Computerworld - High-performance computing (HPC) has almost always required a supercomputer — one of those room-size monoliths you find at government research labs and universities. And while those systems aren’t going away, some of the applications traditionally handled by the biggest of Big Iron are heading to the desktop. One reason is that processing that took an hour on a standard PC about eight years ago now takes six seconds, according to Ed Martin, a manager in the automotive unit at computer-aided design software maker Autodesk Inc. Monumental improvements in desktop processing power, graphics processing unit (GPU) performance, network bandwidth and solid-state drive speed combined with 64-bit throughput have made the desktop increasingly viable for large-scale computing projects.
Rocks adds a vastly expanded solutions layer (Rocks HPC, Rocks Cloud, Rocks Rolls) and enterprise-class support, which transforms the leading open source cluster distribution into a production-ready cluster operating environment suitable for data centers of all shapes and sizes. Clustercorp also partners with the industry's leading workload management providers to offer Rocks MOAB, Rocks LSF, and Rocks SGE. Purchase turnkey Rocks clusters from a long list of reliable hardware partners including HP, Dell, Cray, Silicon Mechanics, and more.
ScaleMP, a maker of virtualization and aggregation software that allows a cluster of x64 servers to look like a big, bad, symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) shared-memory system to operating systems and selected classes of applications, is going downstream to target SMBs and upstream to chase cloud infrastructure providers.
an Miller joined Cray in February 2008 and currently heads up Cray’s Productivity Solutions group with the recently introduced Cray CX1 desk side supercomputer – an Intel Cluster Ready product. Mr. Miller also leads Cray’s corporate marketing organization. Prior to joining Cray, he served as the Vice President of Polyserve Software at HP and as Vice President of Worldwide Sales for PolyServe prior to its acquisition by HP. Before joining PolyServe, Mr. Miller was Vice President of Worldwide sales for IBM High End xSeries Servers where he worked for both IBM xSeries and pSeries organizations, with a particular focus on marketing and sales for high end Intel based systems. Prior to IBM, he was Vice President of Global Marketing for Sequent Computer Systems, and Vice President Asia Pacific. Miller has also worked for Software AG as Senior Vice President Asia Pacific, and for Unisys in many capacities, ending as General Manager for Asia South. Mr. Miller is a Graduate of London University.
Giving users more flexibility in how they configure systems to attack various workloads was a big thread running through SC09 last year. At the show, we took at look at three different companies who are, in one way or another, providing large system images. (Click to see our posts on ScaleMP, 3Leaf, and SGI.)
Engineers, scientists, researchers and other workstation users are continually challenged with more complex problems and shorter deadlines in which to solve them. The Cray CX1-iWS™ solution addresses both of these issues by allowing larger models and simulations to be worked within the workstation environment, eliminating the need to move the problem to an external shared resource cluster, and providing an easy to setup solution.
FUSION1200® is a scalable 8 to 32-processor SMP system for the High Performance Technical Computing (HPTC) market. Available in both deskside and 19-inch rack-mount design, the FUSION1200® is a scalable alternative to traditional RISC based servers. FUSION1200® Series is an enterprise-class system for an IT department looking to leverage the benefits of Intel® standards in a data center. With the flexibility to grow from 8 to 32 Intel® Xeon® processors (quad or dual core), the FUSION1200® Series scales beyond conventional Intel® based platforms while delivering superior price-performance compared to traditional high-end servers. The SMP operational model of the FUSION1200® provides reduced management costs compared to clusters. This Intel® Xeon® processor based server, supporting Intel® Extended Memory 64 Technology and the ScaleMP® vSMP architecture, is the ideal platform for clients with applications that require high processor count and large shared memory.
Numascale's SMP Adapter is an HTX card made to be used with commodity servers with AMD processors that feature an HTX connector to its HyperTransport interconnect.
Building and Promoting a Linux-based Operating System to Support Virtual Organizations for Next Generation Grids (2006-2010). The emergence of Grids enables the sharing of a wide range of resources to solve large-scale computational and data intensive problems in science, engineering and commerce. While much has been done to build Grid middleware on top of existing operating systems, little has been done to extend the underlying operating systems to enablee and facilitate Grid computing, for example by embedding important functionalities directly into the operating system kernel.
"For a while now, IBM has had multiple and competing tools for managing AIX and Linux clusters for its supercomputer customers and yet another set of tools that were used for other HPC setups with a slightly more commercial bent to them. But Big Blue has now cleaned house, killing off its closed-source Cluster Systems Management (CSM) tool and tapping its own open source Extreme Cluster Administration Toolkit (known as xCAT) as its replacement."