Advanced Cluster Computing Consortium established at Cornell supercomputer centre

 Ithaca 26 Jul 99 The Cornell Theory Centre (CTC) has established the Advanced Cluster Computing Consortium (AC3) - a research and IT service consortium for business, higher-education, and government agencies interested in the effective planning, implementation, and performance of commodity-based systems, software, and tools.

Dell Computer Corporation, Intel Corporation, and Microsoft Corporation have joined AC3 as Infrastructure Members and will provide hardware, software, and vendor-specific training and technical support to the consortium.

The goal of AC3 is to provide its members with collective support in implementing state-of-the-art clustered environments, as well as to provide a strategic window into future cluster technologies. Consortium members will receive technology briefings, training, and consulting services from CTC's Cluster Computing Solutions Group, which can provide assistance in planning commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) systems, services to aid migration from UNIX to Microsoft Windows® NT 4.0 or Windows 2000 and access to both pre-release hardware and software, as well high-performance production machines.

Cornell University is one of the leading institutions for computational science and engineering in the country, due in large part to resources and expertise available at CTC. CTC director Thomas F. Coleman said that researchers associated with the center work in some of the most computationally challenging fields - from genomics to datamining, from digital materials to drug design.

CTC will place a strong emphasis on attracting businesses to AC3, emphasized David Lifka, CTC associate director. "We believe that a consortium can help companies reduce their IT risks as they plan and implement enterprise-wide, commodity-based software, servers, and tools."

Other Infrastructure Members announced by Cornell were:
  • Etnus, Inc., developer of TotalView?, a multi-process, multi-thread debugger;
  • Fluent, Inc., developer of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) engineering analysis software;Giganet, Inc., developer of the cLAN? products, a family of high-performance interconnects for clustered servers;
  • Kuck & Associates, Inc., a leading developer of OpenMP , an API for shared-memory parallel programming, and vendor of OpenMP compilers, tools, and services;
  • MPI Software Technology, Inc., developer of MPI/Pro and distributor of ClusterCoNTroller a resource monitoring and job scheduling tool developed by CTC;
  • The Numerical Algorithms Group, Inc., developer of numerical libraries, portable compilers, and 3D visualization tools;
  • The Portland Group, Inc., a leading independent vendor of parallel Fortran, C and C++ compilers;
  • SAS Institute, Inc., a leader in decision support, data warehousing, and statistical analysis;
  • Visual Numerics, Inc., developer of numerical analysis, data visualization, and Internet software solutions
I

n addition to Infrastructure Members, AC3 membership is open to corporations interested in testing and implementing Windows NT or Windows 2000 cluster environments, government agencies, and higher-education institutions.

For more information about AC3, see: www.tc.cornell.edu/AC3/Memberships

Ad Emmen