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Cyclone cloud computing service introduced by SGI(Telecomworldwire Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) HPC and data centre solutions provider SGI (Nasdaq:SGI) announced on Thursday the availability of Cyclone, a large-scale, on-demand cloud computing service dedicated to technical applications. According to the company, Cyclone addresses the science and engineering technical markets that rely on high-end computational hardware, software and networking equipment to achieve rapid results. Initially, the service supports a range of applications partners and five technical domains, including computational fluid dynamics, finite element analysis, computational chemistry and materials, computational biology and ontologies. The service is available in two service models: Software as a Service (SaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). With the SaaS model, customers can reduce time to results by accessing and using Cyclone's pre-defined, pre-certified technical applications. The IaaS model allows customers to install and run their own applications. The technology at Cyclone's core comprises SGI Altix scale-up, Altix ICE scale-out and Altix XE hybrid clusters, based on Intel Xeon or Itanium processors. The hybrid architecture offers either NVIDIA Tesla GPUs or AMD FireStream GPU compute accelerators for floating point double precision workloads, or Tilera accelerators for integer workloads. In addition, SGI InfiniteStorage systems are available for scratch space and long-term archival of customer data. At the system software level, the service offers the choice of Novell SUSE or Red Hat Linux operating systems, performance-optimised through the addition of SGI ProPack. Altair PBS Professional and SGI ISLE Cluster Manager provide system scheduling and management. Supported applications include: OpenFOAM, NUMECA, Acusolve, LS-Dyna, Gaussian, Gamess, NAMD, Gromacs, LAMMPS, BLAST, FASTA, HMMER, ClustalW and OntoStudio. SGI also said it expects to add additional domains and applications partners over time. Cyclone is immediately available at a list billing price of USD0.95 per HPC core hour. Third party ISV application licensing fees, support and use restrictions may apply. ((Comments on this story may be sent to [email protected])) (c) 2010 M2 COMMUNICATIONS |