The Criterion HPS Phantom Addresses Enterprise Challenges Related to Power, Space and Cooling

Criterion HPS has announced the release of the Phantom, a computationally dense smart computing platform with a 64-bit, highly-parallel architecture that allows enterprises to overcome the power, space and cooling challenges. With the delivery of the Phantom, the company is responding to industry demands for a green technology that supports computationally intensive workloads without growing the data center footprint.

The Criterion HPS Phantom provides tremendous processing improvements and considerable acquisition and operational cost savings. Originally developed for a federal government agency, Criterion HPS has expanded the Phantom’s capabilities and partnered with leading software vendors to create appliance-based solutions to meet the computational needs of both public and private sector organizations.

“What started as a research project to address a specific customer challenge has evolved into one of the most powerful, green high performance solutions in the market,” said Michael Dillard, President and Chief Operation Officer, Criterion HPS. “Since the initial government implementation, the company has expanded operations based on research, testing, customer interaction and benchmark initiatives with a range of well-known software providers. Criterion HPS has fine-tuned the Phantom, built out the company’s infrastructure and established a U.S. manufacturing facility to ensure the pedigree of our product. Now we are ready to help address our customer’s most pressing challenges related to rapidly increasingly computational requirements for mission-critical workloads.”

The Criterion HPS Phantom delivers more than 1 TFLOP of processing power through 24 processing cores, up to 16 TB of internal storage and 192 GB of RAM in a 5.25”x17”x19” form factor that weighs roughly 50 pounds.  The Phantom requires a single 110V/20Amp circuit pulling less than 650 watts of power resulting in heat output of approximately 23oo BTUs – less than a standard hair dryer.

To maximize the potential of the Phantom, Criterion HPS collaborates with software partners to fine tune appliance solutions that leverage the platform’s multi-core architecture. To date, a number of recognized software manufacturers have benchmarked popular enterprise workloads on the Phantom. The collective benchmarks confirm that the Phantom delivers new levels of performance, green technology and economics:

Performance

–         Massive computing delivered in a small, light weight package

–         Unique single motherboard architecture

Green

–         Single 110v/20Amp power source

–         845 watts

–         ~2,300 BTUs

Economics:

–         Reduces initial capital acquisition costs by 40 to 80 percent

–         Reduces Operations and Maintenance (O&M) costs by 10 to 15 times when compared to standard datacenter hardware configurations

–         Reduces energy consumption by more than 80 percent

Built with state-of-the-art COTS components and the latest Intel CPU architecture, the Phantom’s scalability and modular design allows enterprises to easily and economically increase performance and capacity to address growing computing requirements.

The Phantom has been tested in a number of diverse use cases ranging from transforming data center applications and processing genome threads to speeding up password cracking and flying in reconnaissance vehicles to support fusion, analysis and processing of intelligence information.

“A new era of computing has emerged from the industry’s dual focus on reducing power consumption and sustaining Moore’s Law,” said Bob Carlson, Criterion HPS’ Chief, Solutions and Product Management. “At the center of this next generation of high performance computing systems, the Phantom has the potential to transform current data center operations and fundamentally reduce the cost of enterprise computing. Enterprises need a powerful, green technology alternative to their current environments. Criterion HPS is well positioned to fill this market void by delivering appliance-based high performance solutions to power  compute intensive software applications while greening the data center.”