ACADEMIA

Liquid Computing Corp., a developer of a new class of scalable computing systems for high performance computing, today announced Permedia Research Group, a provider of a leading high resolution petroleum system modeling tool, will be using the LiquidIQ server to boost the computing capacity and performance of Permedia’s simulations. An early tester of Liquid Computing’s technology, Permedia has been working closely with the company during the development of LiquidIQ. Permedia is providing the world’s biggest oil and gas companies with the leading simulation software, MPath, to predict petroleum migration trajectories and highly detailed petroleum emplacement patterns. The software uses complex, parallel algorithm modeling that consumes massive amounts of communication throughput. Liquid Computing’s server will create the ideal computing architecture to support the simulations. The system will enable near linear scalability and deliver unprecedented performance, while improving best economics. "Liquid Computing’s performance, scalability and lower cost architecture will ensure faster results, allowing our customers to better reduce risk and assess uncertainties in their simulations," said Dan Carruthers, CEO of Permedia Research Group. "Its hardware will allow us to increase the physical complexity and realism of our simulators. As an independent software vendor, this provides us with a more flexible product, giving us considerable market advantage. We are looking forward to continuing our work with Liquid Computing and implementing the final product." LiquidIQ is an Interconnect Driver Server (IDS) which delivers a set of managed computing and communications resources that can be configured with software commands into one or several cluster configurations, shared memory or cache coherent server regions. This design results in a server that far exceeds the performance and scalability levels of legacy vector machines and today’s commodity clusters. The IDS functionality allows users to instantly marshal computing, memory, IPC and I/O resources into highly available and scalable servers that dynamically change to deliver any computing or communications task. “Permedia’s customers are world-class petroleum organization that require immediate and accurate information to make the best exploration decisions. It is crucial that Permedia have a computing system like Liquid Computing’s to deliver the highest levels performance, scalability and flexibility,” said Mike Kemp, CTO of Liquid Computing. “Through our efforts with industry leading companies like Permedia at the alpha stage of our product development, we are continuing to demonstrate that LiquidIQ is optimized for the heavy lifting requirements of the high performance computing market.” Liquid Computing’s system is designed to support standards based programming that will deliver near linear scalability without the headaches of writing architecture specific calls to LiquidIQ. It also provides the flexibility to grow from a single to multi-system configuration. Supercomputing 2005 Liquid Computing will be featuring the alpha version of LiquidIQ at Supercomputing 2005 this November in Seattle. The demonstration unit will also feature Permedia’s simulation software. Liquid Computing’s CTO Mike Kemp will be giving a presentation entitled “HPC Developers Beware: Know Thy Networks” on Tuesday November 15 at 10:30 a.m. in room 617.