INDUSTRY

Supercomputing Online is pleased to announce the winner of the Editor’s Choice for the 2005 Products of the Year. The Editor's Choice award names the best new product when addressing data- intensive challenges. The products were judged by the Editors. In order to qualify for consideration, products must have been shipped in 2005. Products were evaluated based on six criteria: * Innovation. * Performance. * Value. * Flexibility. * Functionality. * Ease of use and manageability. The following is our favorite product from a remarkable year in the life of supercomputing. WINNER: Appro XtremeServers Our research shows the supercomputing market continued to see strong growth as customers expanded their use of standards-based clustered servers. This growth has been driven by purchases from both traditional and new user sites who are able to utilize this technology as improvements in price/performance bring new capabilities within their reach. Supercomputing installations increasingly are implemented with Clusters and Grids of Clusters. Supercomputing Online selected the new Appro XtremeServers because it has met all of the criteria for the award. In addition, customer feedback from different industries in the High-performance computing space has been superb. Appro 1U XtremeServer These new XtremeServers are the first server product line where Appro is also dictating the design and feature sets of the motherboard. One of the important features of the design is that the motherboard comes with eight memory slots per processor instead of only four slots supported by other motherboard manufactures. This provides an enormous system memory flexibility and scalability. The APPRO 1U XtremeServer allows up to 64GB of on-board memory while the APPRO 3U XtremeServer permits up to 128GB. In addition, these servers configured with Dual-Core AMD Opteron processors deliver performance equal to servers with up to double the number of CPUs providing tremendous processing power with lower energy consumption for customer's investment protection. Appro 3U XtremeServer The XtremeServers are perfect fit for compute and memory intensive applications. User sites should consider purchasing Appro XtremeServers because it will not only improve their own productivity and capabilities but also advance the state of the supercomputing industry. For a complete product review of these servers, please go to Open magazine review. More information about Appro XtremeServers can be found at: its Web site.