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Raritan Partakes In HPC Demo Using Off-the-Shelf Equipment

Raritan Computer joins leading enterprise companies to demonstrate that high-performance computing (HPC) can be achieved cost effectively and easily with off-the-shelf, lower- cost, industry-standards-based solutions.

At the SuperComputing 2003 conference held this week in Phoenix, 13 companies, led by Intel Corp, assembled an enterprise computing environment that delivers an extraordinary amount of computing power -- 1 trillion mathematical operations per second (teraflop). The demo, dubbed TeraFlop Off-the-Shelf, consists of a 192-node Intel Xeon processor-based cluster. Raritan provided the KVM (keyboard/video/mouse) switches that are used to access and manage all the servers and other equipment in the demo.

The open nature of the TeraFlop cluster offers businesses the ability to create a highly flexible, cost-effective and efficient high-performance computing environment, without the proprietary solutions and thousands of processors traditionally associated with high-performance computing.

"High-performance computing by its very nature presents real challenges to an administrator requiring BIOS-level access to each server in the rack," said Vsevolod Onyshkevych, vice president of marketing and product management at Raritan Computer. "Crash-cart access at a rack, with the large number of servers typically found in a high-performance cluster, is extremely inefficient and tedious. Raritan's KVM switches provide one seamless consolidated view and instant access to all the servers in a cluster to multiple users, who can be located locally or remotely."

"The TeraFlops demo is an impressive technology attainment," said Jim Pappas, director of initiative marketing for Intel's Enterprise Platform Group. "The power of TeraFlops off the shelf performance utilizing Intel architecture server platforms creates new opportunities for HPC clusters. We welcome Raritan's participation in this demonstration at SuperComputing 2003."

The TeraFlop cluster demo uses Raritan's Paragon and Z-series KVM switches. These give IT professionals the power to access and control their servers and other network devices any way they want, any time they want, from anywhere they want. Raritan's products are ideal for HPC environments because they provide instant access and BIOS-level KVM control of any and all of the servers in a cluster, and can scale to support thousands of servers and devices. Paragon -- Raritan's flagship product and the pioneer of Cat5-based KVM switches -- and the Z-Series support multiple platforms and grant multiple simultaneous users direct control of servers from a single user console, while saving precious rack space.

Other companies supporting the TeraFlop Off-the-Shelf demo include: ATI Technologies, Callident, Ciara Technologies, InfiniCom, Mellanox Technologies, Ohio State University, Rackable Systems, Sandia National Laboratories, SourceForge, Topspin and Voltaire.