NEC today announced the release of "Express5800/1020Ba," a new blade server. The new product contains up to two Intel Itanium 2 Processors in a single blade, along with a maximum of 9 blades (with maximum 18 CPUs) and a power unit in a 10U-tall (1U: 44.45mm) chassis (rack-mount chassis), which enables performance equivalent to that of supercomputers says NEC. "Express5800/1020Ba" employs a Linux operating system, and is targeted at the scientific and technological fields. In the scientific field, where the rapid growth of GRID markets, in particular bioscience is highly anticipated, it provides sufficient power to surpass current computing resources. In technological field, it can also be utilized as a high-performance and low cost computational server for CAE (Computer Aided Engineering) analysis that requires supercomputers or high-performance scalar servers that help to reduce the total cost of developmental processes. The main features of the new product are as follows. 1. World's First Blade Server loaded with 24GB High-Capacity Memory "Express5800/1020Ba" is loaded with 24GB high-capacity memory as well as newest "Intel Itanium 2 Processor". It delivers a high performance of 6.4 Gigaflop/s, which is heavily weighed in scientific computing as well as offering a high performance equivalent to that of supercomputers. To take full advantage of the high performance, it features many floating-point registers and large-capacity, high-bandwidth and low latency cache. A data transfer speed of 6.4GB/s between the CPU and the memory also contributes to an excellent performance. In addition to Gigabit-Ether, for interconnection, it employs Infiniband (10Gbps) which is 10 times faster than Gigabit-Ether. 2. Excellent Installation A single rack-mount chassis can contain up to nine blade servers, two management modules, a power unit, fans, and CD-ROM drives. One 2m-rack can contain up to four rack-mount chassis (up to 36 blades, 72CPUs), realizing a logical peak performance of 460Gigaflop/s, offering 2 times easier installation than scalar servers. 3. High Reliability and High Availability Within the same chassis, the power of each blade can be turned on or off, as well as the replacement of certain blade/s without affecting the operation of the others "hot-swappable"). Redundant management modules are also hot-swappable, which realize smooth recovery of redundant configuration without rebooting blades within the same chassis after repair in the event of system failures. Redundancy is available for N+1 configuration of the power supply and the fan for high reliability and high availability. 4. Excellent Operability By connecting the keyboard and the mouse of each blade server via a management module, operations such as power management, status monitoring and configuration control are integrated, which provide excellent operability of Express5800/1020Ba. NEC's server operation management software "ESMPRO/ServerManager, ServerAgent" monitors server resource and operational status, and automatically detects and reports abnormality. This realizes immediate response in the event of a failure. "WebSAM Deployment Manager," enables all-at-once installation of OS and applications on an enormous number of servers, contributing to efficient operational management. Moreover, Express5800/1020Ba supports software "LSF" developed by Platform Computing. As NEC's original extended function in combination with "LSF," it offers failover function, an operational function that automatically switches to stand-by servers if a failure is detected in the primary servers. These functions realize a total remote operational management function to manage numerous processing nodes. The standard price of the new product is 1,860,000 Japanese Yen (including tax) and the shipping starts from August 2004. Areas to which a scalar server with general-purpose microprocessors is applied are expanding, such as, fluid analysis, structural analysis, machinery design, chemistry and EDA (Electronic Design Automation, CAD). For each application, problems to solve and amount of data processed are expanding and becoming increasingly complicated every day, therefore generating increased needs. To meet these needs, NEC develops the Express5800/1020B, assimilating high-density packaging technology, high cooling technology, on-line support technologies and others.