A new version of Star-P was developed by ISC so that almost everyone will afford this kind of computer.

The new version now runs on lower-cost AMD Opteron-based systems, which enables users who previously didn’t have the budgets and programming knowledge, to tap the power of parallel computing clusters to solve their growing scientific and engineering problems.

Star-P is the world’s first 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 MathWorks’ MATLAB, and run them instantly and interactively on parallel servers.

Star-P eliminates the need to re-program the applications in C, FORTRAN or MPI languages to run on parallel computers, which typically takes months to years to complete for complex and computationally intensive problems.

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.

“Delivering Star-P on the Opteron platform will help usher in the era of personal supercomputing,” said Ilya Mirman, vice president of marketing at Interactive Supercomputing. “Star-P’s ease-of-use combined with the price/performance of Opteron-based clusters will change the landscape of how users program parallel architectures.”

Star-P automatically connects desktop applications to Opteron-based servers and parallelizes the application code on the fly, enabling users to scale their applications across any multi-processor system or parallel cluster in real time. Using Star-P, they can tackle much larger problems on their desktops than ever before possible, while arriving at a solution in a fraction of the time.

The price for this new version of Star-P will be $8000 and is available starting today.