This week's roundup focuses on product news from the SC05 conference, held in Seattle last week. Most announcements are for high performance computing systems and software to run applications on HPC systems.

Microsoft announced the availability of the beta 2 version of Windows Compute Cluster 2003. The software comes on two CDs -- one that contains Windows Server 2003 Compute Cluster Edition and a second CD with the Microsoft Compute Cluster Pack. The first CD includes the basic operating system, the second offers a job scheduler, MPI features, and other tools to run jobs on an HPC cluster. Microsoft broke the offering up in this way so that organizations that use third party schedulers or MPI technology may continue to do so. 

Microsoft will rely on partners and independent software vendors (ISVs) to bring Windows Compute Cluster 2003 to particular markets such as the life sciences market. To that end, partners in the Microsoft pavilion at SC05 included several vendors familiar to the life science community including Accelrys, the BioTeam, MathWorks, Platform, Wolfram Research. Microsoft also included the parallel molecular modeling dynamics code NAMD in its partners pavilion at SC05.

Penguin Computing unveiled Penguin Application-Ready Cluster Portfolio, a line of workgroup or personal clusters that combine hardware and pre-installed software. Essentially, the systems are turn-key HPC clusters designed for researchers with little or no IT support. The entire portfolio of products is available with single- and dual-core AMD Operteron processors or Intel EM64T processors

The Application-Ready Cluster Portfolio includes three product lines. The Penguin Portable Clusters include 6 to 24 CPUs and delivers up to 200 GigaFLOPS (200 billion operations per second) of processing power. The Penguin Performance Clusters can scale from 32 to 256 nodes and delivers up to three-quarters of a TeraFLOPS (trillion operations per second) of processing power. And the Penguin High Density Clusters support up to 240 CPUs and delivers up to 2 TeraFLOPS of processing power.

Linux Networx announced the LS Series, a family of Linux Supersystems. The series includes two product lines: the LS-1 and LS/X. Linux Networx says all the systems in the LS Series combine optimized performance and reduced total cost of ownership.

The LS-1 Supersystems are pre-configured Linux clusters aimed at a wide range of scientific computational and simulation applications and they can be scaled from modest to high-end performance. The LS/X Supersystems are aimed at the high-end, which Linux Networx calls extreme performance. Linux Networx offers LS/X systems that deliver up to 100 TeraFLOPS of processing power.

Wolfram Research announced Mathematica Personal Grid Edition, software that combines the computational features of its flagship data analysis and visualization software Mathematica with high-level parallel language extensions that allow the application to be ported to run on four computing cores.

Specifically, Personal Grid Edition combines four Mathematica kernels, a Mathematica front-end, and a parallel computing toolkit. The software allows a researcher to quickly modify applications to run on four systems or cores producing up to 300 percent increase in performance. Wolfram says the applications can also be run unchanged on grids or clusters using gridMathematica.

SGI announced the SGI Altix 4000, a new platform in its Altix computing line. The Altix 4000 uses blade components, Intel Itanium2 processors, and SGI’s NUMAflex shared memory architecture. The first model in the line, the Altix 4700, supports up to 512 processors and as much as 128 TB of shared memory. The system comes with a choice of Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 or Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Server 4 operating systems.

MathWorks announced Distributed Computing Toolbox 2, a new version of its programming tool for developing distributed computing applications. Enhancements in this release include support for third-party compute job schedulers and new inter-process communication features for distributing and executing parallel algorithms in a cluster of computers using MATLAB.

Interactive Supercomputing (ISC) announced ISC Star-P, software that allows scientists to write algorithms and create models on their desktop and then run them instantly and interactively on SGI Altix servers. Specifically, scientists can work with familiar mathematical software packages such as Mathworks MATLAB to develop data modeling and analysis routines as they normally would. Once done, the Star-P software takes the desktop application and automatically parallelizes the code so that it can run on any multi-processor system (such as the Altix) or parallel cluster. Star-P will ship by year's end.

Rackable Systems announced the C5100-SMP Server and the C2002 High Efficiency Series product line. The C5100-SMP is a 5U, 8 Intel Xeon processor server with 32 GB of memory. Rackable Systems touts it as an x86-based alternative to RISC-based SMP servers. The C5100-SMP is available now with a list price of $69,000. Dual-core and 16-processor systems are planned. The C2002 uses DC power and a number of design features to offer low power consumption and a thermally efficient system. The C2002 systems use dual-core AMD and Intel processors and are intended for use in high-density data centers. 

Briefly…

Liquid Computing, a developer of scalable HPC servers, announced that Europe’s Council for the Central Laboratory of Research Councils will participate in the beta testing of Liquid’s Interconnect Driven Server (dubbed LiquidIQ)…

Appro showed its new AMD-based XtremeBlade systems, which were announced the week before the show.

(Note: Next week’s product roundup will be a holiday special featuring gifts and gadgets for scientists and IT professionals and their staffs.)

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