CIARA Launches NEXXUS C Deskside Cluster Series

Montreal, Canada, November 14, 2011 — Ciara today announced the launch of the NEXXUS C Series, the company’s latest deskside cluster and personal supercomputer. This revolutionary product takes extreme-performance computing to a new level by combining the power and performance capabilities of a datacenter cluster with the ease and usability of a workstation. The NEXXUS C Series was designed from ground-up for office environments without the constraints of power or cooling required in a datacenter and supports a wide range of technical computing applications.

The NEXXUS C is an office-friendly system in a pedestal form factor that will easily fit under or beside a desk. Its industrial-grade liquid cooling system permits low noise operation while its smart design enables the support of standard office power outlets. While a typical workstation has only eight or 12 cores and limited memory capacity, the ground-breaking design of the NEXXUS C Series allows up to 20 processors, 120 cores, 16 GP-GPU’s and almost 2TB of memory for unmatched performance in a deskside form factor.

“Purpose-built for engineering offices, laboratories, or university departments, the NEXXUS C Series makes supercomputing personal again.” said Patrick Scateni, vice-president Sales and Marketing of Ciara. “We have been building Personal Supercomputers and Deskside Clusters since 2004 with our NEXXUS4000® Personal Cluster and FUSION1200® SMP Server. Both were the ancestors of our new NEXXUS C system, the most powerful, most office friendly and affordable product to date. It is designed for maximum performance, functionality and power efficiency. The NEXXUS C Series will permit compute hungry customers to accelerate their results and be faster in their development timelines”

NEXXUS C is easily configurable with a wide selection of compute, storage, graphics or GP-GPU nodes and integrated Ethernet or InfiniBand networking options. NEXXUS C supports the Intel® Xeon® 5600 series processors and is ready for the upcoming Intel® Xeon® E5 series processors, to capitalize on greater levels of performance, flexibility and scalability.

NEXXUS C will ship as a factory-tested, application-optimized and pre-integrated software platform. It is designed to handle the most complex applications and problems in the world such as fluid dynamics, digital manufacturing mechanics, CAD/FEA, data analysis, rendering and seismic processing, among many other compute, memory or I/O intensive applications.

“The NEXXUS C Series offers a great solution for workstation users wanting to reach dramatically higher levels of performance and accelerate their time to completion or for large cluster users needing to be more autonomous without the dependency on sharing large IT infrastructure resources.” said Darcy Letemplier, vice-president of Engineering of Ciara. “With the ability to support Intel’s® latest and future Xeon processors, NVIDIA Tesla GPU or OCZ Technologies SATA or PCI/Express SSD, the NEXXUS C Series is geared to be the most powerful and efficient computer tool that money can buy.”
NEXXUS C Series is available in a variety of configurations:

NEXXUS C4 (4 trays, up to 8 nodes, 16 Intel® Xeon® processor 5600 Series) – Available Feb. 2012
NEXXUS C3 (3 trays, up to 6 nodes, 12 Intel® Xeon® processor 5600 or E5 Series) – Available Mar. 2012
NEXXUS C5 (5 trays, up to 10 nodes, 20 Intel® Xeon® processor 5600 or E5 Series) – Available Mar. 2012
NEXXUS C4G (4 trays, 4 nodes, 8 Intel® Xeon® processor E5 Series + 16 NVIDIA Tesla 20X0 GPU) – Available Q2 2012

NEXXUS C Series supports Red Hat® Enterprise Linux, CentOS and Microsoft® HPC Server 2008 operating systems. Linux configurations include Ciara Cluster Manager powered by Platform and Bright Cluster Manager.

All NEXXUS C Series system come with either a 1 or 3 year international warranty and will be available worldwide through Ciara or one of their authorized resellers.

The NEXXUS C will be on display at SC2011 at the Washington State Convention Center in Seattle on November 14-17, 2011, in Booth # 5310. For more information please visit http://www.Ciaratech.com.

About Ciara:

Ciara is a leading global provider of products, technologies, software, solutions and services to small and medium sized businesses (‘‘SMBs’’), large enterprises (Top 1000) and the public sectors including government, defense and educational entities. We serve customers located in more than 60 countries spread across 5 continents. Ciara designs, develops, markets, services and supports a variety of systems ranging from mobile devices to high-end supercomputers. These systems includes personal computers, mobile devices (Laptops and Tablets), industry standard servers (ATLAS rack-mount or tower servers, Telco/Carrier Grade servers and appliances, High Performance Computing systems such as the NEXXUS® Personal Cluster, the KRONOS and KRONOS S-Line workstations, and TITAN GPU servers. Founded in 1984, Ciara’s headquarters and primary manufacturing plant is located in Montreal, Canada and has offices across Canada and the US.