PSSC Labs Provides Supercomputing Power to the Academic Community

LOS ANGELES, CA - PSSC Labs (Professional Service Super Computer Laboratories) announced today the delivery of Linux-based clusters, known as Powerwulfs, to the University of Idaho for their research needs. The custom-configured clusters delivered to Associate Professor of Computer Science, Professor Robert Heckendorn and fellow scientists at the University of Idaho include Intel Xeon 2.8 GHz processors running a Linux OS optimized for Beowulf systems. The cluster will be used by computer scientists and mathematicians in conjunction with biologists at the institution to conduct research in several fields including studying the genetic information of all living entities and their complex interconnections to each other. The new discipline, known as bioinformatics, while popular in the private sector is relatively rare in academic circles due to the cost of supercomputers. Fortunately, Beowulf clusters, built with off-the-shelf components have brought the cost of high performance computing down to an affordable level for universities. Additionally, University of Idaho computer science students will be given the chance to work with the cluster itself in a rare opportunity for college students to work with computers of this strength and capability. The Idaho machines were delivered with PSSC Labs' latest cluster management software, CBeST v.3.0 (Complete Beowulf Software Toolkit) which was released by the company in July of this year. Alex Lesser, Vice President of PSSC Labs stated, "Beowulf clustering is growing so much right now and we're so pleased that institutions like Idaho are able to use our affordable machines to conduct research using computing power that only a few years ago was out of their reach due to cost concerns." PSSC Labs also announced today that they will be delivering additional clusters to Stanford University, Harvard University and Syracuse University in coming weeks. Lesser continued, "It's exciting for us to be a part of the research that these schools perform and we're glad that PSSC can play a role in making their work easier and high performance computing more attainable."