Tycrid will be participating at the SC09 conference in Portland, Oregon, demonstrating its
workstation and server solutions from booth number 255, and company co-founder and Chairman,
Tim Davies, will deliver a special presentation discussing Tycrid’s custom HPC solutions and the
Prometheus Alliance during the SC09 Exhibitor Forum on Wednesday, November 18, 2009, at 4:30PM
in room number E147-148 at the Oregon Convention Center.

Tycrid Platform Technologies designs custom GPU-based HPC platforms and shared resource
solutions for the life sciences and pharmaceutical industries. For more information on Tycrid
Platform Technologies, please go to http://www.tycrid.com. More information on the Prometheus
Alliance can be found at www.PrometheusAlliance.org.

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Supercomputing is the engine that drives our science, commerce, and communication. Giant search engines trawl the net with billions of queries, molecules are modeled and modified in massive simulations, and deep under Wall Street hulking processors trade massive blocks of money at the speed of light. But the era of the giant, room-spanning supercomputers may soon have some serious competition in the form of a small Calgary-based startup bringing supercomputing to the masses.

Calgary is known throughout Canada as the center of the country’s oil and gas industry, a booming city buoyed by the bubble-swelled profits of 20th century fossil fuel excess. It’s a prosperous if not especially cosmopolitan urban hub on the Canadian prairies. But tucked away in an unassuming office in the suburbs of this middling city, Tycrid Platform Technologies has been quietly putting together desktop systems boasting terahertz level horsepower under the hood since it was founded in 2008.

Miniaturization and Moore’s law have shrunk the components, but supercomputers still share one trait with their ancient, less powerful brethren; the ability to take up an entire room. The world’s fastest and most complex thinking machines may crunch stupendous amounts of data but they also take up a lot of space and require a surfeit of energy.

“Desktop supercomputing really changes the way people can work. In science, it allows those companies that need access to High Performance Computing (HPC) resources to have HPC performance affordably. What this does is let the researcher become more creative in the development of new science. Algorithms that used to be considered a ‘holy grail’ for HPC, can be attainable at the desktop level,” Tycrid president Chris Heier said.

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Tycrid will demonstrate its workstation solutions from booth number 255, and company co-founder and Chairman, Tim Davies, will deliver a special presentation during the SC09 Exhibitor Forum on Wednesday, November 18, 2009, titled, “An Open Platform: GPU Software Test Platform” discussing a proposed research test bed with a 100 teraflop GPU cluster.

In addition to the highly respected technical conference and thrust areas focusing on 3D Internet and Sustainability, SC09 will also have a spotlight on Bio-Computing. For more information on SC09’s Bio-Computing thrust, go to http://sc09.supercomputing.org/files/NR_SC09_Bio_Computing_092309.pdf.

Tycrid Platform Technologies designs scalable GPU-based HPC platforms and shared resource solutions for the life sciences and pharmaceutical industries. The company manufactures the Titan and Slipstream GPU-based HPC platforms. Tycrid will participate in the 22nd annual SC conference, SC09, in Portland, OR, Nov. 14-20, 2009. For more information on Tycrid Platform Technologies, please go to http://www.tycrid.com.

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“Tycrid is an evolving company with vision, passion and the determination to enable a more powerful ecosystem in support of scientific discovery,” said Chris Heier, President of Tycrid Platform Technologies. “I am thrilled to have Mike Bernhardt, a 20-year HPC industry veteran who shares our passion, join our executive leadership team at this important time in our company’s growth. There is no argument that scientific research can be accelerated dramatically with more collaboration and a stronger commitment to heterogeneous, simplistic systems. Mike will play a critical role in establishing Tycrid’s position as a leader in delivering shared HPC resource solutions for the life sciences and pharmaceutical industries.”

Bernhardt first became involved in the HPC community with Multiflow Computer in 1987. Subsequently, he was a Marketing Director with Intel’s Supercomputer Systems Division in the early 90s. He later founded the widely recognized strategic marketing, communications and public relations agency, The Bernhardt Agency, working with numerous HPC ecosystem companies and semiconductor manufacturers for more than 13 years. He has served in an advisory capacity to more than a dozen major trade shows and conferences, has been responsible for more than two dozen major technology product announcements, has deep experience in electronic publishing, and is a widely recognized public speaking and media coach.

Bernhardt will assume all marketing and communications responsibility for Tycrid effective immediately.

“I’ve seen many interesting technology companies over my 20 years in the HPC community, but I’ve seen few companies with Tycrid’s pragmatic vision and a deep belief in the importance of building infrastructure, and enabling an ecosystem to advance widespread participation in scientific research,” said Bernhardt. “Tycrid’s vision is to create seamless computing environments based on GPU-based dense computing systems tailored for those markets with the greatest potential return for society. Tycrid offers tremendous potential in life sciences and pharmaceuticals, and for the HPC industry overall.”

Tycrid Platform Technologies designs scalable GPU-based HPC platforms and shared resource solutions for the life sciences and pharmaceutical industries. The company manufactures the Titan and Slipstream GPU-based HPC platforms. Tycrid will participate in the 22nd annual SC conference, SC09, in Portland, OR, Nov. 14-20, 2009. For more information on Tycrid Platform Technologies, please go to http://www.tycrid.com.

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“The Tycrid Slipstream system is a perfect implementation of what we refer to as the personal supercomputer, cluster level computing capabilities at a price point that makes it accessible to every scientist and engineer,” said Andrew Walsh, general manager of personal supercomputing at NVIDIA.

The Tesla processor that is used in Slipstream utilizes CUDA™, a parallel computing architecture that provides direct access to the GPU for general purpose computing. There are over 25,000 application developers worldwide using CUDA, and over 100,000,000 CUDA-enabled processors shipped.

“Slipstream is a 4 GPU system with 16GB of memory, and a thundering 4 teraflops of compute power. With tens of thousands of CUDA coders out there, we see a need for speed at the desk side of the professional.” said Tim Davies, chairman of Tycrid. “With the era of the such events as the $1000 genome in sight, we feel that the time is right to focus all our efforts on the stand alone supercomputer. NVIDIA has supported this activity from the time we made our first contact and continues to provide top level support directly to us.”

Professionals such as those in seismic, molecular dynamics and financial modeling, tend to use cluster computing to solve their computationally intensive problems. Working on the cluster will generally require wait times to utilize, and require a large amount of capital to maintain. With the Slipstream personal supercomputer, cluster level computational horsepower is now available at the desk side at any time, for less than a fraction of the cost.

More information on Tycrid’s supercomputing platforms can be found at www.tycrid.com and for additional information on CUDA architecture, visit www.nvidia.com/cuda.

About Tycrid Platform Technologies Inc.
Tycrid Platform Technologies Inc. is dedicated to providing powerful and innovative computing solutions. Our experience is in designing high performance computing platforms that support both unparalleled performance capacity, and full integration of day-to-day applications. Our focus is on a synergistic computing model that allows for multiple processing technologies to be integrated into a seamless environment. For more information, visit www.tycrid.com.

VMD is a real-world test that Tycrid utilized, due to it’s support for NVIDIA’s CUDA toolkit, and ability to efficiently scale to multiple GPUs in a single system. The direct Coulomb summation algorithm implemented in VMD is fully GPU optimized with almost linear scaling across multiple GPUs.

“In tests we published in a recent research paper, a single Tesla card outruns a single Intel QX6700 CPU core by a factor of 44,” said John Stone, lead developer of VMD. “The 6 GPU run achieves 228 billion atom evaluations per second, a single QX6700 CPU core can only achieve 0.9 billion. This results in a 253x speedup versus a single CPU core, a very large performance gain even relative to 8 or 16 CPU cores.”

“These results, pushing upwards around 1.7 TFLOPS, are very encouraging for multi GPU processing in general,” said Chris Heier, President of Tycrid Platform Technologies Inc. “This has shown excellent opportunity for massively dense GPU computing platforms. Researchers in molecular dynamics can essentially have the power of a decent sized computing cluster under their desk with Titan.”

Titan brings world leading performance capabilities with a standard 6 Tesla C870 configuration. Professionals utilizing VMD for their research can expect to see results in a fraction of the time they are used to, without the hassle of having to work on computing clusters. For users demanding high performance, and enhanced OpenGL visuals, Titan supports the use of a Quadro FX 5600 GPU.

About Tycrid Platform Technologies Inc.
Tycrid Platform Technologies Inc. is dedicated to providing powerful and innovative computing solutions. Our experience is in designing high performance computing platforms that support both unparalleled performance capacity, and full integration of day-to-day applications. Our focus is on a synergistic computing model that allows for multiple processing technologies to be integrated into a seamless environment. For more information, visit www.tycrid.com.

About VMD (Visual Molecular Dynamics)
VMD is designed for the visualization and analysis of biological systems such as proteins, nucleic acids, lipid bilayer assemblies, etc. For more information on VMD please visit http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/Research/vmd/.

1. CRIBI, University of Padova, Padova, Italy
2. Elaide, Srl, Padova, Italy

Abstract

Searching for similarities in protein and DNA databases has become a routine procedure in Molecular Biology. The Smith-Waterman algorithm has been available for more than 25 years. It is based on a dynamic programming approach that explores all the possible alignments between two sequences; as a result it returns the optimal local alignment. Unfortunately, the computational cost is very high, requiring a number of operations proportional to the product of the length of two sequences. Furthermore, the exponential growth of protein and DNA databases makes the Smith-Waterman algorithm unrealistic for searching similarities in large sets of sequences. For these reasons heuristic approaches such as those implemented in FASTA and BLAST tend to be preferred, allowing faster execution times at the cost of reduced sensitivity. The main motivation of our work is to exploit the huge computational power of commonly available graphic cards, to develop high performance solutions for sequence alignment.

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“It is certainly an exciting product,” reports Chris Heier, President of Tycrid Platform Technologies. “When designing our workstation, Titan, we chose to look at options that both achieve the best performance on the market today, but also make sure that it is ready for anybody to use with Windows or Linux. The system not only gives you world class performance for specialized applications, but also gives you the full support of using these operating systems with all of your applications.”

Titan has the capacity of expanding from its standard 4 GB of system memory, up to 32 GB, and utilizes the latest in Intel quad-core microprocessors. The core of Titans processing capabilities lies in the NVIDIA Tesla GPU’s, each capable of up to 518 gigaflops. The ability to utilize Tesla lies in the Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA) toolkit, developed by NVIDIA.

The workstation was designed from the ground up to be both a personal computer, capable of web, email and productivity applications, as well as a supercomputer, capable of doing compute intensive applications, like molecular modeling. The basic configuration of Titan is available for pre-order, starting at $24,995.

The Titan prototype can be seen at the Sands Expo Booth #73814, at CES in Las Vegas, January 7 – 10, 2008.

About Tycrid Platform Technologies Inc.
Tycrid Platform Technologies Inc. is dedicated to providing powerful and innovative computing solutions. Our experience is in designing high performance computing platforms that support both unparalleled performance capacity, and full integration of day-to-day applications. Our focus is on a synergistic computing model that allows for multiple processing technologies to be integrated into a seamless environment. For more information, visit www.tycrid.com.