Quadrics Supercomputers Worldquadrics

The Research and Development Center has moved to new offices in the center of Bristol.

Quadrics is a leading supplier and developer of high performance networking products and resource management software. Our software and hardware expertise is behind some of the world's fastest computers.
With a philosophy and proven track record of working in partnership, we are helping to solve the world's most complex technological challenges.
Able to call on a long heritage of expertise and the strength of one of Europe's leading corporations, Alenia Aeronautica, a Finmeccanica Company, we combine world-leading technology and industry backing with a collaborative approach to doing business. Quadrics is ideally placed to remain at the forefront of supercomputing.

Quadrics Supercomputers World.

Company Background.
Quadrics Supercomputers World is a newly formed company that incorporates the capabilities, the technologies and the technical skills of two major players in the field of supercomputers. QSW is a joint venture between Alenia Spazio SpA and Meiko Ltd. QSW is a British company, with offices in Bristol, U.K. and Rome, Italy.

The Mission Statement of QSW is to design, develop, produce and market supercomputer systems. Both parent companies have withdrawn from the supercomputers market and have assigned to QSW their interests in this field. QSW has thus obtained the supercomputing technologies of the two parent companies, together with the technical expertise necessary to operate and further develop them.

QSW has two main offices, one in Bristol and one in Rome. The Bristol site is mostly dedicated to R&D activities with added capabilities for customer technical support and marketing and sales support. The Rome offices will be home to the management of the company, production management, marketing and sales head offices, official liaisons responsibilities and customer technical support.

 

The Parent Companies.
Alenia Spazio is the leading Italian space industry employing 2100 people in seven plants located in Rome, Turin, l'Aquila, Catania and Naples. The company has wide experience in complete space systems, satellites for telecommunications, remote sensing, meteorology and scientific applications, manned systems and space infrastructures, transport, launch and re-entry systems, fixed and mobile ground stations for space systems, and space software.
Alenia Spazio is involved, with leading roles, in all national space programs managed by the Italian Space Agency (ASI), in the majority of the European Space Agency (ESA) programs, as well as in several international projects in collaboration with ASI/NASA.

Following an Agreement signed in 1992 with Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN), Alenia Spazio has acquired exclusive rights to produce and commercialise the technology developed in the APE-100 Special Project of INFN, a project that lead to the implementation of a 100 Gflops massively parallel supercomputer.
According to this Agreement, Alenia Spazio had undertaken the responsibility to engineer, produce and sell a line of parallel supercomputers derived from the APE-100 Project, while co-operating with INFN in view of its research and development efforts towards new generations of these machines.

The massively parallel systems derived from the APE-100 Project have been marketed under the name Quadrics since January 1993. Today more than 50 Quadrics systems, in various configurations for a total of about 400 Gflops peak computing power, have been installed and are operational at various sites in Italy, Germany and the UK.

Alenia Spazio is part of FINMECCANICA, the second largest industrial corporation in Italy. FINMECCANICA, which has a total sales figure of about 7 billion US Dollars and about 60,000 employees world-wide, has interests in the most technologically advanced areas, that include energy (Ansaldo), transportation systems (Ansaldo), defence systems (Alenia), civil and military aircrafts (Alenia), space (Alenia Spazio), manufacturing and automation (Elsag).

 

Meiko is the most well known UK manufacturer of high performance computing systems. Meiko has been active on the market for more than 10 years, and gained its reputation starting at the end of the eighties with the CS-1 computer systems, of which more than 400 were sold world-wide. With the CS-2, Meiko made the jump into competing directly against the most well known vendors in the segment, demonstrating a very high technology level by selling its systems to such important customers as CERN in Switzerland, CERFACS in France, the Vienna Centre for Parallel Computing and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the USA and many more.

 

The Future.
The merging of technical teams and skills, technologies and products, markets and application fields, backed by the strong financial background provided by FINMECCANICA and favourable political outlooks at both National and European levels, all warrant to QSW a very relevant position in the future of the high performance computing market: QSW intends to become recognised as the leading European manufacturer of high performance computers, and intends to become recognised world-wide as one of the most relevant vendors in the global market.

 

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