Researchers in all fields share a nearly identical need: to produce as much data, in as short an amount of time, with as little money as is possible. As traditional 'supercomputers' remain highly specialized and relatively expensive, desktop computers in a clustered environment have proven to be a cost-effective means of addressing the demands of increasingly complex research programs. As the performance of desktop computers has recently increased dramatically, this has made possible more complex and more accurate computational models of the realworld being investigated.
High Performance Computing (HPC) is a means of bringing the power of supercomputers to the price, availability, and flexibility of desktop systems. HPC has grown from the super-computers of the '70s and '80s to the COTS (commodity, off-the-shelf) clusters (Beowulf) of the '90s into modern day hybrids, such as the IBM JS21s which provide supercomputer performance at desktop prices.
Terra Soft stands behind the PowerPC architecture as a relatively new, emerging HPC technology which lends itself to higher density, higher performance, lower power consumption, and cost-effective clusters.
