IBM, Intel and Cisco Open High-Performance Computing Center

IBM, Intel and Cisco announced that they have opened a High-Performance Computing (HPC) Center, expanding IBM’s existing HPC facility here. The expanded state-of-the-art HPC center will offer customers, business partners and independent software vendors the ability to test and benchmark analytic software, engineering, aerospace design and other high-performance applications.

The opening of this center combines the world’s fastest cluster computers from IBM with the high-performance InfiniBand and Ethernet networking technology from Cisco and Intel’s most advanced multi-core processors. Together these technologies provide customers a comprehensive test-bed to simplify the set-up and operation of their high performance infrastructure.

“We’re pleased to expand our Montpellier Center with new HPC technologies from Intel and Cisco,” said Dave Jursik, VP of sales for IBM Deep Computing. “This new capability will leverage the HPC resources and expertise in Montpellier and help IBM bring the benefits of high-performance computing to departmental and mid-scale users. Customers and partners, for example, will be able to size, test and benchmark critical applications such as Fluent.”

IBM leads the industry with 186 clusters on the November, 2007 TOP500 Supercomputer Sites List. IBM offers a range of Intel-based cluster solutions including the System Cluster 1350 – an integrated HPC cluster solution that blends System x and BladeCenter servers with key systems management and applications software.

“As the need for high-performance computing applications continues to grow, customers need to test drive these applications on a real-world IT infrastructure that uses the market leading HPC technologies,” added Phil Andrews, director of DataCentre Technologies for Cisco Europe. “Together with IBM and Intel, we are providing a center where our customers can come and experience their applications at the speed of high performance computing and determine the technologies they need create the same experience in their own environment.”

Cisco Infiniband Technology is the leading networking solution for High-Performance Computing from Cisco. The Cisco SFS7000 and SFS3000 Infiniband technology products support the needs of applications that need to be deployed on HPC clusters with the highest possible performance. The products are also extensively used in low latency networks for financial trading systems. Deployed in some of the largest HPC clusters in the world and at some of the largest financial institutions, Cisco is a leader in Infiniband technology.

“Intel is proud to be a part of this project.” said Christian Morales, Vice President and General Manager, Intel EMEA. “A growing number of companies are seeking to increase their competitiveness and operational efficiency by taking advantage of the benefits that high performance compute clusters bring. Customers and integrators of midsized and smaller cluster solutions can use the Montpellier center to develop, tune and fully test their solutions on servers based on Intel’s latest 45 nanometer Quad-Core Xeon microprocessors. Intel brings HPC application expertise, ground breaking processing capacity and energy-efficient performance to this collaboration”

The center will be equipped with a mix of 45nm and 65nm based Quad-Core Intel® Xeon® microprocessors on 32 IBM BladeCenter servers, interconnected by Cisco Infiniband and Ethernet switches. The companies plan to expand the facility as new technology becomes available to keep customers on the leading edge of cluster computing.