Government identifies supercomputing as an important resource.
1980s
1990s
2010s
Technical team set up to study feasibility of starting supercomputing centre.
National Computer Board proposes government-funded facility to provide shared computing resources.
Advanced Computation Centre (ACC) is set up with initial S$40m investment.
NEC SX-1A supercomputer is installed at ACC.
NUS buys minicomputers for modelling underwater mine explosions.
National Supercomputing Research Centre (NSRC) is formed with ACC’s supercomputers.
Singapore acquires two IBM supercomputers with the more powerful SP2 machine going to NSRC to support R&D projects.
Singapore’s most powerful supercomputer, the Cray Research T94, arrives at NSRC.
NSRC and the Centre for Computational Mechanics, NUS merged to form the Institute of High Performance Computing (IHPC).
IHPC helps Rolls Royce in Singapore identify the right supercomputing architecture to invest in.
National Grid Office set up to coordinate the formation of national grid computing infrastructure to support growing demand for computing resources.
Seiko Instruments sets up Singapore R&D facility with IHPC to focus on fuel cell development.
IHPC and Hewlett Packard collaborated to offer computing capabilities in a shared-services delivery model.
A Scientific Advisory Board is set up to benchmark IHPC’s activities and guide its work.
A*STAR Computational Resource Centre (A*CRC) inherits 10 HPC clusters totaling 10 TFlops.
IHPC moves to Fusionopolis at One North and sets up a new simulation chamber.
IHPC signs three-year research programme with the Maritime and Port Authority on the use of computational science and engineering in the maritime industry.
Lloyd’s Register sets up Group Technology Centre in collaboration with IHPC.
A*CRC’s 100Gbps InfiniCortex (IC) is demonstrated at Supercomputing 2014 (SC14) in New Orleans, which later wins Ministry of Trade and Industry Gold Award.
National Supercomputing Centre (NSCC) Singapore, the nation’s first national petascale facility, is established with the support of A*STAR, NUS, NTU and SUTD as founding stakeholders.
Supercomputing Frontiers conference is organised and forms the precursor of the SupercomputingAsia (SCA) conference series.
NTU student team wins annual Student Cluster Competition at Supercomputing 2015 (SC15) conference in Denver.
Singapore’s 1PFlops supercomputer, ASPIRE 1, comes online as the region’s most powerful supercomputer. ASPIRE 1 was ranked No. 115 in the world in the TOP500 supercomputer list in November 2016.
New AI.Platform@NSCC set up by NSCC and NVIDIA to bolster AI capabilities for academic, research and industry stakeholders and in support of AI Singapore (AISG).
The inaugural SupercomputingAsia 2018 (SCA18) conference is held for the first time. The event is an umbrella of notable supercomputing and allied events in Asia with the objective of promoting a vibrant and shared Asian, and global, HPC ecosystem.
Six NVIDIA DGX-1 servers of the new AI.Platform@NSCC – suited to large, batch AI workloads – are integrated with the ASPIRE 1 supercomputer system. The platform facilitates HPC capability development and AI-Deep Learning, and is an enabler for the Singapore AI community.
Finance Minister Heng Swee Keat, who is also chairman of the National Research Foundation (NRF), announced the funding of S$200 million to upgrade the nation’s supercomputing capability. The announcement was made during the opening of the SupercomputingAsia 2019 (SCA19) event.
NSCC receives the Letter of Award from A*STAR which taps on the earlier announced NRF funding to initiate NSCC 2.0. The five-year grant allows the expansion of HPC resources aimed at boosting the capabilities and supercomputing access to all institutes of higher learning (IHLs) and research institutes.
TCOMS, Singapore’s next-generation Deepwater Ocean Basin national research facility, becomes a new NSCC stakeholder. TCOMS will leverage supercomputers to support the development of a simulation system featuring the integration of basin modelling, numerical modelling, smart-sensing and real-time data analytics.
NEA becomes a new NSCC stakeholder. The agency will leverage supercomputing resources to accelerate the research work carried out by NEA’s Centre for Climate Research Singapore (CCRS) in areas such as climate change and modelling of weather.
NSCC’s Köppen system, with a performance of over 160 TFLOPS, storage capacity of over 1.2 PB and 52 compute nodes, is commissioned. The system supports the research needs of the climate research community. In particular, the HPC resources were crucial in the development of Singapore’s 3rd National Climate Change Study (V3).
NSCC Singapore embarks on a plan to nurture the next generation of talent through MoUs with the Institute of Technical Education (ITE) and Singapore Polytechnic (SP), leveraging on NSCC HPC resources for applied AI projects, workshops and training, and student competitions and programmes.
A new collaboration between Japan’s RIKEN Center for Computational Science (R-CCS), Research Organization for Information Science and Technology (RIST) and NSCC Singapore, allowed Singapore scientists to directly tap on Japan’s Fugaku supercomputer.
Singapore-ETH Centre (SEC) becomes a new NSCC stakeholder to leverage supercomputing resources and data storage facilities to simulate scenarios to tackle the urban heat island effects in the Cooling Singapore project. Precision Health Research, Singapore (PRECISE) becomes a new NSCC stakeholder to leverage supercomputing resources and data storage capabilities to enable the deployment of state-of-the-art genome analytics algorithms at an industrial scale to uncover the genetic variants of each individual.
NSCC Singapore, SingAREN and the Quantum Engineering Programme NUS sign an MOU with Finland’s CSC-IT Centre for Science. The collaboration explores a new high-speed, high-bandwidth research fibre optic link between Finland and Singapore as well as more secure ways of protecting data transfer by using quantum technology.
NSCC Singapore and NUHS collaborated to build “Prescience”, a national edge supercomputer located at the hospital, to train artificial intelligence models that boost the delivery of healthcare in Singapore.
Singapore’s next generation HPE Cray EX supercomputer, ASPIRE 2A, with up to 10 PFLOPS of raw computing capacity and is seven times more powerful than ASPIRE 1 is set up and developed. ASPIRE 2A is ranked 167th (GPU portion) and 275th (CPU portion) in the November 2022 TOP500 list of the World’s Fastest Supercomputers.
NSCC Singapore, SingHealth and NVIDIA collaborated to develop a research ecosystem of hardware and software tools to support healthcare and medical research at Singapore’s largest public healthcare cluster.
ASPIRE 2A, Singapore’s newest national supercomputer, began operations and was made available to the Singapore research community on 1 July 2023. ASPIRE 1, Singapore’s first petascale supercomputer ceased its operations and was officially decommissioned on 31 August 2023.