Cluster Computing:

CIARA TECH UNVEILS POWERFUL NEW CLUSTER ARCHITECTURE

Ciara Technologies, a leading provider of high-density rack-mounted computer servers and supercomputer clusters, announced the availability of the VXR- 3DTT.

The VXR-3DT is an innovative high-end computer architecture that can scale from 16 up to 19,440 Intel Extended Memory 64 Technology Xeon processors while providing more than 140 TeraFLOPS of computing power with integrated InfiniBand interconnect. The VXR-3DT gives users access to an extreme high- performance computing (HPC) solution that offers the best price/performance ratio. This is possible due to the innovative architecture of VXR-3DT being built from commodity off-the-shelf hardware and networking components as well as incorporating the Linux operating system. The system is scheduled for general availability in late 2004.

"Today, many businesses are building their own Linux clusters using off-the- shelf components," said Patrick Scateni, VXR-3DT Co-creator and Director of Business Development for Ciara Technologies. "The problem is, how do you maintain and support these clusters once operational? With the VXR-3DT, we've taken all the guesswork out of high-performance computing as a result of the reliability. You don't need an army of technicians on standby. When a problem occurs you merely replace and switch the defective component without ever taking the system off-line or loosing any data. It's that simple."

The VXR-3DT nodes are a 100 percent commodity-based building block with dual- rail 12x InfiniBand distributed fabric and InfiniBand natively attached RAID storage. The nodes are interconnected through high-speed, low-latency 12x InfiniBand network in a 3D Torus, Dual Rail Architecture providing more than 3GB/s of I/O fabric bandwidth per node, with no single point of failure in the entire system.

Ciara Technologies partnered with industry heavy weights such as Raytheon IIS, Intel, Engenio and, Mellanox who have expertise in high-end High Performance Computing systems, microprocessors, modular storage systems and InfiniBand interconnect solutions. Raytheon Intelligence and Information Systems in Garland, Texas, has developed the integrated, topology-aware cluster management suite, while Ciara in Montreal, Canada, conducted the hardware design and integration for the VXR-3DT hardware components. Ciara will manufacture and sell the cluster systems under a license agreement with Raytheon. Raytheon will sell and integrate these systems for its federal and defense clients.

VXR-3DTT is an ideal solution for markets that require access to affordable HPC power including; virtual prototyping, signal processing, financial services, data mining, petro-chemical and pharmaceutical research, bio technologies, bio engineering, genomic research, image processing, high-end video editing, post-production and academic or governmental organizations looking to conduct "pure" research.

"The VXR-3DT is a significant breakthrough because it helps bring fault tolerant, extreme scalability and ease of use high performance computing to the masses," said Richard Libby, HPC Technical Marketing Engineer for Intel Corp. "Intel's involvement with Ciara demonstrates the type of innovation that's possible when pooling market expertise across various disciplines. With VXR-3DT the sky is the limit in terms of high performance computing architectures and research possibilities."