R Systems Sponsors rLoop Team as Part of SpaceX Hyperloop Pod Competition

CHAMPAIGN, Ill., April 26, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- R Systems NA, Inc. confirmed today its sponsorship of the rLoop Hyperloop team participating in SpaceX Competition II.

Founded in 2002, SpaceX is a private space exploration company sponsoring the Hyperloop Pod       Competition. The competition aims to facilitate the development of the high speed Hyperloop transportation system by encouraging independent groups to develop functional prototypes. While many teams participating in the competition are student organizations, rLoop is a unique collaboration of over 100 members spanning more than 14 countries.

R Systems, a bare metal high performance computing provider, began sponsoring rLoop's pod design in March 2016. "We were very excited when rLoop won the Pod Innovation Award at the SpaceX Competition in January," said R Systems co-Founder Brian Kucic. "We are pleased to be able to support their ongoing efforts to revolutionize transportation, and to be a part of rLoop's impressive global collaborative efforts." 

As the only non-student team among the 20 finalist teams to participate in SpaceX's January Hyperloop competition, rLoop did not have ready access to university HPC resources. "We were looking for more CPU power to run the advanced simulations being developed by our team, and R Systems offered to provide exactly what we needed," said rLoop Project Manager, Brent Lessard. "The R Systems support team had us running on their utility cluster in no time. We now have easy access to significant HPC resources to run our jobs at any time of the day or night." 

Amir Khan, rLoop's design and analysis lead is pleased to hear about R System's continued sponsorship. Khan said, "The ability of our engineers to access this powerful resource whenever needed provides us with a valuable advantage."

According to R Systems Senior Systems Engineer Steve Pritchett, the relationship with rLoop has been very positive. Pritchett commented, "After we provided login access and installed necessary software, the rLoop users were able to focus on their pod design rather than dealing with system management issues."

The second phase of the Hyperloop Competition focuses on maximum pod speed. R Systems coFounder Greg Keller says the company is a perfect match for the rLoop team. "At R Systems, we are intimately familiar with the goal of achieving maximum speed," Keller said. "Our people and clusters quickly move our customer's vision forward to conquer big challenges," Keller added.

The SpaceX Competition II is scheduled for completion in mid-2017.

About Hyperloop

Hyperloop is a conceptual, high-speed transportation system proposed by SpaceX CEO Elon Musk. The concept involves passenger or cargo boarded pods being propelled in a low pressure tube using sustainable and cost-efficient energy. To accelerate its development, SpaceX is hosting a competition for engineering teams to design and test their own Hyperloop pods. More information about this innovative technology is available at http://www.spacex.com/hyperloop.

About rLoop

rLoop is a non-profit, open source participant in the SpaceX Hyperloop competition. With a mission to democratize the Hyperloop through collective design, rLoop has gained more than 100 members from over 14 countries. Learn more about how rLoop is revolutionizing transportation at http://rloop.org/.

About R Systems

R Systems is a service provider of high performance computing resources. The company empowers research by providing leading edge technology with a knowledgeable tech team, delivering the best performing result in a cohesive working environment. Offerings include lease-time for bursting as well as for short-term and long-term projects, available at industry-leading prices. 

The R Systems central mission is to help researchers, scientists and engineers dramatically accelerate their time to solution. For more information visit http://rsystemsinc.com/.

SOURCE R Systems NA, Inc.

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