Canton, MI, Dec 2, 2009 - Scalable Informatics Inc., a provider of innovative high performance storage and computing solutions, today announced the first customer installation of the siCluster™ storage cluster product (http://scalableinformatics.com/sicluster).

Scalable Informatics siCluster performance storage clusters provide reliable storage capacities and performance that scale rapidly and cost effectively. These capabilities enabled Scalable Informatics to meet the high performance storage requirements for Minnesota Supercomputing Institutes' new Itasca high performance computing cluster, built by Hewlett Packard.

"Scalable Informatics is excited to have delivered the first siCluster to MSI, to provide high performance storage for the Itasca cluster system," said Dr. Joseph Landman, CEO of Scalable Informatics.

Unfortunately, for many users of HPC systems and storage, a bandwidth wall separates them from their data; by using low performance or non-scalable NAS or SAN systems, users are effectively precluded from accessing data in a reasonable period of time. Scalable Informatics' design breaks that wall, enabling the computational cluster to access data at speeds that meet its potential.

"MSI's Itasca HPC cluster will provide leading edge computational performance to researchers at the University of Minnesota, and we are pleased to complement this system by providing the high performance storage component." Dr. Landman noted.

As implemented at MSI using the GlusterFS™ file system from Gluster Inc.™, Scalable Informatics siCluster was designed to provide a minimum of 8GB/s sustained write performance, and achieved that with little effort.

"The Scalable Informatics storage solution provides MSI with a high-performing, scalable storage system for our newest supercomputer," said Brian D. Ropers-Huilman, Director of Systems Administration and Technical Operations at MSI. "Scalable's design and choice of the Gluster file system will give MSI the bandwidth to allow our researchers to utilize Itasca with 8,664 cores at full scale. Scalable's system offered the best price to performance to capacity ratio to MSI."

About Scalable Informatics

Scalable Informatics is a privately-owned, high performance computing and storage solutions company focusing on delivering pragmatic solutions to computational problems. They design, build, and support high performance clusters, storage and workstation hardware, scalable and accelerated software, and offer support, consulting and development services. Scalable Informatics is a proud member of Automation Alley. The company's website is www.scalableinformatics.com.

About Minnesota Supercomputing Institute

The University of Minnesota Supercomputing Institute for Advanced Computational Research (MSI) is celebrating its 25th anniversary as an interdisciplinary research program spanning across all colleges of the University of Minnesota. MSI has established itself as a vital resource to the University of Minnesota by facilitating groundbreaking research, attracting top faculty and students, and enhancing researchers' competitive advantage in the search for external funding. The Institute provides supercomputing resources and user support to faculty and their research groups at the University of Minnesota and other post-secondary educational institutions in the State of Minnesota. For more information about MSI, visit www.msi.umn.edu.