IBM Departmental Supercomputing Solutions are comprehensive cluster packages offered in a variety of configurations to meet the needs of smaller organisations. Each cluster is comprised servers devoted to running applications, a management server to administer cluster resources and a network interconnect to allow communication between the servers. Every system is packaged and tested as a cluster prior to shipping.

"Many if not all of the roadblocks of deploying clustered servers have been blown away by this Departmental Supercomputing Solution to give small and medium sized businesses a competitive advantage in the marketplace", stated Dave Turek, Vice President Deep Computing, IBM. "We have virtually eliminated the complexity of management, extensive floor-space and power requirements and packaged a variety of choices, at an affordable price, so customers with smaller budgets and staff can still solve challenging problems in life sciences, petroleum exploration, structural design, high-energy physics and finance and securities."

IBM Departmental Supercomputing Solutions are offered in a variety of packaged, pretested clustered configurations running either Linux or Microsoft Windows:

• IBM eServer Blade Center HS20 - Up to 14 dual Intel Xeon processor blade servers in a 7U chassis.
• IBM eServer xSeries 335 - Dual Intel Xeon processor server in a 1U rack optimized form factor.
• IBM eServer 325 - Dual AMD Opeteron processor server in a 1U rack optimized form factor.

The servers are combined with the IBM eServer xSeries 345 management server which is the single point of administration for all cluster resources, which communicates with the other servers in the cluster over a highly secure Ethernet virtual LAN (VLAN). Each Departmental Supercomputing Solution also has a separate Gigabit Ethernet VLAN to interconnect all servers for application internode communications and a terminal server network for remote console applications.