Itanium Solutions Alliance Names 2010 Innovation Award Winners

SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 15 /PRNewswire/ -- The Itanium® Solutions Alliance announced the winners of its fourth annual Itanium Innovation Awards at a celebratory event in San Francisco. The global Awards program is designed to recognize end users, system integrators, and developers for outstanding use of Intel® Itanium-based servers in their organizations or applications. A panel of distinguished judges selected winners in four categories:

Computationally Intensive Applications: The University of Malaga

The University was commissioned by a municipal agency in 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.

Data Center Modernization: Future Electronics

Future Electronics of Canada, 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 Integrity NonStop NS1200 platform. The team was able to complete the entire process on time, with no disruption to users, and a build a stronger platform for future growth.

Mission-Critical Data: Yodobashi Camera

Yodobashi Camera of Japan, a leader in the Japanese retail industry, built a new foundation for its mission-critical computing initiatives using their flexible Itanium-based Integrity servers from HP. The company launched a new service-oriented architecture and disaster recovery environment that drastically reduced the time needed for launching new applications and greatly improved resource utilization.

Humanitarian Impact: COMPUTAEX

Announced in June, the 2010 winner in the Humanitarian Impact category is the Spanish non-profit organization COMPUTAEX. Their supercomputer is based on two shared-memory HP Integrity Superdome SX2000 supernodes and has been used to solve leading-edge social problems requiring more than 256 processors and up to two terabytes (TB) of RAM. COMPUTAEX is helping researchers obtain simulation results very quickly, leading to innovative solutions to Spain's social, environmental, and scientific challenges, such as climate prediction, agriculture and farming, cancer studies, and environmental impact forecasts. The reliable Itanium-based infrastructure enables researchers to run their simulations without the fear of losing research hours and gives them the assurance of accurate and quick results.

"Now in its fourth year, the Itanium Innovation Awards program continues to evolve. We're so glad to have this opportunity to recognize innovative companies and organizations from around the globe who are using Itanium-based computing platforms to support their important work," said Joan Jacobs, president and executive director of the Alliance. "The gala celebration was a perfect culmination of everyone's efforts and we want to thank our judges, finalists and winners for their participation."

About the Itanium Solutions Alliance

The Itanium® Solutions Alliance is a global community of hardware, operating system and application vendors dedicated to accelerating the adoption and ongoing development of Itanium®-based solutions. Formed in September 2005, the Alliance comprises some of the most influential companies in the computing industry with a shared, strategic commitment to delivering mission-critical computing solutions based on the Intel® Itanium® architecture. http://www.itaniumsolutions.org

© 2010. Intel and Itanium are registered trademarks of Intel Corporation. All other trademarks, trade names, service marks, and logos referenced herein belong to their respective companies.

SOURCE Itanium Solutions Alliance