InfiniCon Systems and Scali Announce Breakthrough Performance Levels Backed by Industry's First Performance Guarantee Program for Computing Clusters

Application-optimized Cluster Environment Offers up to 500% Throughput Increase and Guarantees Performance ROI for Commercial Users

(King of Prussia, PA, June 23, 2004) - InfiniCon Systems, the premier provider of clustering and I/O virtualization solutions for next-generation server networks, and Scali, the leader in scalable, high performance cluster software solutions, announced today the Application-optimized Cluster Environment (ACE), which provides breakthrough performance levels for commercial High Performance Computing applications such Fluent, Eclipse, Magma, LS-Dyna, and others. In addition, the companies are offering an industry-first performance guarantee, offering a minimum of twenty five percent throughput improvement over standard cluster interconnect configurations.

"Clustered solutions exhibited a high rate of growth in the technical computing market by more than doubling sales in 2002 to 2003. Clusters are attractive to end users due to their price/performance ratios, which is a result of faster processors, interconnects, and middleware," stated Earl Joseph, Vice President of Research, High Performance Computing, for analyst firm IDC. "The approach of providing a guaranteed level of performance improvement on any application is an innovative marketing approach that will likely catch the attention of both buyers and competitors."

Record Performance Levels

New levels of performance for commercial HPC applications were achieved leveraging the combination of InfiniCon's 10Gb InfiniBand-based systems, in conjunction with Scali's MPI Connect� middleware environment, to ensure a high performance, low latency network upon which industry-standard servers can be clustered. When used together in an Itanium or Opteron environment, these comprise an Application-optimized Cluster Environment (ACE) for which the companies performed benchmarks using commercial industry applications. Results for sixteen-node clusters showed performance results for Fluent's FL5M3 that vaulted from 262 jobs/24hours to 1153 jobs/24hours - a 338% throughput increase. Using MagmaSoft's MAGMAfill application, the throughput was even greater, at 543% measured with the same jobs/24hour metric; in tests using Eclipse E100, the increase was a respectable 56%. These results come on the heels of other recent performance tests, which show the ability to scale InfiniCon-based clusters to up to 144 nodes while retaining an industry-leading 80% or better CPU scaling efficiency.

Industry's First Performance Guarantee

The ACE performance guarantee, in which InfiniCon and Scali guarantee at least twenty five percent performance improvement for ACE configurations over standard, gigabit Ethernet-based clusters, is unique in the industry. "During our seven-year history, we have never felt as comfortable in offering a "�guarantee' as we do today," stated Hakon Bugge, CTO for Scali. "In coupling the power of InfiniCon's InfiniBand-based offerings with our advanced MPI software, we are supremely confident in the performance and value offered to HPC customers."

Please visit the InfiniCon web site at http://www.infinicon.com/partners/ace.asp for additional details related to the newly announced ACE performance guarantee.