Appro is expanding its supercomputing hardware portfolio with offerings targeting the high-frequency trading space and oil and gas market.
Appro on Oct. 12 unveiled the dual-socket HF1 server, which includes overclocked Intel Xeon 5600 "Westmere" processors and a liquid-cooling system that is designed to create the kind of high-power, low-latency environment that traders need for their rapid transactions.
The following day, the company-in conjunction with Halliburton's Landmark Software Services business unit-announced a preconfigured cluster designed to run new software from Landmark for processing oil exploration data.
The Landmark Seismic Coverage Validation Engine includes preconfigured a dual-socket Appro GreenBlade System powered by Xeon processors, with 32 nodes and up to 12 CPU cores per node and 8GB of memory. The cluster is pretested to run Landmark's new Seismic Coverage Validation Tools.
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The HF1 is a rack-mount system that is powered by two Xeon X5680s overclocked up to 4.4GHz and offers up to 48GB of memory. It also has two on-board Gigabit Ethernet ports and seven PCIe Gen 2 slots, remote management capabilities and several options of high-speed interconnects.
Appro said financial firms are the key customers, particularly those companies that handle high-frequency and electronic trading.
Appro's offering shows how companies can get technology that is made specifically for their industries, according to John Lee, vice president of advanced technology solutions at Appro.
"Appro's announcement today represents a fundamental change of how we use technology," Lee said in a statement. "Now, customers can have high-performance computing that is differentiated for their market segment demands."
The Landmark Seismic Coverage Validation Engine fits into that trend as well. It is designed to run Landmark's new Seismic Coverage Validation Tools, applications that can help an oil company get the most out of the complex seismic data that is gathered during exploration.
The work is compute-intensive and requires high-performance computing capabilities, according to Appro officials. The Landmark Seismic Coverage Validation Engine is designed to enable geoscientists to get faster results, make timely decisions and drive down the costs of exploration, they said.
The offering runs on Red Hat Linux and comes with Intel Cluster Ready software. It's also preloaded with Landmark's Seismic Coverage Validation Tools.
Appro will demonstrate the Landmark Seismic Coverage Validation Engine at the SEG International Exposition in Denver Oct. 17-20.
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