“Performance Technologies, Inc. today announced it has provided
three of its Nebula 8000 Fault Tolerant Ethernet Switching Systems
to the Center for Computational Research at SUNY Buffalo. The PTI
equipment is designed to support continuous operation of the
University’s cluster of 64 Sun Microsystems, Inc. Ultra 5
workstations, thereby elevating this collection of workstations to
fault tolerant “supercomputer” status.”
“The supercomputing network at SUNY Buffalo is the end result of
a research collaboration launched in June 1999 between the
University and Sun Microsystems to develop a network of high
performance workstations that will deliver the power of a
supercomputer at a reduced cost. The system configuration
consists of 64 Sun Ultra 5 333MHz workstations running
Beowulf/Linux, a software operating system designed to meld
the workstations into a single resource. From a performance
standpoint, this type of integration approaches the acknowledged
power of today’s general-purpose supercomputers, but at a fraction
of the cost of the bigger machines.”