Michael Feldman over at HPCwire posted a short entry yesterday about an announcement from QLogic and others due later this week
…QLogic will announce a partnership between itself, Dell, Microsoft, AMD and ANSYS to offer an HPC cluster that will be publicly available to users for test driving applications. Dell is providing a 16-node PowerEdge cluster; Microsoft, its Windows HPC Server cluster software; and AMD, 32 of its six-core “Istanbul” Opteron processors. QLogic, of course, will be contributing its own InfiniBand switches and adapters. The first application to be tested on the cluster is the ANSYS’ FLUENT computational fluid dynamics (CFD) code.
The machine will be run out of QLogic’s NETtrack Developer Center in Minnesota, and will be made available to software and hardware vendors of all stripes (storage, compute, etc.) who want to test their products with QLogic’s gear. Michael has more details in the post.
Of course this isn’t the first test cluster in HPC. There is the Hyperion testbed, a 1,000 node cluster announced at SC last year, and the HPC Advisory Council (anchored by QLogic rival Mellanox) is also offering a test cluster for basically the same purpose as QLogic’s. Sure would be nice if everyone could just contribute to a single test center that could field very large resources rather than fielding lots of fairly small, disconnected efforts. I suppose that statement’s akin to whining “why can’t we all just get along?” though.
