Cluster Computing:

EI ANNOUNCES THE XF ETHERNET SERVER ADAPTER, ClusterThreads

Engineered Intelligence (EI) announced the XF "Ethernet Server Adapter including EI's industry-leading MPI-XF" (Message Passing Interface-Extremely Fast) software, delivering unprecedented performance for MPI programmers with standard networking hardware. In conjunction with this, the company announced a research and development collaboration with Ammasso Inc to further expand the capabilities of the XF adapter solution. Finally, EI also announced ClusterThreads, a solution to enable customers to move applications currently running on SMP cluster computers.

"The XF network adapter with MPI-XF Software offers customers performance for MPI-based applications using standard Ethernet comparable to Infiniband or other proprietary networks," said Matt Oberdorfer, president and CEO of Engineered Intelligence. "By using standards based solutions with state-of- the-art technology, we deliver the best price per port solution, making standards-based cluster computing highly effective for more users."

"We believe that the partnership with EI for the XF network adapter shows how we cooperate to bring leading technologies based on the Ethernet standard into the HPC marketplace," said Larry Genovesi, CEO of Ammasso. "Customers who have invested in Ethernet infrastructures are looking for higher performance for their applications, and the XF adapter working with EI's software gives them lower latency, higher bandwidth, and better CPU utilization, key ingredients in application performance."

The XF adapter is designed to work within existing Ethernet infrastructures, using existing switches, cables, and trained personnel. When combined with MPI-XF software, the solution increases performance of application to application data transfers by 5 to 10 times by lowering message latency, offloading the host CPU, providing real-time data compression, and leveraging RDMA. Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) is a set of technologies that enable the movement of data from the memory of one server directly into the memory of another without involving either operating system, thus reducing CPU usage and increasing performance.

In the scientific application arena, MPI (Message Passing Interface) has been a de-facto standard for a number of years. EI is the first company to provide a Message Passing Interface with powerful communication software and hardware technology derived from EI's patented Connected Memory Architecture (CMA) and EXtremely Fast Compression (XFC) with an RDMA-enabled Gb Ethernet adapter.

Based on EI's patent-pending connected memory architecture (CMA) and Memory Coherence Protocol (MCP), ClusterThreads delivers performance for shared- memory programs running on clusters with minimal change to the code. In a ClusterThreads project, EI enables developers who have invested time and effort in SMP programs to migrate them to lower cost, scalable cluster architectures and realize benefits with faster ROI. ClusterThreads is a fully-supported, platform-independent solution that includes EI technology and professional services to assist customers in application migration, tuning and optimization.

"With ClusterThreads we now offer the easiest solution for customers to move from older, expensive SMP systems to low-cost, high- performance clusters." said Matt Oberdorfer, President and CEO of Engineered Intelligence. "By making it painless to migrate applications with minimal code changes needed and performance delivered with our CMA, we are breaking down the barriers for widespread adoption of parallel cluster computing."

"The ClusterThreads technology and our professional services help customers take best advantage of new parallel computing architectures," said Oberdorfer. "EI can deliver the software and services to help customers easily move to new parallel computing platforms."