Cornell Theory Center's Velocity Cluster Makes the Top 500 List; High-Performance Cluster Running MPI/Pro and Cluster Controller Software.

Business Editors & Technology Writers

STARKVILLE, Miss.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--June 16, 2000

Cornell Theory Center (www.tc.cornell.edu) announced today that its AC3 Velocity Cluster has been named to the Top 500 Supercomputing Sites list (www.top500.org). The Top 500 Supercomputing Sites list, maintained by University of Mannheim (www.uni-mannheim.de) and University of Tennessee at Knoxville (www.utk.edu), began in 1993 and is updated two times a year. The Top 500 list was developed in response to the increasing diversity of supercomputers and serves as a means to bring together potential business partners and sellers and buyers and to expose new people to the world of supercomputing. The Velocity cluster is the first supercomputer running software from MPI Software Technology - MPI/Pro(TM) and Cluster Controller(TM) - to make the Top 500 list.

The AC3 (Advanced Cluster Consortium), a partnership of Cornell University's Theory Center, Dell, Intel, Microsoft, MPI Software Technology, Giganet and other leaders in the field of high-performance computing, put the Velocity Cluster together in August 1999. It took about 10 hours to get the 64 Dell computers with quad Pentium(R) III Xeon(TM) processors at 500-Mhz up and running. Velocity currently uses the Windows NT operating system and will soon move to Windows 2000. Velocity boasts performance numbers of 122 gigaflops. Velocity's computing power is used for a variety of applications, including biomedical and geneomic research, seismic processing, materials modeling, large-scale database and data warehousing applications, and computer science research.

MPI Software Technology, Inc. (www.mpi-softtech.com), headquartered in Starkville, MS, was founded in 1996 by Dr. Anthony Skjellum as a spin-off of his research at Mississippi State University. MPI Software Technology has brought three products to market so far: MPI/Pro, Cluster Controller, and VSI/Pro. MPI/Pro and Cluster Controller run on the Velocity cluster. MPI/Pro for Windows(R) NT(R) is a commercial, fully supported implementation of MPI (Message Passing Interface) and is completely compliant with version 1.2 of the MPI standard as set forth by the MPI Forum. MPI defines how data is transferred among multiple processors all working together on related programs. MPI/Pro is available for Windows NT, Linux, and Mercury operating systems and supports high-speed networks such as VIA on Giganet (www.giga-net.com).

Cluster Controller is a product developed at the Cornell Theory Center and licensed by MPI Software Technology, Inc. Cluster Controller (CCS) provides a means of parallel batch job scheduling for clusters of Windows NT workstations. It allows users to submit parallel jobs, such as MPI/Pro applications, into a queue managed by a domain admin account privileged NT service. The queue manager fills the request from the batch script using an advanced backfill algorithm developed by Dr. David Lifka of the Cornell Theory Center. The backfill can also be customized by writing a Perl script that selects the nodes to allocate for the batch job. CCS has a cluster administrator's tool called HostManagerTool that visualizes and simplifies the management of the NT cluster. This tool allows for remote configuration and software installation on the compute nodes from the cluster administrator's desktop.

"Our relationship with MPI Software Technology, Inc. has been extremely valuable," says Cornell Theory Center associate director for systems Dave Lifka. "Good job scheduling, resource management, and reliable MPI are the primary pieces of any high performance computing environment. MSTI has made the extra effort to make sure MPI/Pro and Cluster CoNTroller are ready for a production quality environment. The utilization and stability the AC3 systems is directly related to the quality of their software."

"The AC3 project showcases the enterprise-class reliability, performance and scalability that can be achieved with Intel-based servers, driving clustering technologies and other Standard High Volume server solutions," said Justin Rattner, Director of Intel's Server Architecture Laboratory. "Today's achievement is a great recognition for Cornell, the AC3 project and the Intel-based server industry."

"The AC3 velocity project demonstrates that supercomputing environments are achievable with web orderable shelf components, said David Follett, CTO, Founder, Giganet, Inc. "The combined Giganet VI-based products and MPI/Pro solution provides new levels of performance and scalability to meet today's demanding computational environments."

"MPI Software Technology, Inc is very pleased to see one of its key university customers, Cornell University's AC3, achieve the Top500 status using MPI/Pro, our middleware product for NT and Windows 2000," said Anthony Skjellum, MPI Software Technology's President. "Our joint collaboration with AC3 has strengthened our product in the Windows cluster environment, while providing a production-grade cluster environment for our other customers to emulate. We expect many people to follow AC3's footsteps in the coming weeks and months and also make supercomputer clusters based on the combination of Windows, MPI/Pro, and Giganet."

For more information, please contact Amanda Henry at MPI Software Technology. 662/320-4300 Ext. 27 or [e-mail].