HPCwire: Scalable Servers Corp. Announces flexBLADE Platform

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November 09, 2007

Scalable Servers Corp. Announces flexBLADE Platform

FREMONT, Calif., and TAIPEI, Taiwan, Nov. 7 -- Scalable Servers Corporation exited stealth mode today and announced the release of its versatile flexBLADE technical workgroup computing platform based on AMD Opteron processors.

Scalable Servers Corporation (SSC) is a privately held, world class computer design and manufacturing company based in Fremont, Calif. SSC's flexBLADE platform is a multi-purpose built, stand alone solution targeting the computational needs of technical workgroups, research and development teams and SMB customers throughout the high performance computing market.

Capable of a wide range of configurations, the versatile flexBLADE is comprised of a single chassis form factor with up to 5 dual socket blades, configurable as a cluster, SMP, hybrid-combination or small server farm. Supporting the full range Next Generation AMD Opteron processors, the platform can scale from a cool and quiet, low power 1500 watt departmental solution, up to a robustly configured 3000 watt compute powerhouse. The flexBLADE also supports scaling out beyond standard dual socket to quad socket SMP, FAT NODE, configurations with ample memory support (16 DIMM slots per node, or 80 total DIMM Slots per chassis), storage (up to 10-2.5" and 14-3.5" disks), and a PCIe x16 slot per blade which allows multiple graphics heads per platform. Built-in networking includes 10 or 20 Gigabit InfiniBand, 10 Gigabit and 1 Gigabit Ethernet with full system management that allows the flexBLADE platform a wide range of configurations to match performance and cost requirements.

"The flexBLADE platform from Scalable Servers Corporation is a fine example of what can be accomplished with the versatility of the AMD Opteron processor," said David Rich, director of High Performance Computing at AMD. "AMD64 technology with Direct Connect Architecture helps deliver socket and system scalability along with the investment protection of simple upgrade paths to next-generation processors. This helps our customers deliver exceptionally flexible platforms that can be the basis for a long-term, unified high performance computing strategy."

"The HPC market continues to expand as new customers are enabled with technologies like desk-side and workgroup clusters," said Shawn Hansen, director of HPC marketing, Windows Server Division at Microsoft Corp. "The introduction of flexBLADE and Windows Compute Cluster Server creates a turnkey solution in a convenient form factor that enables scientists and researchers to focus on driving productivity."

"The innovative flexBLADE platform utilizes Mellanox interconnect solutions to provide a leading edge clustered, multi-core environment for personal and workgroup use," said Gilad Shainer, senior technical marketing manager at Mellanox Technologies. "InfiniBand connectivity is a key ingredient for parallel application performance, overall system productivity and provides a unified fabric for external, high-speed, storage solutions."

"The new SSC flexBLADE is an exciting product for Quatrio, because it demonstrated some very important capabilities on industry standard x86-64 hardware only seen on 'big iron' until now," said Zeki Yasar, CTO of Quatrio. "By combining the flexBLADE hardware with server virtualization software we now have a platform that allows you to create hard and soft partitions in a single box, serving up all of your mission critical applications on a combination of the most widely used operating systems in a highly available configuration. One of the most important aspects of the flexBLADE is the ability to roll it out in almost any environment with out having to make special considerations around power, cooling and space. The amount of processing power and memory that can be packed into this box is going to help run the most demanding simulations in record times, ultimately saving organizations of all sizes time and money and accelerating their time to market."

"We are very excited to be working with SSC and the new flexBLADE platform toward developing a variety of Personal Super Computer (PSC) solutions to address the market," said Brian Corn, director of marketing and product development at Thinkmate. "We have seen a tremendous amount of interest in the PSC segment where customers are looking for the convenience of a versatile desk-side supercomputing solution previously unavailable in the market."

Founded as a spin off of Mitac International group, SSC has offices in Fremont, Calif. and Taipei, Taiwan. SSC's core flexBLADE platform will be available through strategic OEM and System Integrator partners in the coming months. The flexBLADE platform will be demonstrated on the OpenFabrics SCinet at the booths of AMD (# 757), Mellanox (# 127) and Microsoft (# 1407) at SC07 in Reno, Nev., Nov. 12-16.

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Source: Scalable Servers Corp.

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