INDUSTRY

ClusterVision, specialist in Linux supercomputer clusters, announced another top year as leading supplier of Linux supercomputer clusters in the United Kingdom, Netherlands, Belgium and Germany. The year 2004 saw a near doubling of sales revenue and a further increase of market share as a result of new customer wins as well as considerable repeat business from existing customers. Some substantial project wins included a 418 Intel Xeon EM64T processor cluster with a 84TB disk storage cluster for the University of Lancaster (UK), a 290 AMD Opteron™ cluster to the Max Planck Institute (Germany), a 208 AMD Opteron processor cluster with Myrinet interconnect for the University of East Anglia (UK), a 144 AMD Opteron processor cluster with InfiniBand interconnect for the University of Surrey (UK), a 270 AMD Opteron processor cluster with Myrinet interconnect and 40TB disk storage for another top university in the UK (see press release), and a 66 Intel Xeon processor compute cluster with InfiniBand interconnect to Astron and the University of Groningen (Netherlands). The 176 Intel Xeon processor cluster with Myrinet interconnect delivered to CENAERO was the fastest computer in Belgium and featured in the Top500 (see press release). A substantial number of other clusters of various size were sold to universities, research institutes and companies across the UK, Germany and Benelux. Furthermore, the year 2004 saw the launch of the UK National Grid Service (NGS) to provide a significant compute, storage and database resource for the UK e-Science community. The UK NGS is based on four compute and database clusters supplied by ClusterVision and hosted by Rutherford Appleton Laboratory and the Universities of Leeds, Manchester and Oxford (see press release). As a Company, ClusterVision expanded significantly with the recruitment of both sales and technical staff, including a new sales team in the UK, headed by Ms Georgina Ellis and Dr ir Gerdjan Busker (see press release). The hiring of the new sales team coincided with the formalisation of our UK business by establishing ClusterVision Ltd as our official UK subsidiary. Our continuing expansion has led to the need for increased office and production space and ClusterVision is in the process of acquiring larger offices close to Amsterdam in the next couple of weeks. Further investments and improvements were made in our cluster operating system and software environment, the ClusterVisionOS, which has led to its being described favourably by our customers, including a staff member from the UK's top independent research laboratory who described it as "the best cluster management setup I used sofar". ClusterVision has grown technically and financially over the last 12 months and we had taken steps to become independent of some previous partners. This plan was hastened by the sad and unexpected death of Mr Louwrens Boomsma, Managing Director and owner of ECL Computers. This occurred at a time of expansion for ECL into new markets which without his leadership they were unable to sustain. Although still a registered trading company, ECL is currently in administration. ClusterVision has taken on affected staff and production facilities and none of our existing customers or cluster installation projects were affected. In November 2004, ClusterVision received an award from the Netherlands British Chamber of Commerce in the 23rd Anglo-Dutch Awards for Enterprise. The prestigious award in the category for "Dutch Exporters" was presented by Heineken CEO, Mr Anthony Ruys, stating: "The judges were impressed with the way this company developed its product and the manner in which they have been able to sell it to some very prestigious and demanding clients". ClusterVision was nominated for the award by its bank, the ABN AMRO bank. Dr ir Matthijs van Leeuwen, Sales Director of ClusterVision, stated: "We are delighted with another top sales year and are grateful to all new and existing customers for choosing ClusterVision. We will continue our focus on customer support and technical expertise and will use profits from 2004 towards this, as well as for expansion into the Germany and French markets".