Interactive Supercomputing Inc. (ISC) today announced its Star-P technical computing software now runs on high performance computers (HPCs) based on new Dual-core Intel Xeon 5100 processors. The Intel Xeon 5100 is designed to deliver more computing power at less cost, with 80 percent higher performance and 35 percent less power consumption than previous Xeon chips. Star-P support for Xeon 5100 servers offers users who previously didn’t have the budgets or programming knowledge another affordable parallel computing option for solving their growing scientific and engineering problems. Star-P also runs on servers based on the dual-core Opteron and Montecito Itanium processors. Star-P is the world’s first interactive parallel computing platform. It allows scientists, engineers and other researchers to code algorithms and models on their desktops using familiar mathematical software packages such as MathWorks’ MATLAB, and run them instantly and interactively on parallel servers. 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 complex and computationally intensive problems. The new Star-P version automatically connects desktop applications to Intel Xeon 5100-based HPCs – such as SGI’s new family of Linux-based Altix XE server and cluster systems – and parallelizes the application code on the fly, enabling users to scale their applications across any multi-processor Xeon 5100 system or parallel cluster in real time. Using Star-P they can tackle much larger problems on their desktops than ever before possible, while arriving at a solution in a fraction of the time. “Star-P for SGI Altix XE server and cluster systems makes parallel processing more economical and accessible for a wider range of technical computing customers,” said Bill Mannel, director of marketing, Server and Platform Group at SGI. “The combination is a big productivity booster, offering our customers a faster path to new science, making unprecedented interactive computing power accessible inside their favorite desktop tools.” The Intel Xeon 5100 platform enters the market at a time when sales of parallel clusters are growing quickly – close to doubling each year for the last three years. Affordable, standards-based processors like the Xeon 5100 and the Opteron are key drivers of this growth. “Star-P running on Xeon 5100 clusters represents a breakthrough model for lowering programming and cost barriers for high performance computing,” said Jason Waxman, director of server marketing for Intel. “This parallel computing platform puts powerful processing capabilities directly into the hands of scientists and engineers, without forcing them to give up their favorite desktop tools.”