New Altix Systems Include Free Star-P

By DE Editors

SGI (Mountainview, CA) is offering an interactive desktop tool for solving large scientific and engineering problems to its Altix customers. The new SGI “Try Star-P for Free” promotion offers free one-year subscriptions of Interactive Supercomputing‘s (Waltham, MA) Star-P technical computing software with purchase of an Altix parallel server or SGI Altix XE cluster.

Star-P is an interactive parallel computing platform that enables scientists and engineers to build algorithms and models on their desktops using familiar mathematical software packages such as MathWorks’ MATLAB or Python, and run them instantly and interactively on Altix systems. It eliminates the need to re-program the applications in C, FORTRAN, or MPI to run on parallel systems.

Customers who purchase an Altix or Altix XE system can get up to an eight-socket subscription of Star-P to develop, test, and deploy their applications for one year. The offer applies to all of SGI Altix platforms, including Intel Itanium- and Xeon-based systems. Customers of larger Altix systems that wish to use their full parallel processing muscle can purchase a larger Star-P license and pay for only the amount in excess of eight sockets.

“The Try Star-P for Free promotion will show scientists, engineers, and analysts that they don’t have to give up their familiar desktop tools to solve larger and more complex problems,” said Bill Mannel, director of marketing, Server and Platform Group at SGI. “They can tap the power and scalability of SGI Altix servers without having to become parallel computing experts.”

For more information on this partnership, visit sgi.com or interactivecomputing.com.

Sources: Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company’s website.