Oslo 23 August 2002 - Scali announced today the availability of Scali ClusterEdge with communication libraries for Intel® Itanium® 2 processor-based platforms with outstanding MPI performance. In excess of 320 MBytes per second transfer rates and less than 5 microseconds latency between user processes in different cluster nodes are achievable with Scali's MPI implementation ScaMPI.

Scali ClusterEdge(tm) is a complete solution for building clusters from standard high volume components. ClusterEdge contains Scali's superior performance MPI implementation (ScaMPI), interconnect hardware from Dolphin ICS, and Scali Universe XE cluster management system. Scali Universe XE is a comprehensive and integrated cluster management system. It contains remote monitoring, out-of-band management, configurable alarms, job control, software configuration management, and power and console management in a single system environment.

ScaMPI is designed to be the best performing MPI middleware for Linux clusters. Unlike most MPI implementations ScaMPI is thread-safe and thread-hot. This enables any mixture of message passing (using MPI) and shared memory programming e.g. using OpenMP or Posix threads directly. ScaMPI has built-in timing and communication trace facilities enabled at runtime by setting a single environment variable.

Scalable Linux systems based on Scali software are used for a variety of applications ranging from scientific computing like computational fluid dynamics and seismic data processing to commercial applications like scalable databases for data warehousing. Scali and Intel are working together to assist Independent Software Vendors in porting their application codes to Intel® Itanium® 2-based cluster platforms. Paired with the outstanding performance of Itanium 2-based systems, clusters are now ready to take on any performance demanding task imaginable.

The development and tuning of Scali software components were performed with Intel® Compilers for Intel® Itanium® 2-based platforms and clustered systems from Hewlett Packard based on the Itanium 2 processor. The Itanium 2-based nodes with Hewlett Packard's ZX1 chipset proved to be an ideal platform for 64-bit clustering. "ScaMPI provides the unique ability to cluster Intel Itanium 2-based servers into balanced systems. Alternative approaches to clustering Itanium-based systems suffered from an imbalance between the tremendous computation power of the EPIC architecture, compared with the bandwidth of the interconnect. Today, ScaMPI achieves application-to-application performance in excess of 320 MBytes/s, yielding a balanced cluster", says Håkon O. Bugge, CTO of Scali AS.

"Intel-based servers deliver compelling price performance in an era where cost effectiveness is vital to all sectors of industry," said John Woodget, director of Intel's computing and solution marketing group for Europe, the Middle East and Africa. "The combination of Intel's open standards-based server technologies with Scali's scalable interconnect solution enables costumers to grow their computing capacities and capabilities to match evolving business requirements, as well as building very powerful High-Performance Computing (HPC) cluster solutions for a wide range of applications."

About Scali:

Scali provides truly scalable cluster systems and software technology offering an order of magnitude better price/performance for parallel applications compared to traditional computer systems. The systems are scalable to hundreds of processors through the use of an innovative Torus topology with a distributed switching scheme, eliminating the need for expensive centralized switches. Scali also provides expert level consultancy for assisting customers with application porting, performance tuning and system configuration.

*Intel and Itanium are trademarks or registered trademarks of Intel Corporation or its subsidiaries in the United States and other countries.

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Øystein Gran Larsen, Dr.Scient.
Scali AS P.O.Box 150 Oppsal 0619 Oslo NORWAY
Tel:+47 2262-8982 (dir) - mailto:gran@scali.no - url: http://www.scali.com

Discover cluster management at http://www.scali.com/universedemo.shtml