Petapath delivers petaflop/s prototypes

PRESS RELEASE

10 October 2009


UK start-up company Petapath (Bristol, UK) has worked with industry 
leaders HP and SGI to deliver two prototype petaflop/s high-performance 
computing systems as part of the pan-European Partnership for Advanced 
Computing in Europe (PRACE).

Funded by the EU’s 7th Framework, PRACE brings together partners from 
20 countries and involves 91% of Europe’s high performance computing 
(HPC) power.

The two prototype petaflop/s systems use Petapath’s accelerator technology 
and are based at the Netherlands Computing Facility in Amsterdam and the 
CINES supercomputing centre in Montpelier, France.

At the Netherlands Computing Facility in Amsterdam, Petapath and HP 
delivered a power-efficient system, built on eight HP SL170 servers 
and next generation accelerator prototypes. The system achieves a peak 
performance of 10 teraflop/s double precision, which is equivalent to 
more then 60 conventional servers. The system consumes only 6kW of power. 
A full petascale system built with this technology would require only 10% 
of the power of todays leading petascale systems.
At the CINES supercomputing centre in Montpelier, France, Petapath incorporated 
the ClearSpeed accelerator technology into a conventional cluster designed
by SGI and increased its performance by 50%, with only a 10% increase in
power dissipation.

These two systems will be used for assessment and development work leading 
to procurement of future multi-petaflop/s systems.

“Petapath’s accelerator technology can dramatically increase computer performance 
with only modest increases in power dissipation. This brings enormous benefits 
to users of HPC, be they in academia or industry,” says Michal Harasimiuk, CEO of 
Petapath. “Systems used in enterprise computing often use only a fraction of their 
available computing capacity. Petapath’s technology will give customers access to 
this unexploited capacity, delivery increased computer performance with only 
a moderate increase in power usage.”

Petapath's software, which uses existing standards, is platform-independent and 
exploits powerful distributed computing technology to harness the parallel processing 
capabilities of multi-core GPUs/CPUs. It is applicable to any industry that require 
energy-efficient high-performance computing power such as the finance industry, oil 
and gas companies, scientific computing applications and the aerospace industry.

“Because we are platform independent, we can work with a wide variety of hardware 
providers to deliver the best solution to our customers,” says Harasimiuk. 
“Improving the efficiency of systems in which multi-core technology is used and 
combining it with acceleration technology can reduce simulation times from days 
to hours.”

- 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


Press contact:
Michal Harasimiuk
michal@petapath.com
+44(0)117 911 7544
+44(0)778 718 5248