Orion Multisystems, a new company founded by former Transmeta executives,
debuted a family of workstations Monday that think and act like
a cluster of servers.
The Santa Clara, Calif.-based company introduced two Linux systems based on
Transmeta’s Efficeon processors — a desktop and a mini tower. Officials said its
desktop model is a single-system board consisting of 12 nodes that can scale up to 96 nodes using eight
interconnected boards. Unlike traditional backroom clusters
that require setting up huge banks of servers, minimal configuration is
required to immediately run all cluster applications.
Colin Hunter, president and CEO, and Ed Kelly, vice president of engineering,
founded Orion Multisystems in 2003 with funding from venture capital firms.
“We already have strong demand for our Cluster Workstations from major
corporations and institutions in a variety of industries,” said Hunter. “We expect to take full
advantage of the multi-billion dollar business opportunity that exists for
high-performance technical computing.”
Most current cluster installations are ad hoc systems that don’t adhere
to standard architectures or binary application footprints. Orion’s team
said it has an advantage by using the low-power, x86-compatible Efficeon
processors to be able to get the boards close together without too much
heat.
In addition to its standard parallel programming libraries, Orion’s
machines are pre-installed with iNquiry software, a suite of more than 200
applications for life science researchers. The Cluster Workstation also includes
other clustering components, such as Message Passing Interface, Parallel
Virtual Machine, and the Sun ONE Grid engine. Because it runs on Linux, the
company said existing Linux cluster software runs on Orion Cluster
Workstation without modification.
Orion’s DS-96 deskside Cluster Workstation has 96 nodes and claims 300
gigaflops (Gflops) peak performance (150 Gflops sustained) with up to 192
gigabytes of memory and up to 9.6 terabytes of storage. The company said it
consumes less than 1500 watts and fits unobtrusively under a desk.
The DT-12
desktop Cluster Workstation has 12 nodes with 36 Gflops peak performance (18
Gflops sustained), up to 24 gigabytes of DDR SDRAM memory and up to 1
terabyte of internal disk storage. The DT-12 consumes less than 220 watts
and can scale to 48 nodes by stacking up to four systems.
The desktop model is less than $10,000 and will be available
October 1. The deskside model is less than $100,000 and will be
available during the latter part of the fourth quarter.
Hunter and Kelly said they picked Flextronics to manufacture their
systems, which boot with the push of a button and have the look, feel and
ease-of-use of a personal computer.
Orion also announced a partnership to pre-install gridMathematica from
Wolfram Research, a pioneer in modern technical computing, in the
Cluster Workstation. Orion said the software will help its users set up and
run large calculations with a high-level programming language, a vast
collection of mathematical algorithms and parallel programming constructs.
“The new Orion Cluster Workstations have the capability to significantly
increase productivity in our research center, because we acquire gigabytes
of imaging data per hour, and there is a continuous backlog of jobs awaiting
completion by our shared, high-performance computing resource,” said Ben
Inglis, associate research physicist, Henry H. Wheeler, Jr., Brain Imaging
Center at the University of California, Berkeley. “The processing of these
massive data sets has become a determining factor for our research
progress.”
