The Linux Competency Centre at Singapore Computer Systems (SCS-LCC) has commissioned a new 60-processor CPU Intel? Itanium? 2-based cluster for the Singapore-MIT Alliance (SMA) at the National University of Singapore.

The SMA cluster, named HydraIII, is the first large-scale Intel Itanium 2-based Beowulf cluster to be deployed into production using the open-source Rocks cluster toolkit, whose development is led by the San Diego Supercomputer Center. The cluster was installed with Rocks and had applications running in less than a day.

"The rapid deployment by SCS of the HP system demonstrates that 64-bit high performance clusters are now as easy to build as 32-bit x86 processor systems," said Leslie Ong, Director, HP Business Critical Systems, South East Asia. "Such efficiency in rollout underscores the growing momentum to move to open standards from proprietary systems in the scientific community," he added.

"The increasing demand for high-performance computing power will be a major driver of computing innovation throughout the next decade. We expect clusters and grids using the open standard Intel Itanium processor family to deliver the performance and affordability required by the industry," said William Wu, Itanium processor family marketing manager, Asia Pacific.

HydraIII cluster supports about 50 SMA researchers and post-graduate students involved in various projects, ranging from computational fluid dynamics to bio-engineering. The cluster consists of fifteen HP rx5670 nodes, each with four Itanium 2 processor, and is interconnected with a high-performance, high-bandwidth, low-latency switching system from Myrinet. The cluster's operating system software is Red Hat Linux, managed by the tools of NPACI Rocks version 2.3.2. Current Linpack performance achieves around 70% of theoretical peak processing power (240GFLOPS) at 167GFLOPS over the Myrinet interconnect.

"We are very pleased with the performance and ease of management of the Rocks-based Itanium 2 cluster," said Prof. Khoo Boo Cheong, Program Co-Chair of High Performance Computation for Engineered Systems at SMA. "We intend to encourage more researchers to migrate to HydraIII over the next few months. The technical expertise and assistance that the SCS-LCC team has provided to us made a huge difference to our transition to 64-bit Linux parallel computing."

"The team took less than a day to install the cluster with Rocks and getting the cluster operational. This is a testimony to the amount of work that has gone into making Rocks one of the best and easiest to use cluster toolkits in the world," said Laurence Liew, manager of the SCS Linux Competency Centre.

"SCS Linux Competency Centre collaborates closely with the San Diego Supercomputer Center on NPACI Rocks and provides critical support in the areas of file systems and queuing systems," said Dr Philip Papadopoulos, program director for SDSC's Grid and Cluster Computing group. "The Rocks user community benefits greatly from SCS' expertise and their significant contributions to this community toolkit."

About Singapore-MIT Alliance:

The Singapore-MIT Alliance is an innovative science and engineering education and research collaboration between three of the top engineering research universities in the world:
- National University of Singapore (NUS)
- Nanyang Technological University (NTU)
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
Founded in 1998 to promote global science and engineering research, SMA has provided its students with an unsurpassed education through the most technologically advanced interactive distance learning facilities available. Additional information is available on (http://www.sma.nus.edu.sg).

About San Diego Supercomputer Centre:
The San Diego Supercomputer Centre (SDSC) (http://www.sdsc.edu) is an organized research unit of the UCSD and the leading-edge site of NPACI. SDSC's mission is to develop and use technology to advance science, and to provide leadership both nationally and internationally in computing, data management, biosciences, and other areas. As a national laboratory for computational science and engineering, SDSC is funded by NSF and other federal agencies, the state of California, the University of California, and private organizations.

About SCS Linux Competency Centre:
The SCS Linux Competency Centre (LCC) is Singapore's leading Linux and open source solutions provider with operations in Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand. The LCC is a Red Hat Authorised Training and Certification partner and offers the internationally recognised Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE) certification. The LCC is also a leading High Performance Computing (HPC) cluster solution provider with established cluster deployments in leading research and educational facilities in the region. The LCC is a co-developer of NPACI ROCKS cluster toolkit from the San Diego Supercomputer Centre, and provides commercial Rocks cluster toolkit support and complete turnkey Linux HPC cluster solutions based on Rocks. More information on SCS can be found on www.scs.com.sg.

About HP:
HP is a leading global provider of products, technologies, solutions and services to consumers and businesses. The company's offerings span IT infrastructure, personal computing and access devices, global services and imaging and printing. HP completed its acquisition of Compaq Computer Corporation on May 3, 2002. More information about HP is available at http://www.hp.com.

About Intel:
Intel, the world's largest chip maker, is also a leading manufacturer of computer, networking and communications products. Additional information about Intel is available at http://www.intel.com/pressroom.