Performance Technologies and SUNY Buffalo partner on a faulttolerant supercomputer

Rochester 29 Mar 00 Performance Technologies provided three of its Nebula 8000 Fault Tolerant Ethernet Switching Systems to the Center for Computational Research at SUNY Buffalo. The PTI equipment is designed to support continuous operation of the University's cluster of 64 Sun Ultra 5 workstations, thereby elevating this collection of workstations to fault tolerant "supercomputer" status.

The supercomputing network at SUNY Buffalo is the end result of a research collaboration launched in June 1999 between the University and Sun Microsystems to develop a network of high performance workstations that will deliver the power of a supercomputer at a reduced cost. The system configuration consists of 64 Sun Ultra 5 333MHz workstations running Beowulf/Linux, a software operating system designed to meld the workstations into a single resource. From a performance standpoint, this type of integration approaches the acknowledged power of today's general-purpose supercomputers, but at a fraction of the cost of the bigger machines.

Working with Sun Microsystems on this project is a continuation of a long-standing relationship Performance Technologies has enjoyed with this leader in networked technology. As a recognized OEM supplier to Sun, PTI continues to provide a variety of high-speed synch/serial Wide Area Networking adapters and protocol software solutions for Sun's high performance platforms.

Performance Technologies' Nebula 8000 is the industry's first truly fault tolerant Fast Ethernet enterprise switch for building highly resilient networks. Where fault tolerance was once seen only in high-end backbone networks - out of the reach of most LANs - the 32 port Nebula 8000 enables organizations who depend on network reliability to gain all the benefits and safeguards of fault tolerance at a cost far lower than building and running redundant systems.

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