Following its OEM agreement with TMS, NextIO extended the reach of its advanced I/O technology to another world-famous hardware manufacturer, IBM. Set to provide IBM iDataPlex customers with reconfigurable and on-demand GPU computing capabilities, this collaboration, announced at the Supercomputing 2009 show in Portland, Oregon, is aimed at the development of new IBM integrated clusters featuring NextIO technology, the company says.  

"Today's announcement helps validate NextIO's leadership in I/O virtualization and will help drive rapid adoption of NextIO-based solutions in the HPC market," K.C. Murphy, founder and CEO, NextIO, said. "NextIO looks forward to continuing our work with IBM in rolling out a joint solution in 2010."  

The goal will be to allow IBM's iDataPlex to access up to eight double-wide or 16 single-wide GPUs in a single appliance, making it possible for users to control the amount of allocated graphics resources according to application demand. This will be possible thanks to NextIO's virtualization technology, which provides a scalable and energy-efficient platform that is compatible with a variety of GPUs. This means that it will easily combine with IBM's resources, allowing the two enterprises to create modular "hot plug" sleds, which will support GPUs and upgrades without causing system downtimes. Each iDataPlex rack will support ten GPU appliances, for as much as 160 GPUs capable of over 80TFlops of computations per rack.

"IBM is committed to offering iDataPlex customers the best HPC solution for investment protection at the lowest total cost of ownership," Alex Yost, vice president, IBM Systems & Technology Group, added. "Customers in HPC now have the performance, density and power savings of iDataPlex available for applications that require GPU computing."

Through this pact, IBM will have the means to include more features into its already-existing platforms. In return, NextIO's technology will reach the many consumers interested in IBM products. These scalable, custom integrated cluster solutions are set to become available in 2010.