Microway Announces NumberSmasher®-5500 Cooler and Greener HPC Clusters with Intel® Xeon® processor 5500 series

Kingston, MA – March 30, 2009 –

Microway today announced their new Intel® Xeon® processor 5500 series-based clusters, SMP servers and WhisperStations. Microway’s platform solutions maximize both energy efficiency and performance density with over twice the performance of Intel Xeon 5400 processor-based systems and 30+% power savings. Combined with 93% efficient power supplies, Microway clusters, servers and WhisperStations consume less power and generate less heat.

An Intel® Channel Partner-Premier Member, Microway uses industry-leading Intel technologies, coupled with sophisticated, proprietary cluster monitoring and management software to create solutions specific to HPC and Enterprise customers’ needs. Microway also manufactures its own brand of InfiniBand products, including FasTree-X™ DDR/QDR switches and TriComX™ multifunction HCAs.

Compute-intensive applications will benefit from revolutionary Intel® Xeon® processor 5500 series innovations:

  • Hyperthreading improves application efficiency and reduces run times by increasing instructions completed per cycle up to 33%.
  • Intel Turbo Boost automatically overclocks processor cores when power and thermal conditions allow.
  • Intelligent Power Technology adjusts system power consumption real-time to workload. Automated Low Power States reduces CPU, Memory and I/O power without impacting performance and Integrated Power Gates dynamically turn off cpu cores that are not in use to reduce idle power.
  • Intel® QuickPath architecture in which each processor owns a part of the total system memory and having each of the components stitched together with a high-speed point-to-point interconnect.
  • 8MB of on-die L3 cache, 6.4GT/sec QPI and triple channel DDR3 1333 MHz memory provide your application the fastest access to data. Microway has measured over 37GB/sec memory bandwidth using the STREAM benchmark, over 40% faster than other dual-processor configurations.
  • Intel® 5520 and 5500 chipsets with 36 lanes of PCI-Express generation 2.0 provide unprecedented bandwidth to storage, network and GPUs.
  • SSE4.2, with additional application-specific instructions for tasks such as XML string parsing and CRC32 error correction calculations. Combined with Intel’s compiler tools and performance libraries, a user’s application will be automatically vectorized to take advantage of SSE SIMD instructions.

“The new Intel® processor 5500 series microarchitecture is especially interesting for our customers with memory and floating-point intensive applications. These include FFTs, which have high data re-use rates; SMP applications that make frequent calls, including transaction-based business applications; and programs that depend on byte code interpreters like JAVA to carry the work load.” said Stephen Fried, President and CTO of Microway.

When a NumberSmasher-5500 cluster is connected with Microway’s FasTree-X™ InfiniBand switch, MPI applications can achieve inter-processor bandwidths of 40 Gbits/sec while taking advantage of the 1.2 microsecond latency of the latest Mellanox ConnectX DDR and QDR HCAs. Microway’s customers have benchmarked scientific applications with Nehalem Xeons and achieved twice the performance of clusters they purchased less than one year ago.

For more information on Microway’s new NumberSmasher®-5500 products please call 508-746-7341 or visit the company’s web site at https://www.microway.com/xeon.html

About Microway, Inc.

Incorporated in 1982, Microway is a major vendor in the High Performance Computing market, designing state-of-the-art, high-end Linux clusters, servers, and data storage solutions. Users worldwide pushing the limits of technology choose us for solutions. These include universities, life sciences, financial, military, Fortune 500s and research agencies.

Microway partners with leading commercial software providers to include products such as Intel Compilers, Platform, SUSE and Red Hat Linux in HPC clusters. Microway is an Intel Premier Channel Partner, Novell Gold Partner and Microsoft Direct OEM for Windows HPC Server. Classified as a small business, woman owned and operated, Microway’s GSA Contract Number is GS-35F-0431N. For more information and a subscription to Microway’s online technical newsletter, please visit www.microway.com.

Microway, the Microway logo, FasTree, GigaCube, MCMS, MPI Link-Checker, NumberSmasher, QuadPuter, TriCom and WhisperStation are trademarks or registered trademarks of Microway, Inc. Mellanox and InfiniScale are trademarks of Mellanox. Microsoft and Windows are registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the U.S. and/or other jurisdictions. Other brands and trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

Intel, the Intel logo and Xeon are trademarks or registered trademarks of Intel Corporation or its subsidiaries in the United States and other countries. Performance tests and ratings are measured using specific computer systems and/or components and reflect the approximate performance of Intel products as measured by those tests. Any difference in system hardware or software design or configuration may affect actual performance. Buyers should consult other sources of information to evaluate the performance of systems or components they are considering purchasing.

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