California Digital & Lawrence Livermore Deploy Fastest Linux Cluster
23 Teraflop Peak System Is World's Second Fastest

FREMONT, CA-[May 13, 2004]--Linux cluster vendor California Digital, Quadrics, and Intel today announced that they had successfully deployed the most powerful Linux supercomputer ever built, a 4,096 Itanium2 processor based Linux cluster code named "Thunder" at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

The Thunder cluster delivers 19.94 teraflops of sustained performance, making it the most powerful computer in North America. Thunder also boasts the largest Itanium 2 processor deployment, as well as the largest implementation of Quadrics' low-latency QsNet^II interconnect technology. These technologies allow Thunder to achieve record cluster efficiency of 86.9%, an important metric in measuring cluster scalability.

"We're proud to have successfully delivered such a ground-breaking Linux cluster with world-record performance and efficiency," reported California Digital CEO B.J.Arun. "Thunder sets important benchmarks for massively-parallel Linux computing."

Thunder uses 1,024 California Digital 6440 servers, each with four Intel Itanium2 1.4GHz processors with 4MB of cache, 8GB of RAM, and 73GB of local storage. "Working with California Digital and Lawrence Livermore has been a great opportunity to demonstrate the absolute performance and scalability that can be achieved with Intel's Itanium2 processor" said Intel Enterprise Platforms General Manager Richard Dracott.

Thunder's efficiency and scalability rest on the strength of its sophisticated interconnect technology, Quadrics' QsNet^II offering. QsNet^II (Elan4) provides the underlying high bandwidth and low latency MPI communications required by today's demanding scalable applications. With support for broadcast in hardware and scaleable collective operations, QsNet^II scales clusters efficiently to over 4,000 nodes.

Despite the technical sophistication of Thunder and the incorporation of new technologies, California Digital deployed Thunder in five months, speeding delivery of computing solutions to support Lawrence Livermore's national security and science programs in fields such as materials science, structural mechanics, electromagnetics, atmospheric science, seismology, biology, and inertial confinement fusion.
"Thunder represents the next generation of Linux cluster for scientific simulation," remarked Mark Seager, Livermore's Assistant Department Head for Advanced Technology. "Our applications are seeing a 50% to 400% speed up over our Xeon base clusters."

Thunder uses a number of innovative open-source software tools developed by California Digital and Lawrence Livermore to manage the cluster effectively, leveraging the industry-leading remote management capability of Intel's Itanium2 system family. California Digital has
released a number of these tools under open source licenses as part of its freeIPMI project for server management and configuration.

About California Digital
California Digital deploys clustered computing solutions for enterprise and government technical customers needing state-of-the-art turnkey solutions incorporating leading software, system, and interconnect technologies. California Digital is a privately held company based in Fremont, CA. Information about California Digital is available at http://www.californiadigital.com or by calling 1-888-LINUX-4-U.

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