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News Release from: Themis Computer | Subject: Slice platform
Edited by the Electronicstalk Editorial
Team on 13 April 2006
Architecture is new approach to
computing
A novel architecture aims to meet escalating demands for thermal and kinetic management, imposed by next generation high density/high performance mission-critical and high-performance computing.
Themis Computer announces its new slice switched computing initiative, designed to meet the escalating demands for thermal and kinetic management imposed by next-generation high-density/high-performance mission-critical and high-performance computing A processor-independent architecture, the Themis Slice platform allows users to mix, match and manage SPARC and x86 architectures, Solaris, Windows and Linux operating systems, in combination with third party network servers, storage and switches
This article was originally published on Electronicstalk on 13 Apr 2006 at 8.00am (UK)
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Designed for high density, high performance computing, the Themis Slice architecture is ideal for those who are looking for highly available, horizontally scalable processing power and lower life cycle cost of ownership.
Themis Slice is offered in air and liquid cooling variants that provide thermal headroom to accommodate aggressive scaling of commercial microprocessor core density, speed and power.
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"Themis Computer has achieved a breakthrough reduction in space, weight and power (SWAP), for mission-critical distributed computing systems", stated William E Kehret, President of Themis Computer.
"By functionally disaggregating commercial computing resources and housing them in a standardised footprint, purpose-built enclosure, the Themis Slice architecture enables high compute densities with superior thermal and kinetic management, without external shock and vibration isolation", Kehret added.
All Themis Slice elements are inherently rugged, have a uniform mechanical footprint and a standard rack height (1RU) and depth (22in).
Up to five slice elements, including a common power slice can be combined in a 5RU docking station, or subrack.
The subrack blind mates with connectors on the slice element, providing power distribution, cable management and dripless couplings for liquid cooling of the constituent slice subrack modules.
The subrack allows liquid and air cooled slices to be intermixed, within a single docking station, providing blind mated dripless couplers to cooling liquid manifolds in the docking station.
Subracks can be interconnected, using external switches, to configure highly scalable grid computing systems.
Within the subrack, slice elements plug into an InfiniBand high-speed, low latency serial switch fabric, so that clusters of up to five Slice elements can be interconnected, without external switches.
Processor slices interface with general purpose I/O (GPIO) slices over a PCI-Express high-speed serial fabric, also supported by the subrack.
Other cluster elements include storage slices and a four port Gig-E target channel adapter colocated in the power slice.
A single Slice processing element can be organised as two- to 16-way SMP nodes.
Up to four processor slices with up to 64 cores can be configured in a single 5U subrack.
The cluster fabric, Internal to the Subrack uses InfiniBand switches and links, for superior (low) memory-to-memory transfer latency and scalable bandwidth.
Subrack clusters can be configured using either Gig-E or InfiniBand.
Themis slice subracks can be combined with IBM or Sun Servers, in heterogeneous networks, using either networking technology.
At the subrack level, Themis Slice technology is a truly open architecture that offers superior SWAP and environmental resiliency.
Processor slices are priced from $10,500.
Processor slice configurations bundled with the subrack docking station and power supplies, are priced from $26,000, in OEM quantities.
Please contact factory for evaluation units or for volume order requirements.
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