Rocketcalc Intros Cluster Appliance

At the recent LinuxWorld Expo, Rocketcalc introduced the Saturn HE and EE Cluster Appliances, Opteron-based personal compute clusters aimed at researchers who need both a high-performance computing system for their work and also the flexibility of owning and managing their own system.

The Saturn HE and EE systems are based on low-power-consumption AMD Opteron HE and EE processors. The systems support eight processors and up to 64 GB of RAM, all in a device that runs on regular electrical power and measures 14 inches by 12.5 inches by 23 inches. Essentially, the Saturn systems are desktop clusters in a box.

Besides simply having increased processing power available for computational work, the Saturn HE and EE systems can play an important role in application development. "You can prototype algorithms before running them on larger systems," says Bryan Lewis, general manager of Rocketcalc. Such a capability is becoming increasingly important as companies, organizations, and departments are often reluctant to let a researcher test out software on a production cluster.

For example, in many cases, IT departments will not give a researcher root level access to a cluster system or administrator privileges on a cluster. In the course of developing an application, such access is usually desirable.

Additionally, IT departments and corporate managers are frequently hesitant to let an untested program run on a production cluster. Such clusters are often tightly scheduled, so any downtime caused by a problem with untested software would not be tolerated.

These problems go away when a researcher has a dedicated desktop cluster system. If an application crashes, the researcher can simply reboot the system and start over without disrupting other workers or jobs that would be running on a production cluster.

And compared to say a single- or dual-processor desktop system, the Saturn personal cluster "is a small development system that is similar to a large cluster," says Lewis. He notes the similarity means that once a distributed application is developed, it can easily be ported to a larger cluster.

The Saturn systems are the latest in a line of high-performance personal cluster systems from Rocketcalc. The company, which was founded in 2001, also sells a Titan line of personal clusters that are based on eight Intel Xeon processors.

What do you think of a personal compute cluster? How would you use one in your research? Would application development work be easier to conduct? Drop me a line at Salvatore_Salamone@bio-itworld.com and let me know what you think about products like this. 

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3D Laptop - Sans Glasses

Sharp Systems of America this week announced the Sharp Actius AL3D, a high-performance notebook computer that includes Sharp's 3D LCD screen technology.

The system is a higher-performance version of a similar Sharp 3D notebook - the Actius RD3D - announced about 18 months ago. The new Actius AL3D is based on a more powerful processor and is capable of supporting computation-intensive and graphics-intensive computational biology research. To meet such computing and graphics demands, the Actius AL3D is based on the Intel Pentium M P750 processor, comes with up to 1,024 MB of RAM, and includes the Nvidia GeForce Go 6600 graphics processor (with 128 MB of video RAM).

The notebook comes with a 15-inch XGA 3D LCD display, which can be switched between 2D and 3D display by pushing a button on the base of the notebook.

The display uses Sharp's TFT 3D LCD technology, which lets researchers view objects in 3D without the need for goggles or 3D glasses. The technology behind the 3D projection relies on a parallax barrier technique that divides light from the LCD so that a person's left and right eye each view a different pattern. This produces 3D images viewable with the naked eye.

Sharp is targeting the notebook at the pharmaceutical and medical imaging markets. For instance, within the pharmaceutical industry, Sharp notes that computational chemists have been using 3D systems that require goggles as part of the drug synthesis process for years. The new notebook will allow computational chemists to view their data without the need for 3D glasses.

The notebook works with a number life science software packages, including modeling and visualization software from Accelrys, Tripos, and Wavefunction. The Sharp Actius AL3D has an estimated street price of $3,499.

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