AUGUST 6, 2009 -- Darkstrand (search Lightwave for Darkstrand), which leverages the National LambdaRail backbone to provide corporate high-speed connectivity, has announced a collaborative alliance with the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The alliance is designed to enable corporations working with NCSA to shorten the path from discovery to product development through advanced connectivity on the Darkstrand Network and the high-performance computing (HPC) power and expertise of NCSA.
A third of FORTUNE 50 companies have partnered with NCSA's Private Sector Program (PSP) to leverage NCSA's infrastructure, technologies, and expertise, the entities say. Through NCSA's PSP and the Darkstrand Network, companies can optimize their combined innovation resources to solve problems, they assert.
"NCSA aligns with industry leaders to tackle the HPC and IT challenges that impede fast product development," said Merle Giles, director of the NCSA Private Sector Program. "We believe that forward-thinking companies can benefit from our partnership with Darkstrand to lead the coming innovation revolution,"
In addition to its PSP, NCSA has partnered with IBM, the Great Lakes Consortium for Petascale Computation, and the National Science Foundation to develop Blue Waters, a sustained-petaflop supercomputer expected to be the most powerful supercomputer in the world for open scientific research when it comes online in 2011. An integral component to the Blue Waters project is also an expanded program to introduce corporations to the benefits of petascale computing.
"Darkstrand is in the business of enabling companies to accomplish things they have been unable to do before," said Michael Stein, CEO, Darkstrand. "We ask corporations, 'What would you do if bandwidth was never a constraint?' in order to liberate their ideas. Partnering with leaders such as NCSA's PSP, which understands the need to close the gap between high-end research and corporate America, is a critical advantage for our customers. Through the PSP, corporations have the HPC technologies and deep expertise they need to innovate, prototype and quickly introduce new products into the marketplace."
NCSA computational resources currently include two Dell Intel Clusters, an SGI Altix, and an IBM IA-64 LinuxCluster. NCSA users have access to a permanent archival storage system and high-speed parallel file systems on each HPC platform that support the creation and analysis of large data sets. A wide variety of third-party applications software, community codes and performance tools are also available for HPC system users. NCSA and the PSP also provide user support and consulting services to integrate facilities and resources.
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