Features:
ORION BRINGS SUPERCOMPUTING TO YOUR DESKTOP
by Tim Curns, Editor
Orion Multisystems, Inc., a company founded by computer industry veterans,
announced two models of the Orion Cluster Workstation, the highest performance
general-purpose computing platform that can be plugged into a standard wall
outlet and used in an office or laboratory environment. Designed for the
individual user, the Orion Cluster Workstation provides supercomputer
performance for engineering, scientific, financial and creative professionals
who need to solve computationally complex problems.
"An important need exists in research and industry for very high performance
computers for individual users, because currently available systems are either
ad hoc collections of commodity PCs or data center-sized shared resources with
expensive power and cooling costs, and systems software that lacks
functionality and maturity," said Dr. Horst Simon, director, National Energy
Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) at Lawrence Berkeley National
Laboratory. The NERSC Center is the principal high performance computing
resource for research funded by the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of
Science, serving more than 2,500 scientists nationwide.
Orion's systems are based on clustering, which is the best means of exploiting
parallelism to generate very high performance computing. An Orion Cluster
Workstation is designed as a single computer. A single system board consists
of twelve nodes for the desktop model, while the deskside model can scale up
to 96 nodes using eight interconnected boards. The entire system boots with
the push of a button and has the look, feel and ease-of-use of a personal
computer. No assembly is needed and minimal configuration is required to
immediately run all cluster applications.
Orion's DS-96 deskside Cluster Workstation has 96 nodes with 300 gigaflops
(Gflops) peak performance (150 Gflops sustained), up to 192 gigabytes of
memory and up to 9.6 terabytes of storage. It consumes less than 1500 watts
and fits unobtrusively under a desk. Orion's DT-12 desktop Cluster Workstation
has 12 nodes with 36 Gflops peak performance (18 Gflops sustained), up to 24
gigabytes of DDR SDRAM memory and up to 1 terabyte of internal disk storage.
The DT-12 consumes less than 220 watts and is scalable to 48 nodes by stacking
up to four systems.
"Orion has created a new category of systems for high performance computing,"
said Stacey Quandt, senior business analyst and open source practice leader,
Robert Frances Group. "The first mover advantage is important for a young
company looking to capitalize on transitioning shared computation resources to
personalized computing across a range of industries."
Orion Cluster Workstations are the first to offer a standard Linux platform
the development community can use for building cluster applications. Most
current cluster installations are ad hoc systems that do not adhere to
standard architectures or binary application footprints. Orion systems, with
Transmeta's Efficeon processors, are built around industry standards for
clustering: x86, the Linux operating system, and standard parallel programming
libraries, including MPI, PVM, and SGE. Existing Linux cluster software runs
on Orion Cluster Workstations without modification.
"The new Orion Cluster Workstations have the capability to significantly
increase productivity in our research center, because we acquire gigabytes of
imaging data per hour and there is a continuous backlog of jobs awaiting
completion by our shared, high performance computing resource," said Dr. Ben
Inglis, associate research physicist, Henry H. Wheeler, Jr. Brain Imaging
Center, University of California at Berkeley. "The processing of these massive
data sets has become a determining factor for our research progress."
The advent of these workstations follow several kinds of emerging trends.
Orion's president and CEO, Colin Hunter, elaborates on what he sees are
significant desktop computing trends.
"The big trend is the decline of the traditional technical workstation and its
more or less complete replacement by the PC. The main reason was that
technical workstations no longer provided any real performance advantage over
x86-based PCs. (The whole reason for the advent of workstations was to provide
a computer that was intermediate in performance between a PC and a back-room
supercomputer, but could be given to an individual engineer or technical or
creative professional, plugged into an ordinary wall socket, and used as
his/her own computer. As technical workstations lost that advanage over PCs,
they declined.) Orion brings back the advantage -- much higher levels of
performance at the desktop," said Hunter.
Hunter further elaborated on the main trends in HPC that engendered the Orion
workstation:
"Three main trends can be discerned:
- Standardization on clusters as the way to exploit parallelism. After
exploring array processing, massively parallel machines (a la Thinking
Machines), and large-scale symmetric multiprocessing, the supercomputer
community has settled on clustering. Now 'supercomputer' effectively means
'cluster'.
- Use of commodity hardware components in clusters. A large fraction of all
existing clusters are based on PCs connected by ethernet, with some very
specialized machines using non-commodity fabrics like Myrinet and Quadrix. But
the majority uses commodity hardware. The reason is that it is cheapest and
its performance improves fastest.
- Development of software standards to support cluster programming. MPI is
the most significant, but the widespread use of Linux is also important."
Orion also announced a partnership with Wolfram Research, Inc., which
pioneered the modern concept of technical computing when it launched
Mathematica 15 years ago. Millions of users on every continent currently use
Mathematica technology. The company's gridMathematica combines the power of
the world's leading technical computing environment with modern computing
clusters and grids to solve the most demanding problems in mathematics,
science, engineering, and finance. With gridMathematica installed, the Orion
Cluster Workstation provides a quick way to set up and run large calculations
by offering a high-level programming language, a vast collection of fast and
reliable mathematical algorithms, and easy-to-use parallel programming
constructs on the most cost effective cluster architecture on the market.
Orion Cluster Workstations offer the first truly consistent platform upon
which third party partners can build a reliable support strategy that takes
advantage of the value of Linux clusters. Orion, together with The BioTeam, a
highly respected Bio-IT consulting firm, is delivering a turnkey
bioinformatics solution. The Orion Cluster Workstation for Bioinformatics is a
12-node Orion desktop cluster pre-installed with the award winning iNquiry
software, a suite of more than 200 applications for life science researchers.
Customers need only unpack the Orion Cluster Workstation, plug it into a
standard outlet, boot the system in less than 90 seconds, and search gene
databases on a personal Linux cluster within five minutes - an unprecedented
capability.
"We already have strong demand for our Cluster Workstations from major
corporations and institutions in a variety of industries," said Colin Hunter,
president and chief executive officer, Orion Multisystems. "We expect to take
full advantage of the multi-billion dollar business opportunity that exists
for high performance technical computing."
The Orion workstations will be used for applications that typically run on
clusters. These markets include bioinformatics, design automation,
computational chemistry, aerospace (CFD), mechanical modeling, financial
analytics, electronic CAD and CAE, digital imaging, special effects and
entertainment. There is an emphasis on markets and applications where rapid
turn-around is crucial.
Ed Kelly, vice president of engineering, and Colin Hunter, Orion president and
CEO, co-founded Orion systems in 2003. Hunter, former VP of Software and CFO
of Transmeta, brought Linus Torvalds to the US and developed a working
relationship with the Linux community. Kelly was the VP of System Engineering
at Transmeta and had been a Distinguished Engineer at Sun for 10 years. He
worked on the original Sparcstation at Sun along with many other projects.
Orion Multisystems has a strong financial partner in Battery Ventures, a
leading venture capital company in the technology industry. "We support the
Orion Multisystems team, which is very well positioned to address emerging
needs in high performance computing across a range of industries, academia and
government," said Ollie Curme, general partner, Battery Ventures.
Orion's systems are manufactured by Flextronics, a worldwide leader in
Electronics Manufacturing Services. Flextronics provides design, engineering,
manufacturing, and logistics operations in 29 countries on five continents.
Orion Multisystems is engaged with multiple customers and in the coming months
will announce specific companies and organizations implementing its systems.
System Dimensions
- Desktop Model: 18.4" (length) x 24" (width) x 3.8"(height)
- Deskside Model: 25"(length) x 17" (width) x 27" (height)
Availability and Pricing
The desktop model is priced at less than $10,000 and will be available October
1st. The deskside model is priced at less than $100,000 and will be available
during the latter part of Q4.
To learn more about Orion Multisystems and its products, visit
http://www.orionmultisystems.com. For customer inquiries, call 1-800-344-1367.
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