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For Immediate Release:
San Jose, Ca. December 18, 2003:

On December 17th, iXsystems CTO Matt Olander and FreeBSD Project clustering expert Brooks Davis appeared on TechTV, a major technology network, for a segment entitled Building a Beowulf Cluster . The segment appeared on The Screen Savers show, which is one of TechTV's most popular programs. TechTV is currently available in nearly 40 million homes in the United States and distributes content to more than 70 countries.

"We get a lot of questions about how to build a cluster," comments Leo Laporte, the host of The Screen Savers . "We want to show our viewers how it's done." Due to its reliability and stability, FreeBSD makes an excellent operating system for building large parallel processing clusters. Using the ports collection, a massive third party assemblage of software included with FreeBSD, it's relatively simple to compile the software necessary for a cluster.

Using four custom 1U rackmount MicroServers provided by iXsystems, Matt Olander and Brooks Davis illustrated the power of combining multiple computers to create an inexpensive parallel processing cluster. The nodes are each powered by a single Pentium 4 processor running at 1.8GHz with 256MB of RAM. Running the linpack benchmark, the miniature cluster is capable of processing at the rate of 3GFlops, which is over 3 billion floating point operations per second. This is greater than the performance of a 64 bit Itanium CPU, which costs significantly more.

Brooks Davis, a FreeBSD clustering expert, says "Clusters are used for wide ranging applications including nuclear testing simulation, weather pattern prediction, and high end graphics rendering, just to name a few."

Here's a stream of the segment for Real Player 9. This is a brief description of the cluster , how it was built, and a look at the Ganglia cluster monitoring interface. TechTV wrote an article about the segment , including a Windows Media stream. For those of you with a bit of bandwidth, you may wish to download the clip .

"Building a FreeBSD cluster is a lot easier than people may think," states Matt Olander. "A cluster can be built to fit just about any budget." Discerning viewers noticed that Matt was wearing an extremely rare and highly sought-after long-sleeve version of the FreeBSD 10 Year Anniversary commemorative t-shirt.

About iXsystems, Inc.
iXsystems, a company nestled in the infamous Golden Triangle of Silicon Valley, provides FreeBSD-based Internet infrastructure grade rackmount servers, security appliances, and managed FreeBSD hosting to a global market. The iXsystems management team consists of former executives and employees from BSDi and iXsystems.

For more information:
Phone: (408)943-4100
Visit the website: www.iXsystems.com
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