Advanced Cluster Computing Consortium Established at Cornell.

ITHACA, N.Y.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--July 27, 1999--

Cornell University Tuesday announced that the Cornell Theory Center (CTC) has established the Advanced Cluster Computing Consortium (AC3) a research and IT service consortium for business, higher-education, and government agencies interested in the effective planning, implementation, and performance of commodity-based systems, software, and tools.

Dell Computer Corp., Intel Corp., and Microsoft Corp. have joined AC3 as Infrastructure Members and will provide hardware, software, and vendor-specific training and technical support to the consortium.

The goal of AC3 is to provide its members with collective support in implementing state-of-the-art clustered environments, as well as to provide a strategic window into future cluster technologies. Consortium members will receive technology briefings, training, and consulting services from CTC's Cluster Computing Solutions Group, which can provide assistance in planning commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) systems, services to aid migration from UNIX(TM) to Microsoft Windows(R) NT(TM) 4.0 or Windows(R) 2000(TM), and access to both pre-release hardware and software, as well high-performance production machines.

The Infrastructure Members commented on their reasons for joining AC3:

"The emergence of the Internet is changing the face of contemporary business and scientific computing, increasing the demand for server scalability and availability, while keeping costs under control," said Justin R. Rattner, Intel Fellow and director of Intel's Server Architecture Lab. "Clusters of servers, based on Intel Pentium(R) III Xeon(TM) processors and multiple industry-standards, like Virtual Interface Architecture, have emerged as one of the premier strategies to provide both high availability and scalability in the computationally intensive Internet environment."

"The university/industry collaboration that is being built through AC3 is an important step in addressing the diverse and demanding computing requirements of businesses, universities, and government agencies," said Scott O'Hare, vice president of the Higher Education Division for Dell. "CTC has a strong history of leading the way in the development of innovative solutions, and we look forward to working with AC3 to demonstrate and validate the computing power, availability, and scalability of Dell PowerEdge(TM) servers, PowerVault(TM) storage solutions, and large-scale Windows NT-based and Windows 2000-based clusters in enterprise environments."

"Microsoft is pleased to be involved in Cornell University's Advanced Cluster Computing Consortium," said Jim Gray, senior researcher for Microsoft. "Cornell's AC3 research will pioneer advanced clustering applications and infrastructure based on scaleable hardware and software. Their scaleable clusters will be able to handle the largest technical and commercial workloads."

Cornell University is one of the leading institutions for computational science and engineering in the country, due in large part to resources and expertise available at CTC. CTC director Thomas F. Coleman said that researchers associated with the center work in some of the most computationally challenging fields from genomics to datamining, from digital materials to drug design.

"These problems will challenge the environments provided by AC3 Infrastructure Members," said Coleman.

CTC will place a strong emphasis on attracting businesses to AC3, emphasized David Lifka, CTC associate director. "We believe that a consortium can help companies reduce their IT risks as they plan and implement enterprise-wide, commodity-based software, servers, and tools."

Other Infrastructure Members announced by Cornell were:

Etnus Inc., developer of TotalView(TM), a multi-process, multi- thread debugger;

Fluent Inc., developer of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) engineering analysis software;

Giganet Inc., developer of the cLAN(TM) products, a family of high-performance interconnects for clustered servers;

Kuck & Associates Inc., a leading developer of OpenMP(TM), an API for shared-memory parallel programming, and vendor of OpenMP compilers, tools, and services;

MPI Software Technology Inc., developer of MPI/Pro(TM) and distributor of ClusterCoNTroller(TM), a resource monitoring and job scheduling tool developed by CTC;

The Numerical Algorithms Group Inc., developer of numerical libraries, portable compilers, and 3D visualization tools;

The Portland Group Inc., a leading independent vendor of parallel Fortran, C and C++ compilers;

SAS Institute Inc., a leader in decision support, data warehousing, and statistical analysis;

Visual Numerics Inc., developer of numerical analysis, data visualization, and Internet software solutions.

Participation by Fluent reflects the growing interest in the goals of AC3 within industry. "Users of Fluents CFD software continue to push the limits of computing capacity, demanding both ever-bigger analyses and faster turnaround times. Fluents commitment to the AC3 is part of our overall commitment to provide highly parallel scaling on Windows NT-based systems," noted Barbara Hutchings, Fluent's director of strategic partnerships.

In addition to Infrastructure Members, AC3 membership is open to corporations interested in testing and implementing Windows NT or Windows 2000 cluster environments, government agencies, and higher- education institutions. For more information about AC3, see: http://www.tc.cornell.edu/AC3/Memberships.

CTC is a high-performance computing and interdisciplinary research center located at Cornell University. CTC receives funding from Cornell, New York State, federal agencies, and corporate program members.