Backbone Networks High-Performance Live Video Servers Build Scalability with Scyld Beowulf

(Las Vegas, NAB 2004; April 19, 2004) Backbone Networks Corporation and Scyld Software, a Penguin Computing Company, today announced a relationship to provide fault tolerant streaming server farms for the internet television broadcasting industry. This partnership provides the crucial elements required to accommodate large scale audiences with streaming television, where high bandwidth signals need to reliably reach many thousands of simultaneous viewers, by utilizing low cost scalable PC clusters and Beowulf software technology.

This partnership builds upon the two companies existing relationship in the Internet radio industry. The new area of cooperation addresses the need for easily expandable, self-configuring server capacity in the television broadcasting industry, which requires dynamic capacity expansion with a minimum of operator intervention.

Initial product offerings will be based on the efficient MPEG-4 streaming standard, implemented with the new Backbone Video live streaming video and audio servers, which are being announced at NAB 2004, and Scyld's second-generation cluster operating system. This alliance will continue to solve a lot of challenges we face in broadcast streaming", explains George Capalbo, Backbone Vice President. "With Scyld Beowulf, we can incrementally build video and audio streaming capacity by creating the equivalent of a supercomputer server, but using low cost clusters consisting of from 2 to 500 PCs, each of which handles hundreds of connected viewer streams." The partnership aligns Backbone Networks' efficient Linux-based multimedia server technology with Scyld's pioneering in second-generation Beowulf clustering technology.

Scyld Software develops and supports software for high-performance computing. Donald Becker, Scyld Software Founder and CTO, and Scyld developers are well known in the Linux community for their extensive contributions to the Linux kernel. Scyld Software is based in Annapolis, Maryland. (www.scyld.com).

Backbone Networks Corporation, based in Worcester, MA, focuses on software solutions for television and radio broadcasting. The Company's products include Backbone Radio's and Backbone Video's, software suites that create, automate, control and stream multimedia content worldwide via the Internet. (www.backbone.com)

About Beowulf
Beowulf and Beowulf clustering are terms that describe a technique of connecting commodity computers together using a modified version of Linux to create a High Performance Computer. Invented in 1994 by Donald Becker and Thomas Sterling, early Beowulf development was sponsored by NASA. In 1997, Beowulf clusters broke the Teraflop mark, and today can perform about 15 Teraflops. There are tens of thousands of Beowulf clusters installed in government, educational, and commercial facilities. Beowulf is a descriptive service mark held by Linux International. Scyld Software and Scyld Beowulf are trademarks of Scyld Software.