DEVELOPER TOOLS

LOS ANGELES, CA – PSSC Labs announced the delivery of two Linux-based clusters to be used by Western Fire Center Inc. The clusters, running Intel Xeon processors, will enable predictive modeling to help ascertain the causes and effects of fires that are involved in litigation more quickly. Western Fire Center, Inc. (WFCi) of Kelso, Washington is a fire testing and research laboratory that provides fire testing services and frequently acts as an expert witness for high-profile fire litigations such as the ValuJet 592 incident in Florida and more recently WFCi was retained for work on the Great White nightclub fire in Rhode Island. “This powerful new tool from PSSC Labs will help us to solve complex fire dynamics simulations more rapidly which leads to a much shorter turn around time between runs…,” said Bryan Klein, Technical Manager of Modeling and Animation Department for WFCi, who is responsible for operation of both clusters. Bryan also commented that “PSSC labs exceeded our expectations in many ways, best of all; they delivered our cluster ahead of schedule. Ordering through PSSC has already saved us valuable time.” PSSC Labs’ cluster will be used to perform computational fluid dynamics and more specifically, WFCi will run the most recent version of the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s Fire Dynamics Simulator to complete accurate fire modeling. The cluster will function as a true parallel machine, conducting distributed computing of multi-block node meshes. Alex Lesser, Vice President of PSSC Labs stated, “We’re happy to assist Western Fire with their important efforts in fire modeling, if our computers can help them figure out what went wrong then perhaps they can help prevent future disasters.” The first sets of PSSC clusters contain a total of twenty-eight Intel Xeon 2.4 GHz processors with a total aggregate memory of 28GBs. The high speed node interconnection is powered by Intel’s 10/100/1000 Gigabit network adapters. Additionally, PSSC’s custom software suite will optimize the performance of the system and improve manageability.