Livermore, Sandia, and Los Alamos National Laboratories *

Los Alamos National Laboratory Los Alamos National Laboratory (often shortened as Los Alamos and LANL) is one of the sixteen research and development laboratories of the United States Department of Energy (DOE), located a short distance northwest of Santa Fe, New Mexico, ...

– 353TF Mustang supercomputer (2011) *

University of Tsukuba is a public university, public research university located in Tsukuba, Ibaraki Prefecture, Ibaraki, Japan. It is a top 10 Designated National University, and was ranked Type A by the Japanese government as part of the Top Global University Pro ...

– 802TF HA-PACS supercomputer (2011) and 95TF supercomputer (2009) at the Center for Computational Sciences *

Lockheed Martin The Lockheed Martin Corporation is an American aerospace, arms, defense, information security, and technology corporation with worldwide interests. It was formed by the merger of Lockheed Corporation with Martin Marietta in March 1995. It ...

– 147.5TF Supercomputer in support of the DoD High Performance Computing Modernization Program (HPCMP) *

Sandia National Laboratory Sandia National Laboratories (SNL), also known as Sandia, is one of three research and development laboratories of the United States Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA). Headquartered in Kirtland Air Force Bas ...

– First of a Kind Intel MIC Testbed Experimental Cluster (2011) *

Idaho National Laboratory Idaho National Laboratory (INL) is one of the national laboratories of the United States Department of Energy and is managed by the Battelle Energy Alliance. While the laboratory does other research, historically it has been involved with nu ...

– Fission supercomputer (2011) *

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) is a federal research facility in Livermore, California, United States. The lab was originally established as the University of California Radiation Laboratory, Livermore Branch in 1952 in response ...

– Hyperion Project (2010), 110TF Graph supercomputer (2009) and 222TF Peloton Project consisting of Rhea, Zeus, Minos and Atlas Clusters (2007) * Renault Formula 1 Team – 38TF supercomputer delivered to the Computational Fluid Dynamics Center in the UK (2009)

Awards and honors

* In November 2012, an Appro Xtreme-X supercomputer (''

Beacon A beacon is an intentionally conspicuous device designed to attract attention to a specific location. A common example is the lighthouse, which draws attention to a fixed point that can be used to navigate around obstacles or into port. More mode ...

'') topped the Green500 List. Beacon is deployed by

National Institute for Computational Sciences The National Institute for Computational Sciences (NICS) is funded by the National Science Foundation and managed by the University of Tennessee. NICS was home to Kraken, the most powerful computer in the world managed by academia. The NICS petas ...

of the

University of Tennessee The University of Tennessee (officially The University of Tennessee, Knoxville; or UT Knoxville; UTK; or UT) is a public land-grant research university in Knoxville, Tennessee. Founded in 1794, two years before Tennessee became the 16th state, ...

, and is actually a GreenBlade GB824M, Xeon E5-2670 based eight cores (8C), 2.6 GHz, Infiniband FDR, Intel Xeon Phi 5110P computer. * HPCwire Editors' Choice Award 2012 – Appro Xtreme-X Supercomputer was awarded "Best HPC Cluster Solution" and "Best HPC Storage Product or Technology" for the collaborative project with SDSC for its Data Oasis Storage System running on the Gordon Supercomputer. *

Top500 The TOP500 project ranks and details the 500 most powerful non-distributed computing, distributed computer systems in the world. The project was started in 1993 and publishes an updated list of the supercomputers twice a year. The first of these ...

November 2012 – Appro was ranked #4 vendor on the Top500 list with 24 supercomputers making the list, with the highest ranking system, the Zin supercomputer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, at #29. * 2012 Intel Solution Summit – Datacenter Solution Innovation Award Winner for Appro GreenBlade and Xtreme-X Supercomputer * HPCwire Reader and Editor Choice 2011 – Editor's Choice for "Top 5 Vendors to Watch" and "Best HPC Server Product or Technology" for Appro Xtreme-X Supercomputer.

References

External links

* {{dead link, date=October 2018
Youtube

Top500 List November 2012

Green500 List – November 2012
Cray Companies based in Milpitas, California Computer companies established in 1991 Manufacturing companies established in 1991 American companies established in 1991 1991 establishments in California 2012 mergers and acquisitions