Case Studies

The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois chose Quad-Core Intel® Xeon® processors for its 9,600-core “Abe” supercomputer, which offers academic researchers, businesses, and members of industry access to outstanding processing performance for solving a full range of science and business problems.  Read the case study.

In this latest issue of the Intel Premier IT Professional program’s IT best practice magazine, Intel and industry leaders provide insights on successful technologies and practices to get you started on your way to IT Utopia.  Highlights include an Intel Product Roadmap from two perspectives (”tops-down” from industry trends and “bottoms-up” from the microprocessor), an interview with Intel CIO John Johnson, and an article on how Sony Imageworks utilizes their 8500 core data farm.

Sony Pictures Imageworks deployed 3,000 new cores with Quad-Core Intel® Xeon® processors to help power the animation and digital effects behind its blockbuster films, including Spider- Man 3, Surf’s Up, Beowulf, and I Am Legend.  As this Intel Premier IT magazine case study reports, servers with Intel processors are helping keep real estate and power costs under control.

Balancing capability and capacity can be a real challenge when data centers are provisioned in a piecemeal fashion. SGI took a different approach, as this Intel Premier IT article documents, by tailoring a hybrid solution to fit a wide range of workflows.

Indiana’s Office of Technology saved the state more than USD 13.9 million by standardizing on Intel® multicore server technologies. Now,it’s targeting over USD 400,000 in IT savings annually and another USD 400,000 in power savings from deploying Dell PCs with Intel® vPro™ technology.  This case study in the recent Intel Premier IT magazine tells the story.

Jeremy Walsh, VMware Senior Systems Engineer,  describes how virtualization can address data center challenges and obstacles.  Walsh also describes what changes the virtualization market is going through as it enters the third generation, and provides an overview and case studies of VMware products.

What does 3rd generation infrastructure-wide virtualization mean to enterprise?  And how can your organization take advantage of this maturing technology that enables you to separate the operating systems from the hardware and encapsulate an OS and an application into virtual machines.  VMware presents their ideas on this plus some real-world case studies in this Intel Premier IT Professional local seminar presentation.

As animation technology has become more sophisticated, so too has its need for computing power. Now, Intel’s multi-core processors are boosting production output for Pixar Animation Studios.  Read this intriguing article on how the Pixar artists take advantage of more cpu cycles to create even more realistic animated characters from the Intel Premier IT magazine Winter 2008 edition.

BMW is all about performance, whether it’s on the track, in the data center, in the consumer driving experience or in the dealerships. Details are in this Winter 2008 Intel Premier IT magazine article or the unabridged web-only version. Or watch the video on How the Microprocessor Has Changed Formula One* Racing, with an interview of Karl Kempf, Intel Director of Decision Technologies.

Karl Kempf was the first person to mount a microprocessor on a Formula One race car, and today he is an Intel Fellow and Director of Decision Technologies at Intel Corporation. He recently explained how the microprocessor has changed Formula One racing.