ACADEMIA

Silicon Graphics today announced a reseller agreement with Interactive Supercomputing (ISC) to resell and support the company's Star- P technical computing software under the SGI label. The agreement will enable SGI customers to gain more value from their SGI Altix Servers through an easy-to-use, interactive desktop tool for rapidly solving large scientific and engineering problems. Star-P is the world's first interactive parallel computing platform, enabling scientists and engineers to code algorithms and models on their desktops using familiar mathematical software packages such as MathWorks' MATLAB, and run them instantly and interactively on Altix parallel clusters. It eliminates the need to re-program the applications in C, FORTRAN, or MPI to run on parallel systems. "Star-P for SGI Atlix servers will be a big productivity booster for our customers who have struggled with traditional programming methods to run large programs for high-performance computers," said Bill Mannel, director of marketing, Server and Platform Group at SGI. "Star-P paired with SGI's high performance and scalable Altix servers offers our customers a faster path to new science, making unprecedented interactive computing power accessible inside their favorite desktop tools." Star-P is designed for SGI customers running high-performance computing applications in government, defense, intelligence, academic research, life sciences, earth sciences, energy, finance and manufacturing markets. It automatically connects desktop applications to SGI Altix servers and parallelizes the application code on the fly, enabling SGI customers to scale their applications across any multi-processor Altix server or parallel cluster in real time. Star-P runs on SGI Altix servers supporting from one to 512 processors, 24 terabytes of memory, and running 64-bit Linux. Star-P will be marketed through Silicon Graphics Inc.'s direct and indirect sales force. "Having a high-performance computer leader of SGI's stature selling and supporting our product is enormous validation for Star-P," said David Gibson, ISC's vice president of sales. "SGI is leading the industry in rapid application development of parallel systems. Our software will help them extend that lead to a wider base of customers." Star-P for SGI Altix servers can be ordered today through SGI's sales channels. U.S. list price starts at $24,000 including annual maintenance. All prices subject to change without notice.