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The Itanium Solutions Alliance today announced Spain's La Fundacion Computacion y Tecnologias Avanzadas de Extremadura (COMPUTAEX) as the winner in the Humanitarian Impact category of its 2010 Itanium Innovation Awards. COMPUTAEX, a non-profit founded to support a wide variety of social, environmental and scientific improvement projects for the Extremadura region of southwestern Spain, relies on an Itanium-based supercomputer to efficiently handle hundreds of parallel processes and manage huge data sets for its many complex research projects.

Finalists have also been chosen in the program's three other categories: Mission-Critical Data, Data Center Modernization, and Computationally Intensive Applications. Winners in these categories will be announced at the 2010 Innovation Awards Celebration on September 14 at The Westin St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco, to be held concurrent with the Intel Developer Forum at the Moscone Center.

"On behalf of the Itanium Solutions Alliance, I'd like to express my deep appreciation to all who entered this year's Innovation Awards program," said Joan Jacobs, president and executive director of the Itanium Solutions Alliance. "We received many impressive submissions from systems integrators, research institutions, application developers, departments of government, and enterprise end-users from all over the world. It made the judges' decision a difficult one, but after much deliberation, we have selected an extremely worthy Humanitarian Impact winner in COMPUTAEX and narrowed the field to a few outstanding finalists in the other categories. We're very much looking forward to honoring all our finalists and winners at our awards ceremony in September."

"We are very pleased to accept this Itanium Innovation Award for Humanitarian Impact," said Dr. Jose-Luis Gonzalez-Sanchez, general manager, COMPUTAEX. "Our Itanium-based supercomputing center has helped researchers obtain results quicker than they could have imagined, making it possible to effectively develop innovative solutions to Spain's current social, environmental, and scientific challenges. In addition to providing massive computation capabilities and allowing us to process huge amounts of data, the Itanium architecture allows us to meet the future performance and growth needs of scientific users with flexibility and headroom."

The Itanium Solutions Alliance Innovation Awards is a global program designed to recognize and reward end users, system integrators, and developers for outstanding use of Intel® Itanium-based servers in their organizations or applications. A panel of distinguished judges evaluated submissions based on a number of criteria, such as difficulty of challenge, results produced, and originality.

Winner - Humanitarian Impact

The Humanitarian Impact category rewards the innovative use of Itanium-based systems to deliver results that benefit humanity through research, social improvements or other humanitarian efforts. The winner in this category receives a $25,000 cash award to support their important work. The 2010 winner in the Humanitarian Impact category is the Spanish non-profit organization COMPUTAEX.

COMPUTAEX's supercomputer is based on two shared-memory HP Integrity SuperDome SX2000 supernodes connected via 10 gigabit Ethernet and has been used to solve leading-edge social problems requiring more than 256 processors and up to two terabytes (TB) of RAM. Most of COMPUTAEX's scientific investigations include simulations that let researchers model real-world events such as how climate changes will affect farming, the impacts of an industry or a refinery, or the risks of a nuclear or chemical disaster. The reliable Itanium-based infrastructure enables researchers to run their simulations without the fear of losing research hours and gives them the assurance of accurate and quick results.