INDUSTRY

HLS Athena S4 with HMMER and Solaris combines performance with low-cost -- Electronic Business Solutions (EBS), a full service systems builder and integrator, announced today the results of the first industry benchmark test of their latest server, the HLS Athena S4. The server utilized Dual-Core AMD Opteron processors to run about four times faster than Apple's G5. EBS, a leading AMD and Sun Microsystems Solaris OEM and system integrator, pitted its 3U five bay rack mountable server, running on the Solaris 10 operating system and equipped with four Dual-Core AMD Opteron processors 865, 8 GB of ECC 400 MHz memory, and one 160 GB SATA II hard drive against an Apple G5 configured with two dual-core PowerPC G5 processors, 4 GB of RAM and 250 GB hard drives. Running the Bio IT software HMMER, a computational intensive, freely distributable implementation of profile HMM software for protein sequence analysis and a tool for profiling hidden Markov models for biological sequence analysis, the Boston Biomedical Research Institute (BBRI) performed its benchmark testing a 4 GB UniProt, a protein sequence database. "By measuring the run durations of identical large HMMPFAM jobs on the HLS Athena S4 and an Apple G5 supporting two dual-core PowerPC G5 processors, the AMD Opteron processor-based server ran about four times faster," said Jon Goldberg, instructor, BBRI. "This performance demonstrates the benefits of a fully optimized software solution running on a Solaris and AMD Opteron processor-based HLS Athena server." "Months of work went into porting HMMER to Solaris," said Fran Oh, CEO, EBS. "Customers can now benefit from HMMER taking advantage of all eight cores, and the increase in performance is linear." "This is an exciting and important time for not only EBS, but the entire scientific research community. We are able to offer super computing power to all of the scientific community at a very competitive price point," said Eric Herbert, Director of Sales and Marketing, EBS. "This prepackaged bundle allows scientists to focus on research rather than downloading and customizing software. With the increase in speed, more testing can be completed on a daily and weekly basis." "AMD is proud to be a driving force behind the performance of the HLS Athena S4 server, and more broadly, EBS' contribution to the scientific research community," said Pat Patla, director, Server/Workstation Marketing, AMD. "AMD Opteron processors with Direct Connect Architecture deliver industry-leading performance-per-watt to address the server computing needs of compute-intensive environments." This super computer solution is now readily available to ship from EBS on an HLS Athena Server or high end HLS Athena Workstation. EBS is offering its exclusive prepackaged, BioBundle solution, which includes HMMER, BLAST, EMBOSS, EMBASSY, and PHYLIP, all ported to Solaris and utilizing multiprocessors, and includes a choice of the following configurable machines, with HMMER and Solaris preloaded at a starting price of under $10,000. HLS Athena S4 3U 5Bay Server * 4 Dual-Core AMD Opteron 64-bit 800 Series processors * 2-32 GB ECC Reg PC 3200 RAM * 5 SATA II or SCSI drives, hardware RAID 0, 0+1, 5 * Redundant 2n+1 hot swap 700W power supplies * HMMER and Solaris pre loaded and optimized to take advantage of all 8 cores HLS Athena W4 Super Workstation * Up to 4 Dual-Core AMD Opteron 64-bit 800 Series processors * 2-64 GB ECC Reg PC 3200 RAM * Up to 8 SATA II drives, hardware RAID 0, 1, 0+1 * 900W/1350W power supply * HMMER and Solaris pre loaded and optimized to take advantage of all 8 cores