Warwick, 21 July 2005. Streamline Computing announced the delivery of the world's most efficient Linux gigabit cluster to Nottingham University on behalf of Sun Microsystems. The 1024 CPU 2.2GHz Opteron cluster, based on Sun Microsystems Sunfire V20z compute nodes was officially listed at position 109 in the latest Top500 list released at ISC 2005. The cluster was physically built by Sun Microsystems and handed over to Streamline who installed and configured the highly-tuned operating system and performed the HPL benchmark that placed it in the Top500 listings. An analysis of the list shows the Nottingham University Jupiter system to be the most efficient gigabit cluster in the world, even though it is built using low-cost 48 port stackable switches, based on 3Com's 3780 series.

"We are very pleased to have placed our 8th system in the Top500 list since 2002" said Richard Groves, COO of Streamline Computing. "As a result of our partnership with Sun Microsystems, we have been able to deliver a highly cost effective computing resource to Nottingham University that competes favourably with systems utilizing specialized technology and costing the customers a great deal more money".

With a stunning 71.6% efficiency, the cluster demonstrates how commodity technology can be made to scale in a highly effective manner. "The result demonstrates Streamline's added-value in the marketplace, and confirms our investment in R&D as well as staff who really understand High Performance Computing," added Dr Groves. “The cluster is running a version of the SCore cluster environment that has been specially tuned to offer our customers outstanding performance and reliability. While it is recognized that the HPL benchmark is not always representative of real applications and workloads, Streamline have also undertaken a range of benchmarks on a number of academic codes that show between 20% and 1200% improvement on 32 processors compared with our competitors' clusters. We have been working on new technology that will widen this performance gap even further."

Streamline Computing is the industry-leading provider of bespoke high performance and cluster computing systems. Since its spin-out from the Universities of Warwick and Oxford in 2001, Streamline has delivered over 250 Myrinet and Gigabit clusters to more than 30 leading universities and commercial organizations. Streamline is the chosen supplier of HPC and parallel and distributed computing systems to many blue-chip organizations globally and in the UK.

For more information please contact

Dr Richard Groves
Chief Operating Officer
Streamline Computing, The Innovation Centre,
Warwick Technology Park,
Gallows Hill, Warwick, CV34 6UW, UK

+44 (0) 1926 623 130
info(at)streamline-computing.com