SuSE announces Itanium availability of server OS

SuSE Linux AG on Wednesday announced the general availability of its SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 8 operating system for Intel Corp.'s family of 64-bit Itanium processors.

The Itanium version of the SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 8 software comes with four CDs, documentation and 12 months of maintenance, and it will be available by the end of the month, the company said in a statement Wednesday.

SuSE also announced that this Itanium version of the operating system has been chosen for the TeraGrid, a project launched by the National Science Foundation in August 2001 to build a massive, distributed computer network for scientific research.

When completed, the TeraGrid will include 20 teraflops of computing power distributed at five sites, the capacity of managing and storing almost 1 petabyte of data and toolkits for grid computing, according to the project's Web site (www.teragrid.org). Its components will be connected through a network operating at 40 gigabits per second, according to that Web site.

IBM Corp.'s Global Services division will deploy at TeraGrid sites clusters of the Itanium servers running the SuSE operating system. The deal is worth "several hundred thousand" of U.S. dollars, SuSE said in the statement.