This week Bright Computing announced that James River Technical will sell and support Bright Cluster Manager. James River focuses on the Education space, and this is looks like a good move for Bright Computing as the company seeks to gain traction for its Linux cluster management software.
As part of this new collaboration, James River will host a Nov. 10 webinar on Eliminating Complexity in Managing GPU Clusters. Topics include:
- Key challenges in managing GPU clusters
- Two models of GPU management: Tool-kit vs. Single Solution
- How to configure a GPU system from “bare-metal” to functioning, high-performance cluster in less than one hour
- How to scale to thousands of nodes, including systems comprising a mixture of GPUs and CPUs
- How to seamlessly switch between CUDA versions
For more information on how to register, check out the James River webinar page.
The University of Arkansas at Fayetteville announced that it has received a $1.7million grant from the National Science Foundation to improve the facility that houses the supercomputers for the college. The funds will be used to purchase air conditioners for the supercomputers and equipment that ensures that electricity can run around the clock, since many research projects require programs to run for several days and cannot sustain a power outage.
Power outages are actually infrequent at the data center, [Patrick] Finnegan said. But he added that this summer, “due to some planned cooling system maintenance, coupled with the unusually hot summer, we have had some brief cooling outages.”
Dryad is an ongoing Microsoft Research project dedicated to developing ways to write parallel and distributed programs that can scale from small clusters to large datacenters. There’s a DryadLINQ compiler and runtime that is related to the project. Microsoft released builds of Dryad and DryadLINQ code to academics for noncommercial use in the summer 2009.
Oracle continues its drive to do away with Sun’s strategy of making money by adding value on top of open source tools provided free to the community. In fairness to Oracle it didn’t work all that well as a business model for Sun, which hemorrhaged money and never turned the strategy into any significant share of the HPC market. The latest victim is Sun’s popular job scheduling system, GridEngine.
Being able to base our cloud storage and compute products on Verari’s world class BladeRack® 2 Series technology and FOREST containerized data center infrastructure puts us at the front of the pack to serve the demanding cloud customer,” said 
Technology innovation is only half the story at Cirrascale; we must also innovate with our business model,” said 
Many organizations have a sufficient amount of computational power and enough CPUs, but they are simply unable to leverage their existing infrastructure for larger compute intensive workloads,” said Shai Fultheim, founder and CEO of ScaleMP. “vSMP Foundation for SMP enables biotechnology organizations like ICBR to aggregate existing hardware and to create a virtual SMP for next generation sequence processing and other biotechnology computing needs that need large amounts of processing power as well as shared memory.”
One of the greatest strengths of the PUE metric, the industry standard for measuring data center energy efficiency, is its simplicity: Calculate how much energy your data center is consuming overall, then divide that number by how much energy your IT equipment alone consumes.
That being said, how do you manage such a resource on the cloud? Theoretically speaking, the cloud offerings loosely coupled compute “agents” in a distributed manner such that you really don’t care. However, we, as HPC technologists, DO care. The folks over at Clustercorp have created a series of integrated solutions such that one can now manage “clusters” of virtual nodes in the cloud the same way one manages a local set of physical nodes: Rocks+.
