Lawrence, Kansas - August 30, 2004 –atípa (www.atipa.com) atípa Technologies, active supporter of the open source community and leading solution provider in high-performance computing systems, announces the successful deployment of two identical Itanium 2 Linux Clusters to the Department of Energy. Each Cluster consists of 536 Intel Itanium 2 CPUs, 12TB of usable fault tolerant I/O storage. atípa Technologies successfully met every requirement set by the customer including a 90-day delivery cycle. A target for this project was to maximize the performance delivered while staying within budget. atípa Technologies collaborated extensively with Intel to achieve the “biggest bang for the customer buck” in providing on-time delivery, superior quality, and unbeatable prices. atípa Technologies designed each Itanium Cluster with 200 Intel Tiger II 2U chassis installed with dual 1.3GHz Itanium 2 Madison Processors for the compute nodes. Additional compute nodes comprise 34 Intel Tiger IV 4U chassis installed with quad 1.3GHz Itanium 2 Processors for each cluster. The clusters were set up identically, and shipped to two different locations within one week. “Working closely with Intel on this project has given us a totally new perspective of Intel. It allowed us to work with each level within each department, to be more efficient in meeting our customer’s needs,“ stated Mike Zheng, President of atípa Technologies. “I am also excited about our future projects that will build on the working relationships we have established within Intel.” Significant pricing and delivery advantages can be achieved by this cooperative relationship.

The project required a system that supports a long useful life-cycle with strict guidelines for formal software verification, qualification and version control. atípa Technologies fulfilled these needs by creating a stable, standards-oriented software environment that will minimize future conversion costs of new systems. RedHat Enterprise WS supporting Itanium 64-bit architecture, 64-bit Intel C and Fortran Compilers, are installed on all nodes.

atípa provided a system of four NFS/IO nodes, each able to sustain 70MB/second writes, and 90MB/second reads, for a total of 290MB/second on reads exceeding the required rate by over 40%. The two clusters contain both Gigabit networking and Myrinet interconnects. The Gigabit network uses a Cisco 6509 with dual fabric attach. The Myrinet network provides high-speed, low-latency interconnects for compute jobs running between all compute nodes. Using the Myrinet interconnect each cluster attained a TOP500 rating of 1810 GFLOPS, placing each machine around 100th on the current TOP500 list.

The system is also required to tolerate failures of disks in such a manner that it is easy to reconfigure and remove failed components and continue operations with minimal changes. The basic atípa NFS IO setup used for each of these clusters has four NFS I/O nodes and four external atípa Fiber to SATA Qualifiers with a total of 12TB of useable space using RAID-5. Each atípa Qualifier is built with sixteen 250GB SATA drives, all hooked to a Brocade SAN switch to allow all NFS I/O nodes to access all disks if necessary. “If you’re willing to risk a half-hour of your time, I can show you a number of exciting ways you can enhance the cluster’s file system management and utilization while containing or reducing the costs with our atípa Qualifiers,” said Roger Heflin, Principal HPC Engineer at atípa Technologies. Mr. Heflin specializes in developing fault tolerant architectures, services and systems on an enterprise-level cluster.

The Software Engineering Support Group at atípa Technologies has seven full-time engineers devoted to supporting customers in assuring quality compliance with all of atípa’s contracts. “Our extensive research in the development and design of robust Linux cluster solutions for data-intensive applications shows the necessity of including storage systems that complement the computer cluster's throughput while exceeding the price-performance characteristics of our competitors.” noted atípa’s Software Engineering Support Group.

“Having a dependable Linux Solution Provider prepared to meet your High Performance Computing requirements quickly is a real security blanket when your computational jobs are critical for day to day operation. You will find that the staff at atípa Technologies will help you feel as if you’re partners. We will work side-by-side with your support group to create and deliver a customized solution that will meet your needs. Let us help you upgrade to atípa Beowulf Clusters as you expand in the High Performance Computing arena.” noted Oracle Technologies Group at atípa, specializing in Oracle RAC development on Linux platforms.

About atípa atípa’s headquarters and R&D (Research and Development) are located in Lawrence, KS. atípa enables a variety of distributed, parallel computing applications by developing powerful, scalable, and reliable clusters, servers, storage subsystems and high-end workstations for the high-performance computing (HPC), Internet computing and database cluster markets.

This press release has been submitted by the Public Relations Department, atípa, Kansas USA

atípa Technologies 4921 Legends Dr Lawrence, KS 66047 press@atipa.com