Penguin Computing Announces Release of New Scyld ClusterWare “Hybrid”

Penguin Computing, experts in high performance computing solutions, announced today that Scyld ClusterWare™ "Hybrid", the newest version of its industry-leading cluster management software, will be released in January of 2010. Scyld ClusterWare Hybrid was developed as a solution for Penguin Computing's Scyld customers who want to provision, monitor and manage heterogeneous operating systems from a single point of control.

Scyld ClusterWare Hybrid is a fully integrated cluster management environment that combines Scyld ClusterWare's industry leading diskless single-system-image architecture with a traditional provisioning architecture that deploys an operating environment to local disk. Combining the "best of both worlds," this hybrid approach provides unmatched flexibility and transparency. Compute nodes can still be booted with Scyld ClusterWare and provisioned extremely rapidly, with a minimal memory footprint and guaranteed consistency, or can be provisioned with a complete operating environment to the local hard drive.

With Scyld ClusterWare Hybrid, target operating environments can be dynamically assigned to cluster nodes at start-up time, allowing for the quick re-purposing of systems according to workload and user demand. Once provisioned, systems can be managed from a single node with a single subset of commands, accelerating the learning curve for new users and reducing the time spent on system management for system administrators and researchers tasked with cluster management.

Click here to access more information.

NumaConnect SMP Adapter Card

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.

Highlights
Scalable, Directory Based Cache Coherence Protocol
Write-back cache for Remote Data: 2-4-8-(16)GB options, standard SDIMMs
ECC protected with background scrubbing of soft errors
16 coherent + 16 non-coherent outstanding memory transactions
Support for single-image or multi-image OS partitions
3-way on-chip distributed switching for 1D, 2D or 3D Torus topologies
30GB/s switching capacity per node
HTX connected - 6.4GB/s
<20W power dissipation

For detailed review click their webpages.
The PDF manual is here.

PRACE is Ready for the Next Phase

PRACE is eligible to apply for a grant under the European Union’s 7th Framework Programme to start the implementation phase.

In October 2009 PRACE demonstrated to a panel of external experts and the European Commission that the project made “satisfactory progress in all areas” and “that PRACE has the potential to have real impact on the future of European HPC, and the quality and outcome of European research that depends on HPC services”. Two months before the end of the project it met the eligibility to apply for a grant of 20 million Euros for the implementation phase of the permanent PRACE Research Infrastructure.

The future PRACE Research Infrastructure (RI) will consist of several world-class top-tier centers, managed as a single European entity. The infrastructure to be created by PRACE will form the top level of the European HPC ecosystem. It will offer competent support and a spectrum of system architectures to meet the requirements of different scientific domains and applications. It is expected that the PRACE RI will provide European scientists and technologists with world-class leadership supercomputers with capabilities equal to or better than those available in the USA, Japan, China, India and elsewhere in the world, in order to stay at the forefront of research.

About PRACE:  The Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE) prepares the creation of a persistent pan-European HPC service, consisting of several tier-0 centres providing European researchers with access to capability computers and forming the top level of the European HPC ecosystem. PRACE is a project funded in part by the EU’s 7th Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement n° RI-211528.