Fixstars Launches Linux for CUDA

Multicore software specialist Fixstars Corporation has released Yellow Dog Enterprise Linux (YDEL) for CUDA, the first commercial Linux distribution for GPU computing. The OS is aimed at HPC customers using NVIDIA GPU hardware to accelerate their vanilla Linux clusters, and is designed to lower the overall cost of system deployment, the idea being to bring these still-exotic systems into the mainstream.

The problem is that the majority of future HPC accelerated deployments is destined to be GPU-based, rather than Cell-based. While Cell had a brief fling with HPC stardom as the processor that powered the first petaflop system -- the Roadrunner supercomputer at Los Alamos National Lab -- IBM has signaled it will not continue development of the Cell architecture for HPC applications. With NVIDIA's steady evolution of its HPC portfolio, propelled by the popularity of its CUDA development environment, general-purpose GPU computing is now positioned to be the most widely used accelerator technology for high performance computing. The upcoming "Fermi" GPU-based boards (Q3 2010) substantially increase the GPU's double precision capability, add error corrected memory, and include hardware support for C++ features.

Which brings us back to Fixstars. The company's new YDEL for CUDA offering is aimed squarely at filling what it sees as a growing market for turnkey GPU-accelerated HPC on x86 clusters. Up until now, customers either built their own Linux-CUDA environments or relied upon system OEMs to provide the OS integration as part of the system. That might be fine for experimenters and big national labs who love to tweak Linux and don't mind shuffling hardware drivers and OS kernels, but commercial acceptance will necessitate a more traditional model.

One of the challenges is that Red Hat and other commercial Linux distributions are generally tuned for mass market enterprise applications: large database and Web servers, in particular. In this type of setup, HPC workloads won't run as efficiently as they could. With YDEL, Fixstars modified the Red Hat kernel to support a more supercomputing-like workload. The result, according to Owen Stampflee, Fixstars' Linux Product Manager (and Terra Soft alum), is a 5 to10 percent performance improvement on HPC apps compared to other commercial Linux distributions.

Fixstars is selling YDEL for CUDA as a typical enterprise distribution, which in this case means the CUDA SDK, hardware drivers, and Linux kernel pieces are bundled together and preconfigured for HPC. A product license includes Fixstars support for both Linux and CUDA. The product contains multiple versions of CUDA, which can be selected at runtime via a setting in a configuration file or an environment variable. In addition, the YDEL comes with an Eclipse-based graphical IDE for CUDA programming. To complete the picture, Fixstars also offers end-user training and seminars on CUDA application development.

(This news summarized from the HPCwire and full text pages can be reached their site)

Appro HyperPower™ Cluster - Featuring Intel Xeon CPU and NVIDIA® Tesla™ GPU computing technologies

The amount of raw data needed to process research analysis in drug discoveries, oil and gas exploration, and computational finance create a huge demand for computing power. In addition, the 3D visualization analysis data has grown a lot in recent years moving visualization centers from the desktop to GPU clusters. With the need of performance and memory capacities, Appro clusters and supercomputers are ideal architectures combined with the latest CPUs and GPU's based on NVIDIA® Tesla™ computing technologies. It delivers best performance at lower cost and fewer systems than standard CPU-only clusters. With 240-processor computing core per GPU, C-language development environment for the GPU, a suite of developer tools as well as the world’s largest GPU computing ISV development community, the Appro HyperPower GPU clusters allow scientific and technical professionals the opportunity to test and experiment their ability to develop applications faster and to deploy them across multiple generations of processors.

The Appro HyperPower cluster features high density 1U servers based on Intel® Xeon® processors and NVIDIA® Tesla™ GPU cards onboard. It also includes interconnect switches for node-to-node communication, master node, and clustering software all integrated in a 42U standard rack configuration. It supports up to 304 CPU cores and 18,240 GPU cores with up to 78TF single/6.56 TF double precision GPU performance. By using fewer systems than standard CPU-only clusters, the HyperPower delivers more computing power in an ultra dense architecture at a lower cost.

In addition, the Appro HyperPower cluster gives customers a choice of configurations with open-source commercially supported cluster management solutions that can easily be tested and pre-integrated as a part of a complete package to include HPC professional services and support.

Ideal Environment:
Ideal solution for small and medium size HPC Deployments. The target markets are Government, Research Labs, Universities and vertical industries such as Oil and Gas, Financial and Bioinformatics where the most computationally-intensive applications are needed.

Installed Software
The Appro HyperPower is preconfigured with the following software:
- Redhat Enterprise Linux 5.x, 64-bit
- CUDA 2.2 Toolkit and SDK
- Clustering software (Rocks Roll)

CUDA Applications
The CUDA-based Tesla GPUs give speed-ups of up to 250x on applications ranging from MATLAB to computational fluid dynamics, molecular dynamics, quantum chemistry, imaging, signal processing, bioinformatics, and so on. Click here to learn more about these speedups with links to application downloads.,


(This news sourced from Appro Ltd. and can be reached their web site)