ARMONK, NY -- Nov 6, 2003 -- IBM today announced that Mississippi State University (MSU) has installed one of the world's largest diskless InfiniBand® supercomputers.(1) The new clustered system from IBM uses InfiniBand technology to speed communications between 192 servers, increasing communications of the system by up to 10 times over traditional methods, based on gigabit ethernet and is expected to make the MSU supercomputer the 30th most powerful computer in the world.(2)

The new supercomputer, dubbed "Maverick," will be used by the University's Engineering Research Center, which is an institute for computational science and engineering that helps businesses and researchers tackle tough computational questions.

"IBM worked closely with MSU to develop a powerful, state of the art clustering solution that would meet their needs," said Dave Turek, vice president of Deep Computing, IBM. "The reliability and ease of management of the IBM cluster solution combined with the throughput capability of InfiniBand yielded a significant increase in performance for the MSU cluster."

Research conducted at the Engineering Research Center benefits the government, businesses and consumers. Among the projects that will take advantage of the new computing power are automotive research projects to computationally test the "crash-worthiness" of new automobiles to make cars safer and reduce the time required to complete a test, potentially saving companies tens of thousands of dollars. Research projects also exist that computationally simulate the aerodynamics of automobiles, aircraft, and ships in order to increase performance and to make them more fuel efficient. The Engineering Research Center is also doing research to help understand and predict the formation of ice on aircraft wings in the hopes of making air travel safer.

"The vast amount of computation involved in our studies required a new type of technology that would allow us to maximize our computing resources," said Roger Smith, Senior Systems Administrator, Mississippi State University, Engineering Research Center. "The combination of IBM eServer systems and new InfiniBand technology gave us a 400 percent increase in processing power over our current cluster."

The Engineering Research Center's cluster is comprised of 192 IBM eServer® xSeries™ 335 systems and connected by Voltaire's InfiniBand solution to deliver a peak performance of 2.3 TFlops.

About the Engineering Research Center at Mississippi State University
Founded in 1990 at Mississippi State University by the National Science Foundation as the NSF Engineering Research Center for Computational Field Simulation, the Engineering Research Center is an institute for the advancement of computational science and engineering through research, education and collaboration with industry and government. Its mission is to serve MSU, the state and the nation through excellence in computational science and engineering, and to enable the complementary missions of each of its five associated member centers by providing the appropriate environment, infrastructure and support. For more information on the Engineering Research Center, visit http://www.erc.msstate.edu.

About IBM
IBM is the world's largest information technology company, with 80 years of leadership in helping businesses innovate. Drawing on resources from across IBM and key Business Partners, IBM offers a wide range of services, solutions and technologies that enable customers, large and small, to take full advantage of the new era of e-business. For more information about IBM, visit www.ibm.com.

The IBM eServer brand consists of the established IBM e-business logo with the following descriptive term "server" following it. The following are either trademarks or registered trademarks of International Business Machines Corporation in the United States or other countries or both: IBM, the IBM e-business logo and BladeCenter. All other company, product or service names may be trademarks or registered trademarks of others. Statements concerning IBM's future development plans and schedules are made for planning purposes only, and are subject to change or withdrawal without notice.

(1) Claim based on comparison to all publicly announced InfiniBand clusters.

(2) Ranking based on June 2003 Top 500 List of Supercomputers.