San Francisco--Nov. 2002--Scientists at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF), Grenoble, France, needed to increase the processing speed of their computers in order to keep up with the massive amounts of data produced by the ESRF experimental stations.

ESRF has had great experiences with EnFuzion. EnFuzion from Axceleon was installed on "matrix", a 9-machine BeoWulf cluster consisting of 2-processor Linux machines in the past. It was therefore a natural decision to purchase more EnFuzion.

One 10-node license was bought for the Joint Structural Biology Group. Initially, it has been used for testing batch processing of protein crystallography data reduction. Already, more than a ten-fold increase in processing speed has been achieved by using multiple computers with multiple processors. "It is difficult to achieve more than this, because the disk access becomes the limiting factor due to huge amounts of processed data," says Olof Svensson, programmer at the Scientific Software Unit at ESRF. "We intend to include EnFuzion in a web server, which will act as a front-end for data processing," Dr. Svensson continues, "and EnFuzion will be controlled by the web server for dispatching jobs to other computers." The Joint Structural Biology Group has around 20 SGIs of the 02 and 0200 series; the majority of these being two-processors, but with some four-processors. The group also deploys a dedicated Linux cluster of six processors plus access to the Computing Services NICE cluster which contains the above-mentioned "matrix" cluster as well as a 26-processor Linux cluster.

The second 10-node license was acquired for the Scientific Software Unit to help scientists with occasionally large amounts of data to process, but without an everyday need for a full cluster. "After we have installed it on one of our computers, our scientists will be able to access it according to their specific needs," Dr. Svensson states. The nodes used will be the 26 processors from the Linux cluster.

About Axceleon

Axceleon, with offices in San Francisco, Palo Alto and Monterey, Calif. is revolutionizing the high-performance clustering market. Its EnFuzion software offers clients the ability to gain faster computing results with their existing heterogeneous hardware and software computing environments. Whether deployed on dedicated servers or idle desktops across an enterprise, EnFuzion^TM reduces application execution time and delivers a tangible Return-on-Investment (ROI). To learn more about Axceleon please visit http://www.axceleon.com

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