Celebrating groundbreaking people and their work — from all areas of industry and research — developed using Intel® Itanium-based solutions.
Congratulations to COMPUTAEX of Spain, winner of the 2010 Itanium Innovation Award in the category of "Humanitarian Impact." La Fundacion Computacion y Tecnologias Avanzadas de Extremadura (COMPUTAEX) is a non-profit founded to support a wide variety of social, environmental and scientific improvement projects for the Extremadura region of southwestern Spain, relies on an Itanium-based supercomputer to efficiently handle hundreds of parallel processes and manage huge data sets for its many complex research projects. Read the announcement here.
Finalists have also been named in the categories of Computationally Intensive Applications, Data Center Modernization, and Mission-Critical Data (see detailed descriptions below). The winners of each category will be announced at the 2010 Itanium Innovation Awards Celebration on September 14th, 2010. This year's Awards Celebration will be held at The Westin St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco. Alexandra's room, on the 32nd floor, overlooks Union Square and offers incredible views of the city and bay. There will be a regular shuttle service from the Intel Developer Forum at the Moscone Center to the St. Francis from 5:00 - 6:00 pm. If you work in the high-end server space and would like to attend this year's award celebration, please contact us.
View photos from last year's Award Celebration.
FINALISTS – Computationally Intensive Applications:
COMPUTAEX, the Spanish nonprofit and Humanitarian Impact winner, submitted a distinct solution to tackle a massive electromagnetics computational problem for the automotive industry. They used two shared-memory, Itanium-based HP Integrity SuperDomes to solve the leading-edge problem with more than 620 million unknowns in less than 20 hours.
eBay, the world's largest online marketplace with more than 90 million active users globally, utilizes SGI's Itanium-based Altix 450 and Itanium-optimized software to mine massive amounts of transactional metadata and provide scoring and analysis on subjects ranging from market and business metrics to risk and fraud solutions.
The University of Malaga was commissioned by the Municipal Energy Management Agency of the city of Malaga, Spain to create an accurate solar irradiation map and develop software that calculates the amount of solar energy that can be captured at any point of the terrain as well as the parameters that allow a good exploitation of solar energy. For this task, they used an Itanium-based HP Superdome with a 64 dual-core Itanium processor.
FINALISTS - Data Center Modernization:
Fraport AG (Frankfurt Airport) has a passenger volume of more than 52.8 million annually, making it the busiest commercial airport in Germany and the seventh largest international airport. In order to provide a reliable, disaster-tolerant baggage logistics system and real-time database, Fraport AG modernized its data center with OpenVMS clusters based on HP Integrity server blades and the dual-core Itanium processor. This solution quadrupled the throughput of the baggage transportation control system and paved the way for future growth.
Future Electronics, a global distributor of electronic components that operates in 169 locations in 42 countries in the Americas, Europe and Asia, underwent a successful migration from a MIPs processor to Itanium-based HP NonStop servers, providing the company a foundation in the data center to improve business efficiency and save considerable time and money.
MegaFon is the third-largest mobile phone operator in Russia. Its Stolichny Branch in Moscow serves more than seven million subscribers. To support vigorous subscriber growth and increase performance of the billing system, it migrated from Sun Fire E25K servers running Solaris 9 to HP Integrity Superdome servers and HP-UX 11i v3 and saw 200 percent more I/O performance with 24 fewer processors and a 1.5 times decrease in the billing processing period. The new system helps downtime with quick failure recovery, restarting in 30 minutes versus 1.5 hours with Sun servers.
FINALISTS - Mission-Critical Data:
Nordea Bank Finland in Helsinki employed a new HP Integrity NonStop BladeSystem platform to handle the majority of its financial transactions—approximately 22 million per day—including payments, card and Netbank transactions.
Taiwan's Bureau of Labor Insurance needed a system that could handle integrated national pension-related operations for approximately five million insured citizens. To meet stringent requirements for performance, stable operations, high availability and expandability, it implemented Itanium-based servers from NEC running HP-UX and Oracle's 10g RAC database server.
The Shanghai Stock Exchange had a critical need to build a "Next-Generation Trading System" to support the massive workloads on one of the largest stock exchanges in Asia. Very happy with the performance of the OpenVMS operating system, they added Itanium-based Integrity servers from HP to their Alphaserver environment to form a mixed cluster and ensure a solid foundation for future growth.
Yodobashi Camera, a leader in the Japanese retail industry, places a high priority on its IT environment to meet new business challenges. Utilizing its flexible HP Itanium-based infrastructure, the company launched a Service-oriented Architecture protected by a disaster recovery environment to serve as the foundation for its mission-critical computing initiatives.
