Industry Leaders PathScale and Voltaire Sign Agreement on High Performance Grid Backbone and Linux Cluster Solutions

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., Sept. 29 /PRNewswire/ -- PathScale, developer of innovative solutions to accelerate the performance and efficiency of Linux(R) clusters, this week announced that Voltaire is adding the PathScale InfiniPath(TM) HTX(TM) InfiniBand(TM) adapter as one of the InfiniBand adapters offered with its high-performance multi-service InfiniBand switches. This is the latest in a series of developments that demonstrate how PathScale InfiniPath has become the high-performance InfiniBand interconnect of choice for performance-minded cluster users.

More details are available at http://www.pathscale.com/press_releases.html

One of the first Voltaire customers to receive the PathScale adapter is the Sandia National Laboratory's research facility in Livermore, CA. According to Dr. Matt Leininger, computational scientist at Sandia National Laboratories, "We see Voltaire's collaboration with PathScale as a very positive development that will make it easier for us to build extremely large InfiniBand-based clusters based on the OpenIB software stack. The ability to couple the PathScale InfiniBand adapter to Hypertransport has some significant advantages in terms of latency and effective bandwidth for many of our complex applications such as structure mechanics, computational fluid dynamics and combustion codes. PathScale's support for OpenIB is a critical requirement for us."

PathScale InfiniPath, available as both an adapter card and as an ASIC, is the industry's highest performance Linux cluster interconnect for message passing (MPI) and TCP/IP applications. InfiniPath delivers superior interconnect performance at commodity price levels by implementing a high-performance software stack and by connecting directly to the AMD Opteron(TM) processor via a standard HyperTransport HTX slot. When integrated with Voltaire's InfiniBand-based switching solutions, InfiniPath enables applications to reliably scale to hundreds or thousands of nodes.

"This agreement between PathScale and Voltaire marks InfiniBand technology's coming of age," observed Nathan Brookwood, principal analyst at the industry research firm Insight 64. "Now the market will be served by multiple vendors offering customers a range of price/performance alternatives. PathScale's innovative marriage of InfiniBand and HyperTransport technology provides a low-latency interconnect that makes clusters of 64-bit x86 systems an even more cost-effective approach for high-performance computing applications."

Voltaire provides a complete family of grid backbone solutions including the Voltaire Grid Director(TM) ISR 9288, the industry's most scalable, multi-service switch for building high-performance clusters and grids ranging from tens to thousands of nodes. To deliver complete cluster solutions to customers, Voltaire has established OEM agreements with leading server vendors IBM, HP, SGI, and strategic sales relationships with Sun, NEC and Hitachi.

PathScale recently published new InfiniPath performance results including the Pallas Benchmark Suite and the HPC Challenge Benchmarks that validate PathScale InfiniPath as the industry's highest performance commodity cluster interconnect for Linux-based HPC applications. These results can be viewed at http://www.pathscale.com/infinipath-perf.html Availability

The Voltaire HCA460HT InfiniBand adapter, based on PathScale InfiniPath is orderable immediately from Voltaire and its worldwide channel partner network. About Voltaire

Voltaire is the worldwide leader in grid backbone solutions for networked computing in the next generation data center. Voltaire's integrated family of switching hardware and network virtualization software delivers the high performance, intelligent backbone for grid computing architectures. Leveraging the InfiniBand standard, Voltaire solutions offer improved performance, utilization and scalability across compute clusters, storage and IP networks. Voltaire solutions are available from major systems vendors and integrators. More information about Voltaire is available at http://www.voltaire.com or by calling 1-800-865-8247. 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, GF Private Equity LLC, ChevronTexaco Technology Ventures and the Dow Employees Pension Plan. For more details, visit http://www.pathscale.com, send email to sales@pathscale.com or phone 1-650-934-8100.