DEVELOPER TOOLS

At today's Supercomputing 2005 conference, Absoft Corporation, a leading manufacturer of advanced software development tools, announced it is working with Intel Corporation on an Enhanced Edition of Absoft's newly released High Performance Computing Software Development Kit (HPC SDK) for 64-bit Intel Xeon processor-based servers and clusters running Linux. The Enhanced Edition will begin shipping in December, 2005. Absoft announced general availability for the Basic Edition of the HPC SDK in June at the International Supercomputing Conference 2005 in Heidelberg. “We are gaining substantial traction with our increasingly comprehensive line of HPC SDKs, which have essentially the same look and feel across multiple platforms,” said Absoft CEO Wood Lotz, “but the Intel-based SDKs are leaping ahead both in market volume and in the range of powerful software tools included in the new Enhanced Editions for developing the highest performing computing codes on clusters, servers, and grids.” The Absoft HPC SDK is a complete solution allowing software developers to easily compile, run, debug, and optimize high performance software applications. The HPC SDK includes some of the industry's leading software tools optimized for 64-bit extensions and is preconfigured for easy installation. It includes Fortran and C/C++ compilers from both Intel and Absoft, debuggers, math libraries, pre-built message passing (MPI) libraries, and other development tools. Also included is a comprehensive set of example HPC programs to help new users quickly learn how to take full advantage of the HPC SDK features. The HPC SDKs from Absoft are the only commercially available HPC SDKs that combine tools from multiple vendors to provide customers with true best-of-class solutions. With just three easy mouse clicks, customers can install and begin using the HPC SDK to take advantage of their existing hardware and software investments. Absoft Corporation is the single point of contact, simplifying all pre-sale, post-sale and technical support issues related to the HPC SDK. The HPC SDK Enhanced Edition includes all of the features of the increasingly popular HPC SDK Basic Edition for Intel Xeon processor-based systems along with additional tools from Intel, including: Intel VTune™ Performance Analyzer to easily streamline code, and Intel Thread Checker and Intel® Thread Profiler for OpenMP and POSIX threads debugging and bottleneck analysis. Also included are open source tools such as Marmot, an MPI thread checker. Future versions of the Enhanced Edition of the HPC SDK will include the FxP parallel MPI debugger from Absoft. “Absoft's decision to include our products, with our exceptionally strong support for threading, enables Absoft customers to develop applications today which best exploit the capabilities of current and future platform offerings,” said James Reinders, Director of Marketing for the Software Products Division of Intel Corporation. The HPC SDK was developed for 64-bit Intel Xeon processor-based servers and clusters running Linux, such as the IBM xSeries eServer and the IBM eServer Cluster 1350, IBM's leading-edge Linux cluster solutions. The HPC SDK is also available for systems such as the new IBM Grid and Grow™ and the IBM BladeCenter.