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HP, S'pore agency to set up US$19M research lab

The IT giant will collaborate with the country's research agency to develop management software for next-gen data centers.
Written by Jeanne Lim, Contributor

SINGAPORE--Hewlett-Packard (HP) Labs and Singapore's Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*Star) have inked a three-year deal to set up the HP Shared Services Platform Laboratory (SSP Lab) in the island-state.

Announced at a virtual signing ceremony here today, the agreement will see both organizations invest S$30 million (US$18.7 million) in the lab, which will be HP's largest and only such facility in the Asia-Pacific region.

Over the videoconference, Dick Lampman, director of HP Labs, said: "The concept of shared services is key to enterprise IT. We've been working in this area for some time."

Lampman is also the senior vice president of research at HP. The IT vendor spends about US$3.5 billion annually on research and development.

The SSP Lab will house more than 30 researchers from A*Star's Institute of High Performance Computing (IHPC) and HP Labs to develop management software for next-generation data centers and grid-related technologies.

The joint research and development laboratory will initially be located at IHPC's office building, and will relocate to Singapore's info-communications and digital media hub, Fusionopolis. The first phase of this site is scheduled to open in 2007.

HP executives told ZDNet Asia that the SSP Lab will be powered by the company's blade servers running on AMD processors.

During the next three years, the team at SSP Lab will develop software tools and platforms intended to provision compute capabilities and software in a shared-services delivery model. The research covers technology areas that include service-oriented architecture (SOA) and software-as-a-service.

Noting that it took 18 months to convince HP Labs to establish a presence here , Boon Swan Foo, A*Star's managing director, said: "I am glad HP SSP Labs is here to undertake cutting-edge research in the newest area of utility computing."

Boon expects enterprises and the scientific computing community to be early adopters of technology that culminates from SSP Lab research, followed by the media and logistics companies.

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