GAMING

BOSTON, MA -- Blackstone Computing today made public its reference design (or "Blueprint") for highly scalable, high-throughput compute farms - a hardware topology in which networked servers are pooled together as a single, powerful computing resource. With domain-specific experience in life sciences and semiconductor design, the Company has helped dozens of companies establish successful compute farms based on this Blueprint. While stressing the need for strategic infrastructure software and services that optimize and manage these farms - Blackstone's focus with its PowerCloud(TM) software - the Company hopes its Blueprint will advance the adoption of these core production infrastructures. "Compute farms are an important platform for companies that are running compute and data intensive applications," said Ron Ranauro, founder and vice president of business development, Blackstone Computing. "The challenge is that companies approaching this for the first time have to dedicate significant resources in researching, deploying and managing the compute farms. By releasing the Blueprint, Blackstone is easing compute farm adoption by shedding light on an architectural design with a proven track record of success." In designing the Blueprint, Blackstone has taken into consideration cost, vendor independence, scalability, performance and manageability. The Blueprint is valid for all variations and combinations of UNIX and Linux. The architecture is designed to scale as a single entity to 1,000 processors, although configuration, administration and performance benefits are seen with systems as small as 16 CPUs. The Blueprint, while technology independent, does point out that companies need to look beyond the hardware architecture if they want the compute farm to be truly optimized for their particular environment. "The Blueprint is a great starting point for understanding how to build compute farms," Ranauro added. "But the compute farm needs a software management layer that ensures the infrastructure is providing maximum throughput and proper resource allocation. PowerCloud is that control and management layer." Blackstone has already shared its Blueprint with select hardware platform providers. Blackstone will provide periodically updated versions of its Blueprint white paper, "Blackstone Computing Blueprint White Paper V.1," which is now freely available at http://www.BlackstoneComputing.com.