Mellanox Establishes High Performance Computing Advisory Council

Mellanox® Technologies, Ltd. (NASDAQ: MLNX) (TASE: MLNX), a leading supplier of semiconductor-based, server and storage interconnect products, today announced the formation of the HPC Advisory Council (http://www.mellanox.com/partners/HPC_Advisory_Council.php), a distinguished high-performance computing ecosystem that includes best-in-class original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), strategic technology suppliers, independent software vendors (ISVs) and selected end-users across the entire range of HPC market segments. The Council was formed to accelerate HPC innovations and new technologies, optimize system performance, efficiency and scalability and provide the best total solution to the end-user. The Council will also collaborate to extend the reach of HPC into new market segments, which have been traditionally governed by single workstations, but currently require the performance of HPC clustering to meet current and future end-user requirements. The growing list of companies and end-user organizations that have joined the HPC Advisory Council include: AMD, Appro, Blue Ridge Numerics, Colfax International, DataDirect Networks, Dell, Evergrid, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, GigaSpaces Technologies, HCL Infosystems, HP, Intel, The Israeli Association of Grid Technologies (IGT), Lamprey Networks, Livermore Software Technology Corporation, LSI Corporation., Mellanox Technologies, Microsoft, Microway, NEC Corporation of America, Netweb Technologies, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Ohio State University, RNA Networks, SGI, Scalable Graphics, ScaleMP, Schlumberger, Silicon Mechanics, SoftModule, Sun Microsystems, System Fabrics Works, Terascala, The Victorian Partnership for Advanced Computing, Voltaire, VXTECH, Wipro InfoTech, Wolfram Research, Z Research and various individuals. For joining the HPC Advisory Council, please visit http://www.mellanox.com/partners/HPC_Advisory_Council.php or contact hpc@mellanox.com. "The HPC Advisory Council was formed with the main goal to create best practices within the HPC market segments, particularly qualifying and optimizing HPC solutions, while also providing a common support center for consultations, questions and issues for HPC end-users,” said Gilad Shainer, director of technical marketing at Mellanox Technologies. "HPC end-users can benefit from the HPC Advisory Council through reduced procurement cycle and installation time, and availability of pre-tuned applications for better system utilization and faster time to market.” "Building an HPC ecosystem with key industry players on board is critical in order to ensure interoperability, maximize total solution efficiency, and accelerate new technologies and time to market of new HPC products,” said Jie Wu, Research Manager, Technical Computing at IDC. "Mellanox’s HPC Advisory Council outreach is expected to speed up HPC cluster adoption in more sectors of the technical computing, and bring the capabilities of HPC to new markets and products.” "Industry collaboration is a critical step in delivering technology developments that best meet customers’ needs,” said Scot Schultz, senior strategic alliance manager for HPC, AMD (NYSE: AMD). "Participation in the HPC Advisory Council is a natural fit for AMD, as many of the leading HPC installations worldwide are based on the AMD Opteron™ processor, and our work with the HPC Advisory Council can help HPC customers and partners continue to deliver superior end-to-end solutions that address the most demanding workloads.” "Appro is proud to join the Mellanox HPC Advisory Council where it provides a premier forum for networking technology leaders to help companies access the right resources to succeed,” said Jim Ballew, Chief Technology Officer at Appro. "Appro sees the adoption of InfiniBand supercomputing clusters as an affirmation that HPC is going mainstream.” "Blue Ridge Numerics is excited about the opportunity to join the Mellanox HPC Advisory Council,” said Eric Stenner, Director of Information Technology at Blue Ridge Numerics. "Mellanox technology will be an integral part of our development of CFdesign in an InfiniBand-based high-performance computing environment, with the goal of making complex CFD simulations faster and more accessible to a wider group of engineers.” "We are proud to be a member of the HPC Advisory Council, and to share our vast experience and innovative solutions in high performance computing with the HPC community,” said Gautam Shah, chief executive officer, Colfax International. "Our world leading clustering solutions have already been placed in the Council Cluster Center to provide the necessary development and benchmarking environment for the Council activities and outreach.” "DataDirect Networks is seeing new data storage requirements and choices emerge in the HPC space,” said Dave Fellinger, CTO of DataDirect Networks. "For example, many HPC users have deployed our S2A storage systems in clustered environments, designed to handle increasingly complex data patterns and massive amounts of large files. Users will be able to leverage the Council’s best practices and interoperability testing to better optimize their solutions to achieve the extreme performance, scalability and stability needed for their data-intensive scientific and modeling applications.” "A colossal of knowledge from the best names in HPC technology is what the HPC Advisory Council will facilitate. It will be beneficial for the end-user as it will bring specialized knowledge within reach of those who wish to implement high-performance solutions,” said George Paul, Executive Vice President, HCL Infosystems Ltd. "As India's premier information enabling and ICT (information and communication technologies) system Integration Company we bring over three decades of expertise, and are happy to be a part of the alliance as we are sure this will help build the HPC ecosystem.” "To help users conduct HPC research and meet their business objectives, some of the industry’s top minds will develop best practices through the HPC Advisory Council,” said Ed Turkel, manager of HPC product marketing for the Scalable Computing & Infrastructure Organization at HP. "HPC innovation impacts how customers utilize HP technology, which is evidenced by the growth we have seen in InfiniBand adoption on HP Cluster Platforms based on HP BladeSystem c-Class servers. Advancements such as this can now be better supported by an entire team tasked with facilitating industry collaboration.” "Intel has been part of the Mellanox HPC Cluster Center from its beginnings, contributing key optimizations for the benefit of the entire HPC community,” said Jim Pappas, Director Technology Initiatives and Industry Marketing at Intel. "We look forward to furthering these efforts with the HPC council and providing even broader support to end users for our mutual HPC technologies, such as our advanced HPC servers with InfiniBand* and Intel® Cluster Ready technology that enhance end user experiences and simplify deployments.” "As the HPC market expands, end-users increasingly ask for ways to improve productivity,” said Jeff Wierer, senior product manager at Microsoft Corp. "We anticipate the HPC Advisory Council to drive valuable best practices in how to use high-speed networking and Windows HPC Server 2008 in mainstream enterprise and commercial datacenters.” "We look at InfiniBand as a unified connectivity for HPC and Storage. It will address the speed and latency issues on top of ease to manage the entire HPC setup with just one connectivity,” said Sanjay Lodha, chief executive officer, Netweb Technologies. "This collaborative effort will bring the entire eco system close to each other in bringing truly exciting products and solutions for the customers.” "Joining the HPC Advisory Council is an integral part of Scalable Graphics strategic development plans. Mellanox InfiniBand technology lays in the core of our software solutions for high-performance computing and visualization,” said Xavier Cavin, Chief Executive Officer of Scalable Graphics. "We believe that this large ecosystem will greatly help in the spread of HPC solutions and HPC best practices into a wide range of markets.” "InfiniBand is viewed as a strategic interconnect by HPC customers,” said Bill Mannel, senior director, server marketing, SGI. "We are happy to participate in the Council to further the software and hardware options available to all users. Two of the top 10 supercomputers in the world use tightly-integrated Mellanox technology in our SGI® Altix® ICE platforms, and we expect this trend to grow.” "The HPC Advisory Council will help end-users solve real business problems and perform highly complex scientific simulations, faster than ever,” said Cheryl Martin, senior director Modular Systems, Sun Microsystems. "Our InfiniBand-based systems, used by some of the worlds fastest supercomputers, are available via the Council Cluster Center to the entire HPC end-user and software development community making it easy to take advantage of Sun's powerful and efficient solutions for application performance optimization and future application development.” "System Fabric Works (SFW), a 6 year old leading independent custom software engineering services, integration and consulting company is pleased to join the HPC Council to share our experience in developing core components of he current HPC clustering and storage ecosystems, and lessons we have learned in several deployments with leading edge customers in modeling and simulation, national security, financial services and product development, for many other members of the Council,” said Bob Pearson Founder, CEO and CTO, System Fabric Works. "We look forward to the Council playing a major role in the discussions on the strategic, technical and business issues the Council will work on.” "The unique value of the HPC Advisory Council is the combination of members from different user segments and from many areas that make up the ecosystem for successful HPC environments,” said Rick Friedman, VP of Marketing at Terascala, Inc. "This Council will provide a great opportunity for all these groups to work together and share best practices for those HPC environments.” "One of the great things about InfiniBand is the ongoing collaboration of the HPC community to further the technology’s advancement and ensure interoperability,” said Asaf Somekh, vice president of strategic alliances, Voltaire. "The HPC Advisory Council is poised to have a great impact on a broad array of HPC technologies based on InfiniBand and will help ensure the best total solutions for HPC customers. Voltaire has significant experience with large HPC deployments and we are happy to share this experience to contribute to the HPC Council’s success.” "We are pleased to be part of this distinguished group of ecosystem for building integrated HPC solutions,” said Sitaram Venkat, Group Product Manager for HPC Practice at Wipro InfoTech. "We value our partnership with Mellanox immensely, as a System Integrator for building highly cost-effective HPC solutions on high bandwidth interconnect to reach out to end-users, and as a Pioneer for Affordable Super Computing for future developments.” HPC Advisory Council members and end-users can benefit from easy access to equipment for certifications and benchmarking via the Mellanox Cluster Center. The Mellanox Cluster Center, located in Santa Clara, California, offers an environment for developing, testing, benchmarking and optimizing products based on leading-edge multi-core systems and the latest 40Gb/s InfiniBand technology. More info can be found at http://www.mellanox.com/applications/clustercenter.php. The Council also operates an end-user advisory help desk to provide a centralized place for end-users’ HPC-related questions, such as troubleshooting, system design and usage model advisory for overall system performance optimization. For additional details about the HPC Advisory Council email hpc@mellanox.com. About Mellanox Mellanox Technologies is a leading supplier of semiconductor-based, interconnect products to world-class server, storage, and infrastructure OEMs servicing Fortune 500 data centers, the world’s most powerful supercomputers, and mission critical embedded applications. The company’s Virtual Protocol Interconnect™ (VPI) enables standard communication protocols to operate over any converged network (InfiniBand, Ethernet, Data Center Ethernet) with the same software solution. Utilizing proven networking, clustering, storage, virtualization and RDMA acceleration engines, VPI optimizes application performance, power consumption, workload agility, and total system efficiency while future-proofing IT infrastructure. Founded in 1999, Mellanox Technologies is headquartered in Santa Clara, California and Yokneam, Israel. For more information, visit Mellanox at www.mellanox.com. Mellanox, ConnectX, InfiniBlast, InfiniBridge, InfiniHost, InfiniRISC, InfiniScale, and InfiniPCI are registered trademarks of Mellanox Technologies, Ltd. Virtual Protocol Interconnect is a trademark of Mellanox Technologies, Ltd. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners.