Entropia Creates Largest Computing Resource Ever Available to Academic Scientists

Business Wire, Nov 9, 2000

Business Editors/Hi-Tech Writers

SAN DIEGO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov. 9, 2000

Supercomputing2000 Conference

Entropia to Donate Computing Power Comparable to 10X the

Aggregated Annual Capacity of the Leading Academic Supercomputing

Sites in the Nation

At the Supercomputing2000 conference this week in Dallas, Texas, Entropia CTO Dr. Andrew Chien announced this morning that his company has signed agreements with both the National Computational Science Alliance ("Alliance") and the National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (NPACI).

As part of the agreements, Entropia, an Internet and enterprise computing services company, will donate an unprecedented 200 million CPU hours to the PACI program, creating the largest computing platform ever offered to its national academic user community. The Alliance and NPACI are both part of the National Science Foundation's Partnerships for Advanced Computational Infrastructure Program.

This partnership will serve one of the largest communities of nationally distinguished computer and computational scientists and researchers. Entropia's donated resources are comparable to 10 years of output from the largest computational systems currently available to academia. These 200 million CPU hours will be utilized by projects jointly selected by both Entropia and the PACI Program. Current scientific research projects supported by the PACI program include bioinformatics, protein folding, telescience, multi-physics simulations and scalable visualization rendering.

Entropia produces Entropia 2000, software that snaps into any PC and connects it to a global Entropia computing grid of more than 100,000 PCs in more than 80 countries. The software allows researchers in business and academia to tackle complex computing tasks by taking advantage of idle PC resources across the world.

Through this new collaboration, Entropia will deploy its Node Server at the leading-edge sites of the Alliance, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) in Urbana-Champaign, Ill. and of the NPACI, the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) in San Diego, Calif. This deployment will also mean access to Entropia's global network of PCs.

"We will work with Entropia to develop projects that can utilize this important resource," said Dan Reed, director of the Alliance and NCSA. "We will also work with their team so that more groundbreaking scientific applications will run in the Entropia environment, a platform with clear and increasing importance for high performance computing."

"NPACI is pleased to partner with Entropia to provide the computational science community with access to this Internet computing capability, which will work extremely well for certain classes of problems," said Sid Karin, director of NPACI and SDSC. "In addition to tightly coupled systems, I expect distributed megacomputers to be part of our arsenal to support the spectrum of scientific disciplines."

Both NCSA and SDSC have been leaders in providing national access to innovative high performance computing architectures for 15 years. Entropia's donation extends this tradition to a planetary architecture.

"It's great to engage the scientists who are creating the new computational applications, the foundation of the future of computing," stated Andrew Chien CTO of Entropia. "Entropia recognizes the responsibility in building the world's largest computing resource and this donation demonstrates our commitment to supporting the advancement of science and knowledge to the benefit of society at large. We are proud to have been selected by these two leading institutions to assist them in their computational research."

About the National Computational Science Alliance

The National Computational Science Alliance is a partnership to prototype an advanced computational infrastructure for the 21st century and includes more than 50 academic, government and industry research partners from across the United States. The Alliance is one of two partnerships funded by the National Science Foundation's Partnerships for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (PACI) program, and receives cost-sharing at partner institutions. NSF also supports the National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (NPACI), led by the San Diego Supercomputer Center.

The National Center for Supercomputing Applications is the leading-edge site for the National Computational Science Alliance. NCSA is a leader in the development and deployment of cutting-edge high-performance computing, networking, and information technologies. The National Science Foundation, the state of Illinois, the University of Illinois, industrial partners, and other federal agencies fund NCSA.

About the National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (NPACI)

The National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (NPACI) unites more than 45 universities and research institutions to build the computational environment for tomorrow's scientific discovery. Led by UC San Diego and the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), NPACI is funded by the National Science Foundation's Partnerships for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (PACI) program and receives additional support from the State and University of California, other government agencies, and partner institutions. The NSF PACI program also supports the National Computational Science Alliance led by the University of Illinois. For additional information about NPACI, see http://www.npaci.edu/, or contact David Hart at SDSC, 858-534-8314, dhart@sdsc.edu.