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The National Cheng Kung university in Taiwan will soon be home to a Supercomputing Research Center that will one day become a part of the BlueGene Consortium researching computer software.

At present, however, the data center being built in collaboration with the IBM Thomas J Watson Research Center will be used for high-speed computation cloud technology services and bilateral research with the IBM center.

The Watson Research Center is based in New York and acts as the headquarters for IBM Research. IBM has seven other labs in cities throughout the US and one in Cambridge, UK.

Much of its research focusses on IT hardware, software and services as well as solutions for vertical industries.

The new supercomputing center in Taiwan will be used specifically to look at disaster prevention technology, advanced medical equipment, biomedical research and photoelectric and energy technology.

According to National Cheng Kung University research center project director Der Huang Chi Chuan, 63 researchers in the engineering, biopharmaceutical and science space will work at the supercomputing center.

“We will take the research into the floating point computation capacity of 20 petaflops as our target,” Huang said.

Taiwan has become increasingly recognized for its push into the computing space in recent times, with its nearness to China making it an important cloud computing destination.

According to Cens.com, a number of local companies from Taiwan are banding together to form what they call Cloud Valley, which will link cloud infrastructure in China to Taiwan.

Taiwan’s Cloud Computing Association says the operation, which is being pushed by Chunghwa Telecom, Quanta and ASUS among others, could attract more than 1 trillion yaun in cloud revenues to the country.

The group is also planning to take part in China’s own cloud computing trial plan, which is seeing 10 districts in the country being set up as cloud bases to help promote local industry.

Microsoft has also been working with Taiwan cloud computing vendors to help drive container-based solutions for cloud computing since 2010.

And more recently, Hollywood production company Rhythm & Hues announced it would set up cloud services in Taiwan for producers in the APAC region and rumours circulated that Facebook could also be considering the country as a location for a new cloud computing center.