Oslo, Norway, December 2, 2002 - Scali, a leader in high-performance cluster communication and management solutions, announced today record-breaking Message Passing Interface (MPI) communication performance by surpassing 385 MBytes per second on a HP Itanium® 2-based cluster with the HP Chipset zx1. The Linux cluster was installed in the Advanced Computing Research Laboratory (ACRL) within the Texas Learning and Computation Center (TLC2) at the University of Houston by Scali and Brock Computer Applications, Inc. (BCAI), a Houston-based HP "Gold" channel partner.

Scali has consistently demonstrated outstanding performance with less than four microseconds latency on user-process-communication for Linux clusters with its ScaMPI™ Message Passing Interface. ScaMPI is based on highly optimized algorithms for message passing through a direct data transport mechanism that eliminates overhead and reduces latency.

Scali’s high-bandwidth and low message latency MPI coupled with the high-bandwidth and low-latency of the HP Chipset zx1 and extreme compute power of the Itanium architecture are delivering powerful clusters that are scalable and reliable. The combined benefits of these systems have proven to be ideal in improving the performance of compute and communication intensive applications in the technical and scientific computing marketplaces.

The ACRL Linux cluster consists of 19 HP zx6000 workstations with dual 900 MHz Itanium 2 processors and a single HP rx5670 workstation with quad 1 GHz Itanium 2 processors. The installation will enable leading edge research in methods and tools for designing and building adaptive high-performance software for scientific and engineering applications for the emerging computation and data grids. The system will also be used for research in air quality modeling, seismic modeling and data analysis and genetic medication development.

"Scali has surpassed our expectations by delivering 385 MBytes per second MPI bandwidth. The proven performance of Scali’s MPI together with their flexible cluster management software has presented us with highly favorable price performance ratios," said Dr. Lennart Johnsson, director of ACRL and TLC2 at the University of Houston.

"High performance clustering is presenting exciting opportunities in the market place," said Fred Graves, vice president of business development at BCAI. "The low latency and high performance seen from Scali’s MPI on the research software at the TLC2 clearly demonstrates the potential cost savings and increased return on investment within scientific and technical high performance computing."

"Scali accomplishes the tremendous bandwidth illustrated on Itanium 2-based products through our well-proven and future-ready direct data-transfer model that delivers data with minimal delays and buffering," said Håkon O. Bugge, vice president of development and CTO of Scali. "This model preserves our ultra low latency communication performance and unleashes the power of the underlying hardware."

"The popularity of lower cost clustered systems ready to take on the most demanding tasks continues to grow," said Steve Joachims, director of Marketing and Solutions from HP’s High Performance Technical Computing division. "The ability to deliver scalable and highly available solutions combining Scali’s software with the outstanding performance of HP’s Itanium 2-based systems further strengthens our position in the high performance cluster market."