New Version of Star-P

Star-P developed by Interactive Supercomputing is an excellent interactive parallel computing platform . It allows scientists, engineers and other researchers to code algorithms and models on their desktops using familiar mathematical software packages such as The MathWorks’ Matlab, and run them instantly and interactively on parallel servers. This eliminates the need to re-program the applications in C, Fortran or MPI languages to run on parallel computers. Such process of re-programing may sometimes take months depending on complexity of the algorithm and how computationally intensive those problems are.

The new version of Star-P 2.3 (announced on June 20) is designed to make high performance computing more economical and accessible for a wider range of technical computing users. It runs on lower-cost AMD Opteron-based systems. Users who previously didn’t have the resources to tap the power of parallel computing clusters can now tackle much larger problems on their desktops, while arriving at a solution in a fraction of the time.

The new 2.3 version will be available from SGI’s Professional Services team and distribution partners. For high-end parallel processing needs, Star-P also runs on Itanium-based SGI Altix servers supporting from one to 512 processors, 24 terabytes of memory, and running 64-bit Linux. Star-P automatically connects desktop applications to Opteron-based servers and parallelises the application code on the fly, enabling users to scale their applications across any multi-processor system or parallel cluster in real time.

Star-P is a great tool that computationally-intensive industry applications may utilize to improve their overall efficiency, even without having resources for parallel programming.