APPLICATIONS

With recent compliance legislation such as Sarbanes-Oxley and increasing corporate governance over information security, businesses around the world are facing a tsunami of data. But the amount of data is not the only challenge -- companies are increasingly under pressure to not only be able to store petabytes of data, but also be able to retrieve this information instantly at an affordable cost. To address this challenge, Unisys has partnered with Microsoft and Cornell University to unveil, at Supercomputing 2004 conference, a research initiative aimed at developing petabyte-sized storage that will allow researchers, and businesses in the future, to have instant, real-time access to vast amounts of data. Through three data intensive projects run by Cornell - one of which laid the foundation for the translucency effects in The Lord of the Rings trilogy and earned the films a visual effects Oscar - Unisys is working with the scientific community to test the performance and capacity of low cost commodity storage disks to provide more affordable, cost effective, real time data management and access -- a feat never before achieved. The goal of the research is to decrease data retrieval time by four orders of magnitude (1/10,000) over existing petabyte storage systems. In practical terms, this means a bank loan officer could instantly access a borrower's 25 year mortgage history in a matter of minutes, enabling much quicker business decision-making -- a plus for both customers and the bank. Unisys, Microsoft and Cornell University will be present at SC2004 (Unisys Booth #1921, Microsoft Booth # 1815, Cornell Theory Center Booth # 2235), and will have on display results and analysis obtained from this ongoing project. I invite to stop by our booths to take a look for yourself and meet Dr Peter KarnazesDirector, High Performance Computing for Unisys, Dr. Michael Salsburg Technology Director, Systems & Technology for Unisys and David Lifka, CTO of Cornell Theory Center.