National Supercomputing Center Brings Advanced Resources to Darkstrand Network to Solve Real World Corporate ProblemsToday, Darkstrand announced a collaborative alliance with the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, a leader in deploying robust high-performance computing (HPC) resources and developing new computing and software technologies. This joint effort will enable major corporations working with NCSA to shorten the path from discovery to product development through advanced  connectivity on the Darkstrand Network and the HPC power and expertise of  NCSA. A third of FORTUNE 50 companies, including  Boeing, Caterpillar, Dell, John Deere, IBM, Microsoft, Proctor & Gamble, Rolls-Royce and State Farm, have partnered with  NCSA’s Private Sector Program (PSP) to leverage NCSA’s infrastructure, technologies and expertise. Through NCSA’s PSP and the Darkstrand Network, companies can optimize their combined innovation resources to solve real world problems.

“NCSA aligns with industry leaders to tackle the HPC and IT challenges that impede fast product development. For more than two decades, NCSA has worked with global corporations to solve intractable problems in HPC, data management and analysis, visualization, cybersecurity and advanced IT.  We believe that forward-thinking companies can benefit from our partnership with Darkstrand to lead the coming innovation revolution,” said Merle Giles, director of the NCSA Private Sector Program.

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. Blue Waters will provide the national research community with unprecedented power and performance capability for breakthroughs in nearly all fields of science:  the behavior of complex biological systems, hurricanes and tornadoes; an understanding of how the cosmos evolved after the Big Bang; the design of new materials at the atomic level; and simulation of complex engineered systems for power distribution, airplanes and automobiles.  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 across diverse sciences:  chemistry, computational biology, computational structural mechanics, computational fluid dynamics, and mathematics. NCSA and the PSP also provide user support and consulting services to integrate facilities and resources into one, integrated solution set for corporate users. 

U.S. corporations connecting to Darkstrand will now gain access to NCSA’s vast research and technological capabilities along with those of other Darkstrand Network partners, including: Calit2 at the University of California, San Diego; the New Mexico Computing Applications Center; the Ohio Supercomputer Center;  the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center;  and the Electronic Visualization Laboratory at the University of Illinois, Chicago.