World’s Lowest Latency AMD Opteron™ Processor-Based HPC Systems Offered by IWILL and PathScale

World’s Lowest Latency AMD Opteron™ Processor-Based HPC Systems Offered by IWILL and PathScale

Taipei, Taiwan, June 1, 2005 IWILL Corporation, a leading manufacturer of high-end server, workstation and appliance solutions, and PathScale, developer of innovative software and hardware solutions to accelerate the performance and efficiency of Linux® clusters, have announced that IWILL’s AMD Opteron processor-based system boards with standard HTX slots are being offered with the PathScale InfiniPath™ InfiniBand™ HTX™ Interconnect to deliver unprecedented low-latency performance for HPC users. This announcement was made today at the 25th annual Computex Taipei Conference, Asia’s largest IT show.

The IWILL booth at Computex is B1110.

IWILL and PathScale also announced record-breaking results on industry-standard benchmark tests by the InfiniPathâ„¢ interconnect operating with the IWILL DK8-HTX AMD Opteronâ„¢ processor-based system board. The InfiniPath HTXâ„¢ Adapter is a low-latency cluster interconnect for InfiniBandâ„¢ that plugs into standard HyperTransport technology-based HTX slots on IWILL system boards.

“This new technology takes full advantage of the AMD Opteron processor with Direct Connect Architecture, directly connecting I/O, memory and processors with open-standard HyperTransportâ„¢ technology,” said Pat Patla, director, server/workstation marketing, Microprocessor Solutions Sector for AMD (NYSE: AMD). “There is clearly a strong market interest in this innovative new cluster interconnect solution.”

Optimized for communications-sensitive applications, PathScale InfiniPath is the industry’s lowest-latency Linux cluster interconnect for message passing (MPI) applications. Operating on an IWILL DK8-HTX server board, InfiniPath achieved an all time record-low MPI latency of 1.32 microseconds on the standard Ohio State MPI benchmarks. InfiniPath also achieved a peak bi-directional bandwidth of 1842 MB/s and achieves half of this peak bandwidth at 385 byte messages (streaming), the best in the industry. This means that SMP-class performance will now be available to commodity-priced compute clusters, increasing application performance, cluster utilization and user productivity.

“IWILL and PathScale are leveraging five important industry standards: HyperTransport, InfiniBand, OpenIB, MPICH and the AMD64 Direct Connect Architecture,” explained Harry Hirschman, director of PathScale’s InfiniPath marketing unit. “By supporting these latest open standards, IWILL and PathScale are delivering low-latency HPC solutions that are superior in nearly all respects to other systems using older, proprietary interconnect technologies.”

The InfiniPath interconnect connects to any standard InfiniBand 4X switch including those from SilverStorm (Infinicon), Cisco (TopSpin) and Voltaire. InfiniPath will also support the OpenIB software stack providing full InfiniBand compliance. InfiniPath works with all AMD Opteron processors, but uniquely exploits Dual-Core AMD Opteron processor-based servers. InfiniPath implements a HyperTransport tunnel architecture enabling easier configurability on multiprocessor designs.

“The combination of IWILL system boards and the PathScale InfiniPath interconnect can efficiently and reliably scale to thousands of nodes,” explained Mason Su, worldwide general manager for IWILL Corporation. “Our commitment to supporting the latest advanced technologies means that our resellers and system OEMs will always experience the best possible performance from IWILL’s HPC systems.”

PathScale InfiniPath HTX Adapters and AMD Opteron processor-based servers with IWILL DK8-HTX system boards offering the new standard HTX slots will ship in June and are now orderable from over 20 leading Linux systems providers including: Alexander Technology (Australia), Angstrom Microsystems (USA), Appro International (USA), Aravision (Taiwan), Compusys (UK), Dalco AG (Switzerland), DataSwift (France), E4 Computer Engineering (Italy), Gridcore AB (Sweden), Hard Data (Canada), Megware (Germany), Microway (USA), NovaGlobal (Singapore), Progression Infonet (India), Rackable Systems (USA), Scalable Systems (Singapore), Streamline Computing (UK), Sumisho Electronics (Japan), Team HPC (USA), T-Platforms (Russia), Visual Technology (Japan) and Western Scientific (USA).

About IWILL
IWILL is a leader in the design, manufacturing and deployment of workstation and server motherboard platforms. IWILL continues to develop, innovate and improve – while reinvesting in design and manufacturing practices that add to stability, quality and reliability of the finished product. For more information, please visit www.iwill.net or iwillusa.com.

About PathScale
Based in Mountain View, California, PathScale develops innovative software and hardware technologies that substantially increase the performance and efficiency of Linux clusters, the next significant wave in high-end computing. Applications that benefit from PathScale’s technologies include seismic processing, complex physical modeling, EDA simulation, molecular modeling, biosciences, econometric modeling, computational chemistry, computational fluid dynamics, finite element analysis, weather modeling, resource optimization, decision support and data mining. PathScale’s investors include Adams Street Partners, Charles River Ventures, Enterprise Partners Venture Capital, CMEA Ventures, ChevronTexaco Technology Ventures and the Dow Employees Pension Plan. For more details, visit www.pathscale.com, send email to sales {at} pathscale(.)com or telephone 1-650-934-8100.

Media Contact
David Wright
dw1 {at} mbipr(.)com
+1-650-618-1544