Oslo, Norway – November 18, 2003 – Scali, a leader in high performance clustering solutions, announced today that IBM has become a reseller of Scali's platform independent Message Passing Interface (MPI). As part of the agreement, Scali MPI Connect™ has been tested and approved for distribution on custom built systems and the IBM eServer 1350 Linux cluster.

The interconnect independent architecture of Scali MPI Connect enables IBM to streamline high performance clustering activities by moving towards a standardized MPI across interconnects, hardware platforms and third party applications. Customers are already adopting Scali’s powerful high-performance Linux-based clustering solution on IBM Linux Clusters. Customer wins include Max-Planck-Institute for Flow Research at Göttingen in Germany and Queens University Belfast in the UK. To lead the relationship with IBM and deliver the joint solutions to organizations, Scali has appointed Rick Salmon as Vice President of Global Partnerships focussed on IBM.

"IBM’s value proposition and Scali’s high performance clustering technology complement each other perfectly," said Bjorn Skare, president and CEO of Scali. "Customers have the choice of best-of-breed technology and software either as pre-integrated or custom-built solutions. With the scope of hardware platforms IBM offers, customers are given an unbeatable ability to meet their price performance objectives. Gaining IBM as a partner presents Scali with many exciting opportunities."

"Having the ability to distribute a single MPI implementation across many platforms clearly aligns with work we are doing to further the high performance clustering model," said Dave Turek, Vice President, Deep Computing, IBM. "Scali MPI Connect is an excellent fit for the e1350, giving our customers and partners a standardized solution with reduced complexity and unmatched flexibility."

The IBM eServer 1350 cluster offers interconnects for 10/100 Ethernet, Gigabit Ethernet and Myrinet-2000. Scali MPI Connect also supports InfiniBand® and SCI through the same single MPI implementation. The IBM e1350 cluster series includes the rack-optimized IBM eServer 325 and xSeries 335, 345 and 360 systems, and runs with the Red Hat or SUSE Linux operating systems.

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