Scientific Computing Associates Announces The Linda Club-- A New Partnership Initiative for Beowulf Resellers

Linda, a proven industry standard for parallel programming and well known for reliability and efficiency, will now be available to end users at no additional charge when bundled with a Beowulf Cluster purchase from an authorized Linda Club reseller. By exploiting Linda’s exceptional flexibility and ease of use, end users will dramatically reduce the time it takes to make productive use of Beowulf clusters. This makes a Linda Club bundle the low-cost solution for any user wishing to develop a Beowulf Cluster.

The Linda Club offers advantages extending beyond the initial Beowulf Cluster purchase. SCIENTIFIC will commission Beowulf resellers to handle future end-user purchases of Linda upgrades or other SCIENTIFIC products, creating a one-stop point of purchase.

Linda, introduced in the mid-1980s, was the first commercial product to implement virtual shared memory (VSM) for supercomputers and large workstation clusters. Linda is content-addressable, not address-based, making it much easier to build applications and fully utilize hardware capacity. Cost-effectiveness, speed and ease of use all are advantages of using Linda in Linux-based systems.

Linda technology is embedded in versions of Gaussian 98?, the computational chemistry program based on the methodology for which John Pople won the 1998 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Other uses by such companies as Lehman Brothers and Amerada Hess have proven the power of Linda’s parallel processing capabilities.

A recent article, “Linux Gushes Savings for Oil Giant” (Computerworld, May 3, 1999) describes an application developed by Amerada Hess using Linda for Red Hat Linux that makes it possible for geologists to render detailed 3-D seismic images of sub-sea formations. The application was moved from an IBM SP2 to a 32-node Linux cluster, a move that saves Hess nearly $2M, according to Vic Forsyth, Amerada Hess’s Houston- based manager of geophysical systems. “Without Linda, a rewrite would have been required that would have delayed implementation by months,” said Forsyth.

About Scientific Computing Associates
Founded in 1980, SCIENTIFIC has pioneered the commercial use of parallel and distributed computing. Linda® software is a set of powerful extensions to C, C++, Fortran and Java that enables rapid development and deployment of parallel applications. Linda® is a coordination language which supplies the "glue" needed to cement many independent processes together into a single parallel program. Linda® provides a Virtual Shared Memory (VSM) that is logically shared by all the processes in a parallel program. Linda® is easy to use, even for users who are new to parallel computing. Proven applications include financial and risk analysis, computational chemistry and biotechnology, seismic analysis, electronic design (EDA), and computational fluid dynamics.

For more information about Linda® and SCIENTIFIC’s other powerful software products and services, contact SCIENTIFIC at 203/777-7442, visit the company’s web page at www.LindaSpaces.com, or email software@LindaSpaces.com.

Press Contacts:

Scientific Computing Associates, Inc.
Marilyn Riordan
203-777-7442
riordan@LindaSpaces.com