Pittsburgh, PA, USA. 10th November 2004 -- McIntire Computing Group, a High Performance Computing (HPC) consulting firm based in the United States, has partnered with Singapore based Scalable Systems to launch Scalable Rocks v1.1 in the United States and Canada. Scalable Rocks v1.1, which supports EM64T, Opteron, Itanium and Pentium/Athlon (x86), has been chosen to power Iowa State University’s Rocks cluster, which is being used to solve large scale problems in computational genomics and electromagnetics.

The Rocks cluster toolkit is an easy-to-use cluster configuration and management package developed by the Grid and Cluster Computing Group at San Diego Supercomputer Center and its collaborators. NPACI Rocks was awarded “Most Important Software Innovation” by both HPCwire's editors and readers in 2004.

Scalable Systems is a co-developer of Rocks and provides a commercially supported version of Rocks – Scalable Rocks Cluster Toolkit – which includes the Rocks Console (RxC) which is a web-enabled Rocks cluster management console and integration with the open source grid engine scheduler from SUN. Scalable Rocks v1.1 currently ships with either NPACI Rocks OS or Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

“We have worked with NPACI Rocks in a research environment for many years and are excited to be joining Scalable Systems in introducing the United States to a fully supported, graphically managed cluster solution based on Rocks,” said Tim McIntire, founder of McIntire Computing Group. “Scalable Rocks v1.1 is based on the latest release of NPACI Rocks 3.3 and allows groups to power fully supported clusters with the processor of their choice.”

Mr. Laurence Liew, Chief Technology Officer for Scalable Systems said, “Scalable Rocks enables systems integrators, cluster administrators and end-users to achieve maximum productivity and throughput performance in the shortest amount of time. With the core Rocks technology enhanced with our web-based cluster management console and integrated with Grid Engine – you get a working cluster – First Time, Every Time! We are pleased to be partnering with McIntire Computing Group to deliver Scalable Rocks to the US and Canada. With their extensive knowledge and experience with Rocks it was a natural partnership and we expect our customers will benefit greatly from our combined strengths.”

Joseph Mesterhazy, systems administrator for the parallel computing and computational biology laboratory, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Iowa State University said, "We chose Scalable Rocks because it has the best combination of easeof-use and vendor support. The excellent web-based management interface, the innovative and award-winning NPACI-Rocks clustering system, and the Red Hat Enterprise Linux OS are a great combination."

McIntire Computing Group provides Scalable Systems with a local presence in the United States for sales, support, and business development.

We are pleased to see McIntire Computing Group, who have been involved with Rocks clusters in the U.S. for several years, partner with Scalable Systems to provide commercial support for this open-source toolkit" said, Philip Papadopoulos, PhD., Program Director, Grid and Cluster Computing, San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC). “Scalable Systems Singapore is one of the core developers and longtime contributors to the NPACI Rocks project. Users in the U.S. will now be able to get commercial support for Rocks from an experienced team of Rocks developers and engineers.”

About McIntire Computing Group

McIntire Computing Group (www.mcintirecg.com) is a privately held U.S. consulting firm which focuses on scientific and high performance computing. McIntire Computing Group sells Scalable Rocks to end-users and hardware partners. Extended software and services are available such as, on-site cluster installation and support, custom software development, consulting services, and OptimaNumerics high performance scientific and technical computing libraries.

About Scalable Systems