Guardocs - Gridtech: HPC

Friday, November 16, 2007

HPCwire Readers and Editors Name Rackable Systems the “Best Price/Performance HPC Hardware Solution” in the Industry

FREMONT, Calif., November 13, 2007 – Rackable Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ: RACK), a leading provider of servers and storage for large-scale data centers, today announced that the company has been awarded a 2007 HPCwire Readers’ Choice Award in the category of Best Price/Performance HPC Hardware Solution. The award honors Rackable Systems’ broad range of high-performing Eco-Logical™ servers and storage, designed to reduce operational expenses and improve TCO in even the most demanding data center environments.

“Rackable Systems is honored to be recognized for delivering compelling x86 solutions to the HPC community,” said Mark J. Barrenechea, president and CEO of Rackable Systems. “Our build-to-order model allows us to tailor each solution to the price/performance needs of each customer, helping to enable the Eco-Logical data center.”

Rackable Systems’ innovative x86 server and storage designs help reduce power and cooling costs while maximizing performance, providing an ideal solution for HPC deployments. With products ranging from Eco-Logical rack-mount servers to the company’s RapidScale clustered storage and its award-winning ICE Cube modular data center, Rackable Systems continues to provide solutions that are customized and built to order to meet the unique needs of any data center. Carefully designed to reduce power consumption and increase reliability, Rackable Systems solutions enable data centers to “go green” without compromising application performance.

“At the University of Florida, we have been pleased with the power and space efficiency provided by our Rackable Systems servers and storage. With their high-density racks and dual-core servers, we were able to house a cluster that would have required three times the space and twice the power of competing solutions,” said Dr. Charles Taylor, senior HPC systems engineer and associate director of the University of Florida HPC Center. “We applaud Rackable Systems for bringing high-performance, environmentally-friendly solutions to HPC environments like our own.”

The coveted HPCwire Readers’ Choice Awards are determined through online polling of the global HPCwire audience, along with a rigorous selection process involving HPCwire editors and industry luminaries. The awards are an annual feature of the publication and constitute prestigious recognition from the HPC community. The 2007 Readers’ Choice awards generated a record number of responses from the several hundred thousand readers who access HPCwire each week.

More information on these awards can be found at the HPCwire website (http://www.HPCwire.com).
Rackable Systems.

Friday, October 12, 2007

UNIVA UD Unveils blueprint for the world’s first industrial strength open source cluster and grid product suite

Taking aim squarely at vendors who offer only costly, confusing and limiting proprietary grid and cluster products, Tuecke and Venkat will lead a discussion about key issues raised by customers opting for open source implementations.

“Increasingly, businesses are embracing open source software models in many areas, but until now there has been no complete, integrated open source stack for cluster and grid,” says Tuecke, Univa UD’s chief technology officer. “Given Univa’s open-source pedigree and United Devices’ commercially proven technology, we believe that gap can now be filled and expect the resulting merged solution set will drive many more cluster and grid operators to open source implementations. There is no longer any reason to tie up cluster and grid systems with costly and limiting proprietary software.”

Univa and United Devices, pioneers and leaders in cluster and grid technology, announced the merger of the two companies last month, becoming Univa UD. At that time, the company promised it would outline an “open source industrial strength” product roadmap at the Open Grid Forum.

Based on a free, downloadable open source cluster management product, Univa UD has said its end-to-end High Performance Computing (HPC) open source product suite will also include a fully supported pro version with rich functionality and an enterprise-class grid solution growing out of UD's award-winning Grid MP™ technology.

“Our vision is to emulate and improve on the open source models of software companies who have gone before us,” said Tuecke, “companies like Red Hat and SugarCRM.”

Tuecke, along with Dr. Ian Foster and Dr. Carl Kesselman, founded Univa in 2004, as well as the Globus Project almost a decade earlier. They are known as the father’s of grid computing for their pioneering efforts in developing open grid software and standards.

Prior to founding Univa, serving as its initial CEO and subsequently becoming its CTO, Tuecke was responsible for managing the architecture, design, and development of Globus software, as well as the Grid and Web Services standards that underlie it such as OGSA and WSRF.

In 2002, Tuecke received Technology Review magazine’s TR100 award, which recognized him as one of the world’s top 100 young innovators. In 2003, he was named (with Foster and Kesselman) by InfoWorld magazine as one of its “Top 10 Technology Innovators” of the year.

“There continues to be a tremendous growth in the cluster market in terms of revenues and number of units,” said Venkat, a co-founder of United Devices in 1999. “The open source grid and HPC expertise from Univa and the commercial technology and experience from United Devices put Univa UD in a unique position to serve this market. End-to-end, we can now offer the world’s best-of-breed open source technologies backed with commercially proven solutions and world-class services and support.”

Univa UD’s session at OGF21 will be 1:30 p.m. to 3 p.m., Tuesday, Oct. 16, in the Portland Room at the Grand Hyatt Seattle. Univa UD said details of its new product roadmap also will be available at the company’s exhibit during the conference.