Supercomputing 2004, Pittsburgh, November 9 - Scali, a leader in high-performance clustering solutions, today announced that it is extending Scali MPI Connect™, its message passing interface software, to run on the full range of IBM eServer POWER processor based systems. Scali’s interconnect-independent software is currently compatible with IBM’s Intel and AMD processor-based cluster nodes and will now expand to include IBM OpenPower™, BladeCenter™ and pSeries® Linux-based servers.

Typically enterprise and high performance computing environments have a mixture of different hardware platforms, but cross-platform utilisation is often limited. By porting to IBM POWER processor-based servers, Scali has responded to this challenge and expanded its MPI software to run in highly heterogeneous environments. Customers can now benefit from a single, cross-cluster MPI implementation for their POWER processor, AMD- and Intel-based IBM clusters. The Scali solution provides them with high levels of performance, stability and scalability across independent interconnects, hardware platforms and third party applications.

“By porting Scali MPI Connect to POWER, the software is even more flexible. It can now address densely populated blade systems, Linux-based commodity clusters and performance optimised SMP environments through the use of a single, cross-platform MPI implementation, which is interchangeable across leading interconnects. This, coupled with our existing commitment to IBM's xSeries and e326 ranges, helps further reduce complexity in today’s data centers,” said Håkon Bugge, Chief Technology Officer and Founder, Scali. “What would typically be a very complex environment is now hugely simplified with Scali MPI Connect software.”

“We continue to offer our customers choice when selecting the right software and mix of hardware to suit their respective high-performance computing needs,” said Brian Connors, vice president Linux on POWER, IBM. “With new support for the IBM POWER platform and now the ability to run across IBM eServer systems, we expect this commercially developed, professionally supported Scali MPI solution to deliver significant value to our customers and partners.”

“In the oil & gas industry we are continually expanding our support of applications running in complex clustering environments. Scali MPI Connect streamlines the work and time traditionally spent testing and developing applications for each new hardware platform,” said Rick Owen, Commercialisation Manager at Schlumberger Information Solutions. “This benefits both Schlumberger and our customers by allowing us to bring software applications with support for new hardware platforms to market more quickly.”

"In our compute environment we need Linux clusters that are flexible, powerful and robust" said Henry Tufo, Associate Professor at the Computer Science Department at the University of Colorado, "Scali MPI Connect was painless to install and configure and is showing us excellent performance gains on the IBM POWER platform over open source alternatives."

Scali, http://www.scali.com