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ORION ANNOUNCES PARTNERSHIP FOR gridMathematica

Orion Multisystems Inc announced agreements with Wolfram Research Inc and The BioTeam to implement leading productivity software in Orion's new high performance Cluster Workstations for technical computing.

Wolfram Research pioneered the modern concept of technical computing when it launched Mathematica 15 years ago. Millions of users on every continent currently use Mathematica technology. The company's gridMathematica combines the power of the world's leading technical computing environment with modern computing clusters and Grids to solve the most demanding problems in mathematics, science, engineering and finance.

Orion's Cluster Workstations are the highest performance general-purpose computing platform that can be plugged into a standard wall outlet and used in an office or laboratory environment. Designed for the individual user, Orion Cluster Workstations provide supercomputer performance for engineering, scientific, financial and creative professionals who need to solve computationally complex problems.

"An important need exists in research and industry for very high performance computers for individual users, because currently available systems are either ad hoc collections of commodity PCs or data center-sized shared resources with expensive power and cooling costs, and systems software that lacks functionality and maturity," said Horst Simon, director of the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The NERSC Center is the principal high performance computing resource for research funded by the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science, serving more than 2,500 scientists nationwide.

With gridMathematica installed, the Orion Cluster Workstation provides a quick way to set up and run large calculations by offering a high-level programming language, a vast collection of fast and reliable mathematical algorithms, and easy-to-use parallel programming constructs on the most cost effective cluster architecture on the market. Orion Cluster Workstations take all of the extra costs out of cluster computing -- no redundant cabling, cabinets, power supplies or installation services are required. With a single on/off switch, high performance Orion systems boot in less than 90 seconds, and have the ease-of-use benefits of personal computers.

"Together, Wolfram Research and Orion Multisystems provide everything you need to get started with technical and scientific supercomputing," said Peter Overmann, director of software technology at Wolfram Research. "The same parallel computations that you develop with gridMathematica will run without modification on a budget Orion Cluster Workstation or on a top 500 supercomputer."

Orion Cluster Workstations offer the first truly consistent platform upon which third party partners can build a reliable support strategy that takes advantage of the value of Linux clusters. Orion, together with The BioTeam, a highly respected Bio-IT consulting firm, is delivering a turnkey bioinformatics solution.

The Orion Cluster Workstation for Bioinformatics is a 12-node desktop cluster pre-installed by Orion with the award winning iNquiry software, a suite of more than 200 applications for life science researchers. Customers need only unpack the Orion Cluster Workstation, plug it into a standard outlet, boot the system in less than 90 seconds, and search gene databases on a personal Linux cluster within five minutes -- an unprecedented capability.

"Taking advantage of the price, performance and capability of Linux clusters on a mass deployed Orion workstation platform is an exceptional solution for scientists who require the flexibility of the Linux community, the computing capability of clusters and the affordability of commodity-based solutions," said Stan Gloss, managing director of The BioTeam.

"These partnerships with Wolfram Research and The BioTeam demonstrate our commitment to provide the highest productivity solutions for Orion's technical computing customers," said Colin Hunter, president and CEO of Orion Multisystems. "Uniting the leading cluster software solutions with Orion's innovative platform will deliver high performance computing to the desktops of scientists, engineers and financial professionals with computationally demanding applications."

Orion's DS-96 deskside Cluster Workstation has 96 nodes with 300 gigaflops (Gflops) peak performance (150 Gflops sustained), up to 192GB of memory and up to 9.6TB of storage. It consumes less than 1500 watts and fits unobtrusively under a desk. Orion's DT-12 desktop Cluster Workstation has 12 nodes with 36 Gflops peak performance (18 Gflops sustained), up to 24GB of DDR SDRAM memory and up to 1TB of internal disk storage. (1) The DT-12 consumes less than 220 watts and is scalable to 48 nodes by stacking up to four systems.