PRESS RELEASE 2 May 2009 Petapath invited to speak at HP-CAST Start-up company showcases its expertise in high-performance heterogeneous computing systems Petapath (Bristol, UK), has been invited to speak at the Hewlett-Packard for Consortium Advanced Scientific and Technical (HP-CAST) computing conference in Madrid, Spain (May 10 – 13, 2009). Petapath and HP are working together to develop a prototype petaflop/s systems as part of the pan-European Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE) (www.prace-project.eu). Petapath’s presentation, “Programming for high-performance heterogeneous systems”, will use the PRACE prototype system to compare and contrast current development practice using proprietary tools versus the new open standard of OpenCL. “One of the remaining challenges is that performance characteristics of OpenCL-targetable platforms will differ, and that tuning an application will require a degree of system specific information which the application will have to manage,” says Dairsie Latimer, co-founder and CTO of Petapath. “Heterogeneous systems are now becoming increasingly pervasive at both the top and bottom of the high performance compute market. Accelerators can deliver significant performance and cost advantages but this is at the expense of the challenges involved in using them effectively. The industry is moving towards open standards which users will embrace as an enabling link in cross platform heterogeneous software development.” Petapath is also taking part in a tutorial – “Software environments for accelerators” – which will have presentations by HP partners offering development tools and libraries for accelerators. “When graphics cards and FPGAs started being used to accelerate computation, the available development tools and environments were not intended for this use and were unfamiliar to the typical scientist or engineer,” says Michal Harasimiuk, CEO of Petapath. “Now compilers, tools, and libraries are emerging for both these and other accelerator technologies that make them much more approachable by users with a background in programming high-performance computing applications.” - END - About Petapath Petapath is a supplier of heterogeneous computing solutions in the high-performance computing sector. Its expertise and technology dramatically increases computing performance with only a moderate increase in power dissipation. Petapath’s software technology can be applied to any application using high-performance computing, from banking and entertainment, to scientific and mathematical modelling. Petapath’s technology is a cost-effective, energy-efficient way of increasing computer performance into the petaflop/s regime. www.petapath.com About HP-CAST The Hewlett-Packard Consortium for Advanced Scientific and Technical (HP-CAST) computing users group works to increase the capabilities of HP solutions for large-scale, scientific and technical computing. HP-CAST provides guidance to HP on the essential development and support issues for such systems. HP-CAST meetings typically include corporate briefings and presentations by HP executives and technical staff (under NDA), and discussions of customer issues related to high-performance technical computing. www.hp.com Press contact: Michal Harasimiuk michal@petapath.com +44(0)117 911 7544 +44(0)778 718 5248