INDUSTRY

Faculty and students at the nation's leading research universities can now more quickly and easily solve large scientific and engineering problems utilizing high-performance computers thanks to a new reseller agreement announced today by James River Technical (JRT) and Interactive Supercomputing (ISC). James River Technical is now the exclusive academic reseller of ISC's Star-P technical computing software in the U.S. Star-P is the world's first interactive parallel computing platform, enabling users to code algorithms and models on their desktops using familiar mathematical software packages such as MathWorks' MATLAB, and run them instantly and interactively on SGI Altix. Star-P eliminates the need to re-program the applications in C, Fortran or MPI languages to run on parallel computers, which typically takes months to years to complete for large, complex and computationally intensive problems. The partnership is already helping a number of research universities tackle computationally challenging projects. For example, the University of Connecticut will use Star-P in its new Institute for Supercomputing and Visualization to speed discovery in research ranging from fuel cells, alternative energy and parachute dynamics to bimolecular and metabolic engineering. Star-P will be a key productivity tool in what will become a national center for supercomputing research and applications, according to school officials. JRT will sell, support and train academic customers on all aspects of the Star-P platform. As part of an introductory rollout, the two companies will co-host a series of bi-weekly webinars starting this month to introduce the software's capabilities and features. JRT will also make available an Internet accessible demo Star-P system that will allow prospective customers to login and see the performance capabilities of Star-P in real-time. In addition to academic research, Star-P is designed for SGI Altix users running high-performance computing applications in government, defense, intelligence, life sciences, earth sciences, energy, finance and manufacturing markets. It automatically connects desktop applications to SGI Altix servers and parallelizes the application code on the fly, enabling users to scale their applications across any multi-processor Altix server or parallel cluster in real time. "We partnered with ISC to deliver the best of both worlds to academic users - the interactive MATLAB desktop tool that they prefer, combined with the supercomputing power they need," said Tom Mountcastle, president of JRT. "Star-P provides automatic and transparent parallelization of existing MATLAB codes, giving faculty, staff and students the power they need for faster time to insight and discovery. It eliminates the recoding required when moving from the desktop to an HPC server, bringing an unprecedented level of interactivity to the workflow and discovery processes." Star-P runs on SGI Altix servers supporting one to 512 processors, 24 terabytes of memory, and running 64-bit Linux. JRT is offering academic customers specially priced Star-P/ALTIX A330 bundles starting at $40,000.