PRESS RELEASE 10 October 2009 Petapath delivers petaflop/s prototypes As part of the pan-European Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE), start-up company Petapath has delivered two prototype petaflop/s high-performance computing systems 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 About PRACE The Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE), is preparing the creation of a persistent, pan-European research infrastructure that will provide a leading high-performance computing service to enable world-class science. Funded by the EU’s 7th Framework, PRACE brings together partners from 20 countries and involves 91% of Europe’s HPC power. The objective of the two year project is the completion of the necessary legal, administrative, and technical work that will allow the permanent research infrastructure to start operation in 2010. www.prace-project.eu Press contact: Michal Harasimiuk michal@petapath.com +44(0)117 911 7544 +44(0)778 718 5248