The IMSL Fortran Library 6.0 is the first announced third-party set of mathematical and statistical libraries to be offered with IBM's Blue Gene/P, which features four low-frequency (850 MHz) PowerPC 450 processors on a single chip. In addition, the IMSL Fortran Library 6.0 offers improved MPI coverage, integrated ScaLAPACK support, as well as the ability to leverage IBM's ESSL and OpenMP in order to support both shared memory and distributed memory technology for developing high performance computing applications. As a result, developers now have the means to combine IBM's supercomputing power and Visual Numerics' libraries to accelerate application innovation for a range of computationally intensive industries and research areas such as oil & gas, financial services, aerospace, life sciences, and meteorology.

"We are elated that Visual Numerics has raised its hand in support of the Blue Gene/P technology with the latest version of IMSL", stated Dave Turek, vice president of Deep Computing at IBM. "The availability of IMSL provides our Blue Gene customers with an extensive and reliable set of mathematical and statistical functions to help meet their application development requirements."

The IMSL Fortran Numerical Library 6.0 includes:

• A new state-of-the-art Dense Linear Programming Algorithm
• New ScaLAPACK Integration Support which gives users easy access to MPI-enabled algorithms and utilities, and allows them to write parallel code by removing many of the complexities in developing MPI-based applications.
• Cross-platform coverage so applications developed on the desktop can be deployed to Blue Gene/P
• Backward compatibility to enable the migration of legacy applications to Blue Gene/P

"Visual Numerics and IBM have been partners for more than 35 years and offer the most advanced, high performance computing solutions to the developer community", stated Phil Fraher, president and CEO of Visual Numerics. "Already a number of Visual Numerics' customers have indicated they will migrate to the Blue Gene/P technology. With the IMSL Fortran Library 6.0, the most complete Fortran-based library solution available on IBM Blue Gene/P, we're giving customers and other developers a competitive advantage in building the fastest applications available in their industries."