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Winners Of Excellence In Cluster Tech Awards Announced

ClusterWorld Conference & Expo, a premier event on clustered solutions in commercial, research and academic computing, announced the winners of the 2nd Annual Excellence in Cluster Technology Awards at their event, held this week at the San Jose Convention Center.

Voltaire's Best of Show award recognizes their InfiniBand Solutions for Clusters, originally submitted for the Interconnect's category. Judge Dr. Jeff Layton, columnist for ClusterWorld Magazine, said the judges were impressed with their approach to large scale InfiniBand interconnects for clusters including their InfiniBand Switch Routers, InfiniBand-to-IP, and fabric management software.

Appro's recently released HyperBlade Full-Cluster also won accolades from judges in the 64-Bit Turnkey Systems category. It's use of AMD Opteron's processor also allows 32-Bit applications to run simultaneously.

"Appro is extremely pleased to receive the ClusterWorld Excellence Award for the best 64-Bit Turnkey Cluster Solution," said Daniel Kim, president and chief executive officer for Appro. "Having Appro HyperBlade AMD Opteron based Cluster solution recognized by such an influential conference and outstanding publication such as ClusterWorld Magazine validates our market leadership and reflects our commitment to delivering best-in-class solutions for our customers."

The awards recognize the many breakthroughs in clustering technologies presented by ClusterWorld Conference & Expo exhibitors. A number of the award winners and nominees have developed technology that has reshaped the IT landscape and brought supercomputing power to new markets.

"The awards are given to recognize companies and products that are extending the reach, viability, and adoption of clustered systems," said Dr. Douglas Eadline, lead judge and Editor-in-Chief of ClusterWorld Magazine. "We had several categories with such great products that selecting a winner was incredibly difficult."

Thirty-one products from over 20 of the cluster industry's leading companies are competing for the coveted Best of Show Award as well as the top spot on one of eight (8) product categories: Cluster Management/Monitoring Systems, Interconnects, Grid Solutions, Storage Solutions, Developer Tools, Software Stack/Linux Distribution, 32-Bit Turnkey Systems, 64-Bit Turnkey Systems, Open Source Cluster Solutions, and the coveted Best of Show.

Many of the category awards recognized emerging companies such as Panasas that are producing innovative solutions such as their ActiveScale Storage Cluster and UK -based Quadrics Limited with their Interconnects category winner, QsNet II.

"We are honored to accept this highly-coveted award," said Garth Gibson, CTO and co-founder of Panasas, of their product's win in the Storage Solutions category. "This acknowledges the Panasas ActiveScale Storage Cluster's ability to uniquely solve the storage management and performance problems traditionally associated with Linux cluster."

"The QsNet family of switches and the Quadrics software environment has proven its merit at being able to support production level supercomputing via the medium of large scale Linux clusters," said John Taylor of Quadrics Limited. "This award is not only an accolade to all at Quadrics Ltd involved in the delivery to market of Quadrics products but also to those customers who have been instrumental in the successful deployment within their stringent operational environments. We thank the organizers and judges at ClusterWorld for this prestigious award and the opportunity to demonstrate how the new QsNetII version of QsNet is being made more accessible to the wider Linux cluster community as well as driving scalability towards the hundred of Tflops capability."

The awards were given at a ceremony last night in the San Jose Convention Center ballroom. Award judges included Dr. Doug Eadline, Editor of ClusterWorld Magazine, Author and Physicist Dr. Robert Brown, NSF GRIDS Center Co-Director Tom Garritano, Lockheed-Martin Senior Engineer Dr. Jeff Layton, NSF Science and Technology Fellow Dr. Dan Stanzione, Indiana University Research Associate Jeff Squyres, and Moscow Joint Supercomputing Center Department Head Dr. Pavel Telegin.

Best of Show WINNER: Voltaire, InfiniBand Solutions FINALIST: IBRIX, IBRIX Fusion 1.2

Cluster Management/ Monitoring Solutions WINNER: Linux Networx, ClusterWorx 3.0 FINALIST: Appro International, Appro Cluster Management Solution

Grid Solutions WINNER: Platform Computing Inc., Platform Symphony FINALIST: United Devices, Grid MP Cluster v4.1

Developer Tools WINNER: Engineered Intelligence, CxC Parallel Application Development Solution FINALIST: Intel , Intel Trace Analyzer/ Intel Trace Collector

Interconnects WINNER: Quadrics Ltd., OSNet II FINALIST: Voltaire, InfiniBand Solutions

Storage Solutions WINNER: Panasas, ActiveScale Storage Cluster FINALIST: PolyServe Inc., NAS Cluster Solution

Software Stack/Distribution WINNER: Scyld Computing/Penguin Computing, Scyld Beowulf Cluster Operating System

32 Bit Turn-Key Solution WINNER: RLX Technologies, High Performance Turnkey Cluster Solutions FINALIST: Linux Networx, Evolocity II (E2)

64 Bit Turn-Key Solution WINNER: Appro International, Appro HyperBlade Full- Cluster FINALIST: Rackable Systems/AMD, Rackable Systems C1000-17HE with AMD Opteron processor HE

Open Source Cluster Solution WINNER: Los Alamos National Lab, Clustermatic 4 FINALIST: Linux Networx, Evolocity II with LinuxBIOS