Microsoft's Vince Mendillo introduced 13 Microsoft partners, present at the Exhibition, all of them with unique solutions based on the company's technologies. The speed-up for advanced simulation is provided by the Visual Studio solution which delivers a mixed development environment of GPU and CPU. There are also several financial services solutions available.

Intel's Hengeveld had high hopes on the Knights Ferry processor series which are shipping now. He also talked about the Cluster checker capability and invited the audience to a Westmere demo.

The Supermicro representatives were highly enthusiastic about their Twin Blade, consisting of 2 nodes that function as two independent servers offering double density without doubling the cost. The 2UTwin2 solution has four nodes and looks like a blade. There are more hard drives in the front. Super Storage Bridge Bay (SBB) technology delivers higher speed interconnects.

HP' Ed Turkel introduced the company's so-called converged architecture which means that an all-in integrated solution is being proposed for computing, storage, and the like. The blade has been launched three years ago. HP also presented an 8-node cluster in one single box for deskside usage. There was also a server for large cluster computing - the X9000 series - and a storage solution for mixed data files. HP also presents Lustre and Cloud solutions and a container solution. More information about the container is available at http://www.hp.com/go/pod

The Tera-100 supercomputer launch in collaboration with CAE was announced at the Bull booth. The new supercomputer is provided with Intel processors and with the new 4300 servers. These may be extended to 8, 12 or 16 blades.

Mellanox is providing the only interconnect on the TOP500 that is growing, the booth representatives stated. The GPUDirect is developed with NVidia for a faster communication.