The company's main advantages involve a powerful cluster management and a complete node and OS management. Roland Fehrenbacher also insisted on the support for cluster grouping with full regular upgrades. There is attention for a continued maintenance and optimization. transtec provides a one stop support for the whole package with high availability options. The company secures a software compatibility guarantee for all Linux applications and there is a full service option for complete management and commercial applications.

The speaker highlighted the following key features as being important assets in the transtec story. There is a Zero admin compute/storage node management. transtec people offer PXE remote booting and take care of the hardware autodetection during the boot process. Local disks are being set up automatically and there is a complete remote BIOS control. The OS upgrade is performed simply by rebooting the complete cluster with hundreds of nodes, within 3 minutes.

Beowulf software components include many different MPI environments optimized for Intel, PathScale and PGI compiler. The disk is fully scalable and there is a Web-based cluster portal and hardware CPU.

Roland Fehrenbacher showed the ISC2005 audience a case study at the Catholic University of Leuven (KUL) in Belgium. The system there is general purpose with machine paremeters of 300 Opteron and 172 dual Opteron compute nodes.

Inquisitor Horst Simon asked if transtec is already selling in the United States. Roland Fehrenbacher said this was not likely to happen very soon but probably in the future via European companies with subsidiaries in the USA. Still, everything remains open for the future.