IBM offers Microsoft high performance computing and visualisation test drives

It’s an extension of IBM Computing on Demand, offering manufacturers and others on-demand, pay-by-the-hour extra infrastructure to access serious additional computing power. “With the Computing on Demand facility, Microsoft and IBM are delivering supercomputing performance to companies that could previously not afford it, or never had access to it,” comments Vince Mendillo, director of HPC marketing at Microsoft. IBM says it will offer the Windows HPC Server 2008 test drive in units of 14 to 16 nodes on IBM BladeCenter or System xservers wth Intel Xeon multi-core processors. “IBM’s On Demand Centres are an effective way for new users to tap into the power of supercomputers,” says Steve Remondi, CEO of Exa in the US, which packages engineering software with the On Demand resource. “Many of our customers have never used supercomputers before, but they realise that high-performance computing offers a competitive edge.” IBM also says it will make its high-end 3D visualization engine, Deep Computing Visualisation (DCV) available to on-demand users – enabling ultra-detailed 3D modelling of data. And driving all that will be a new web portal interface to help on-demand users schedule computing resources. Facilities in New York and London already offer users a secure and scalable infrastructure, currently with more than 56 terabytes of storage and 13,000 processors, based on technologies from Intel and IBM.