So what happened to Aluminum? GridCentric Inc, a Toronto-based software company, announced their release of the Copper Cluster Management Stack this morning. According to the release Copper “combines virtualization and grid computing technologies to enable simple, efficient and flexible cluster deployment, management, and use.”
GridCentric’s approach to cluster management will enable many organizations to service users in ways that would have otherwise been impractical or impossible. Our experiences with it to date have been very positive. Copper(TM) is the way of the future for many organizations,” said Professor Michael Bauer of the University of Western Ontario, and Associate Director of the SHARCNET academic supercomputing consortium.
According to company product documents, Copper supports diskless compute nodes, virtual clusters controlled via a CLI and web-based administrative console.
GridCentric’s Copper(TM) product represents a new class of cluster management software,” said Tim Smith, co-founder and CEO of GridCentric Inc. “Systems integrators, cluster operators, and end-users will all benefit from Copper’s unprecedented ease of installation, management, and use.”
They utilize a lightweight virtual machine as the primitive for the node images. This is a bit different from traditional cluster management stacks such as Rocks that require cold installs. However, virtual machines imply an additional layer of physical abstraction from the system. Personally, I’m curious what this does to performance.
For more info on the Copper suite, read the full release here.
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