Microway’s BioStack-LS™ Named 2011 Best of Show at Bio-IT World for Hardware and Infrastructure

April 15, 2011 - PRLog -- Microway’s BioStack-LS cluster was awarded the prestigious Best of Show award in the IT Hardware & Infrastructure Category at the Bio-IT World Conference in Boston.  
The Microway BioStack-LS™ is a modular, extensible cluster for life science researchers.  It provides dense compute power that's easy to use. With over 15 TFLOPS of InfiniBand-connected computing power spread over 6272 Nvidia Tesla GPU cores and 84 Intel Xeon CPU cores, the BioStack-LS provides performance vastly superior to traditional compute clusters.  To suit life science customer needs, all Microway GPU-based clusters are delivered fully tested, integrated, and ready to run NVIDIA’s Bio WorkBench applications with the latest CUDA environment.

BioStack-LS includes best-in-class Bright Cluster Manager® to simplify administration.  Bright’s easy to use, professional management solution enables GPU monitoring, continual health checks, automatic sidelining of troubled nodes, and graphical displays of cluster utilization and open resources.
BioStack-LS incorporates 7 1U GPU Nodes, each with 12 Intel Xeon x86 CPU cores. Nodes include 2 NVIDIA Tesla C2070 GPUs, each with 6GB GDDR5 memory, 448 CUDA cores, and over 1 TFLOP performance. Nodes are connected with Microway’s FasTree™ InfiniBand fabric and employ  Microway’s InfiniScope for debugging and testing network integrity and application performance.
At the conference Microway also displayed a 3D demo of NAMD software running on a WhisperStation- Tesla PSC (personal supercomputer) with NVIDIA Tesla C2070 GPUs and Quadro 6000 graphics using NVIDIA’s 3D Vision Pro technology.  Attendees saw a stunning 3D display of DNA pulled through a synthetic nanopore.

"Computational biochemistry enables researchers to quickly sort through large databases of biomolecules and drug candidates," said Sumit Gupta, Tesla product line manager at NVIDIA. "Microway's award-winning BioStack-LS cluster uses the performance of NVIDIA Tesla GPUs to accelerate these bioscience applications to rapidly advance scientific research."

"Partnering with Microway is truly a winning proposition for us," said Dr. Matthijs van Leeuwen, founder of Bright Computing. “The Microway team combines their deep technical knowledge with a keen understanding of how to meet the specific needs of their customers. The Microway BioStack-LS is a good example -- a platform optimized for the unique demands of life sciences."

“Molecular dynamics, quantum chemistry, and bioinformatics applications are particularly well suited for massive parallelism. NVIDIA’s Bio WorkBench ensures these applications are designed to run efficiently on the 448-core Tesla. With speedups exceeding 10x on many applications, scientists can leverage Tesla GPUs to achieve smaller footprints with increased computational power. Microway’s Tesla-based clusters are the ideal foundation for this accelerated research," commented Stephen Fried, Microway's President and CTO.

Microway's Tesla solutions for life sciences are delivered fully integrated with CUDA SDK and Linux or Windows. Clusters offer advanced manageability features that have been refined over years of development and thousands of real-world cluster deployments.  A complete product description can be found at: http://www.microway.com/biostack

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Incorporated in 1982, Microway is a major vendor in the High Performance Computing market, designing state-of-the-art, high-end Linux clusters, WhisperStations, servers, and data storage solutions. Users worldwide pushing the limits of technology choose us for solutions. These include universities, life sciences, financial, military, Fortune 500s, and research agencies. Microway is an Intel Channel Premier provider and Nvidia Tesla Preferred Partner. Classified as a small business, woman owned and operated, Microway's GSA Contract Number is GS-35F-0431N.