ENGINEERING

Dell Contributes 448 GFLOPS of High Performance Computing Power to Leading Provider of Earth Images on the Internet -- GlobeXplorer LLC, one of the world's leading provider of satellite images and aerial photography via the Internet, is using Dell server technology to speed online access to the vast library of images in its supercomputing data center. GlobeXplorer, a subsidiary company of Stewart Information Services Corp., links Dell PowerEdge servers to form a powerful compute engine of more than 448 gigaflops (million floating point operations per second) of theoretical peak computing power so that customers can access one of the world's largest commercial library of aerial and satellite images within seconds. With 400 terabytes of raw image data stored in-house, GlobeXplorer serves traditional and emerging Web-based businesses in the real estate, insurance, government, news media, education, travel and leisure, and telecommunications industries. "We needed to refresh our data center in order to keep up with increasing customer demand and selected Dell for its reliability, low cost, and personal attention to our needs," said Rob Shanks, president and CEO of GlobeXplorer. "The clustered environment provides us with maximum scalability and flexibility, as well as increased performance and opportunity for growth. Dell PowerEdge servers help us maintain traffic and load balancing to provide an excellent customer experience." Dell has provided GlobeXplorer with more than 40 Dell PowerEdge 1750 servers running Red Hat Linux for its technology refresh. The servers help GlobeXplorer quickly locate, decompress and distribute satellite images and aerial photography via the Internet. The speed of GlobeXplorer's image delivery today -- often more than one million images daily to customers worldwide -- is a significant advance from the company's previous service. "GlobeXplorer exemplifies the growing trend of commercial customer applications being deployed on powerful standards-based supercomputing clusters," said Steve Felice, vice president and general manager of Corporate Business Group, Dell Americas. "Dell is committed to ensuring that our corporate customers can cost-effectively transition to high-performance clusters to improve their service delivery models and expand their businesses." GlobeXplorer LLC is a leading geographic data integration and publishing company providing online access to one of the world's largest commercial library of georeferenced digital aerial imagery. The company's image library is distributed over the Internet using a proprietary platform that dynamically searches, retrieves, compacts, and delivers high-quality images from an online database within seconds. Using this technology, GlobeXplorer provides fast and affordable access to aerial images and associated database content to thousands of businesses and consumers on a daily basis. Through dynamic Web applications, Web services, Internet portals, and Internet-aware devices, GlobeXplorer distributes interactive maps and aerial imagery via flexible subscription services. The company is headquartered in Walnut Creek, Calif., and its products are available worldwide. For further information, contact GlobeXplorer at info@globexplorer.com or visit www.globexplorer.com.