insideHPC » Enterprise HPC

Cloud HPC: Elastic MapReduce in the Automotive Industry

Rich Brueckner — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 08:13:54 +0000

In this blog post, Rinivasan Sundara Ragan takes a look at how the value of Cloud computing to the automotive enterprise is its ability to perform processing of large amounts of information using highly parallel processes on scalable computing infrastructure.

Using Amazon Elastic MapReduce, you can instantly provision as much or as little capacity as you like to perform data-intensive tasks for applications such as web indexing, data mining, log file analysis, data warehousing, machine learning, financial analysis, scientific simulation, and bioinformatics research.

Ragan goes on to cite the following computational tasks as prime candidates for Amazon Elastic MapReduce: Vehicle Model and Option Validation, Vehicle Mass Analysis, Emission Reporting, Recyclability and Recoverability, and Warranty Claim Analysis. Full Story

Podcast: DecisionHPC Provides Business Analytics for Your Cluster

Rich Brueckner — Wed, 22 Dec 2010 18:15:51 +0000

In this podcast, I interview Deepak Khosala, President of X-ISS (eXcellence in IS Solutions, Inc.). The company’s HPC solutions range from complete outsourced system management to DecisionHPC, a web-based monitoring & analytics software package.

Many users of HPC systems are interested in maximizing system productivity and ensuring business goals are aligned with system usage. DecisionHPC provides the tools to make informed business decisions and aid in the planning of future HPC computing resources. Download the MP3 * Subscribe on iTunes * Subscribe on other Podcast Players.

Whitepaper: HP Cluster Platform 3000SL a Balanced Approach to HPC

Rich Brueckner — Tue, 21 Dec 2010 08:17:10 +0000

While more and more companies are embracing HPC by utilizing clusters of computers, application performance doesn’t always scale with expectations. In this HP whitepaper, the company describes how the HP Cluster Platform 3000SL balanced computing system delivers increased density while fully leveraging economies of scale.

To meet the specific requirements of this growing population of customers, HP designed the HP ProLiant SL family of servers. With a modular architecture based on an ultra-efficient design philosophy, HP ProLiant SL servers are built to enable massive compute environments, while using fewer components and less energy for power and cooling. This innovative design enables the HP ProLiant SL family to drive excellent savings:

Installed to fill a 100,000-square-foot data center, the SL line could cut 51,842 megawatts of electricity per year—or enough energy to power 4600 average U.S. homes.

In the same data center, the SL line removes 838.5 tons of weight—an amount equal to 4.3 Boeing 747 jets. This reduces shipping costs, data center construction costs and the total energy footprint.

Vendors, do you have new whitepapers for our readers? Let us know at news@insidehpc.com.

Hitachi GST Delivers Storage Bounty on a Platter

Rich Brueckner — Fri, 17 Dec 2010 08:29:10 +0000

By Chris Mellor • Get more from this author

Hitachi GST has developed a single-platter 2.5-inch drive holding 500GB, a record density at this form factor in a production disk drive.

The Travelstar Z5K500 spins at 5,400rpm, has an 8MB cache and a 7mm z-height. It is designed for use in thin notebooks, notebooks and tablet-type devices, and comes in 250, 320 and 500GB capacity points. Its areal density is up to 636Gbit/in2.

There is a G-DRIVE Slim 500GB external drive product using this disk drive.

Seagate’s equivalent drive family, the Momentus products, top out with the Momentus 7200, a 2-platter, 750GB model with 541Gbit/in2 areal density. That was announced in May this year. It also has a Momentus Thin single-platter version, offering 160 or 250GB with a 380Gbit/in2 density, which also spins at 7,200rpm.

Hitachi GST’s new drive holds twice as much data. The Momentus Thin was announced in January last year and could be viewed as ripe for updating.

What about WD? Its WD-AV-25 is a twin-platter drive holding up to 500GB and was announced in March. It also has a 2-platter Scorpio Blue offering 750GB capacity with an approximate 541GB/in2 areal density. This is quite like Hitachi GST’s new drive with its 8MB cache, 5,400rpm spin speed and 3Gbit/s SATA interface. Were WD to halve the number of platters and move to a higher areal density, it could then produce a 500GB single platter product. So far it has avoided the single platter product category, though.

So too has Toshiba, whose best effort areal density-wise so far in the 2.5-inch space is the MK7559GSXP 750GB, 2-platter with 541.1Gbit/in2 density. It too has an 8MB cache, SATA 3Gbit/s interface and 5,400 spin speed. Like WD it has eschewed the single platter product area.

Samsung’s best effort appears to be a 640GB, 2-platter product. It does look as if Hitachi GST has started delivering a new generation of perpendicular magnetic recording technology; 636Gbit/in2 is a significant advance on the state of the production art.

It can obviously produce a 1TB, 2-platter 2-5-inch drive if it chooses, and applying this areal density to its 3.5-inch products could readily produce 4TB drives. Hitachi GST is preparing its IPO and such product technology strengths would enable an eye-catching product launch to boost investor sentiment about the company.

The 500GB G-Technology G-DRIVE slim will be shipping to retailers in early Q1 2011. Pricing has not been set. The Travelstar Z5K500 family will be shipping to select distributors in December. It will come with bulk data encryption and extended availability options. ®

This article originally appeared in The Register.

HPC Coming to Corporate Sooner Than You Might Think

Rich Brueckner — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 21:29:28 +0000

In his recent blog post reflecting SC10, John Dean of Syncsort writes that advent of parallel programming tools like Visual Studio 2010 are paving the way for HPC to reach the missing middle:

I believe this is a significant breakthrough and that the application of this technology is bound to be pervasive. It finds use in multi-core engines and in cloud applications. While it is argued that HPC and cloud are at opposite ends of the spectrum, the reality is that parallelism is at the heart of both operations. Both require function segmentation with complete definition to facilitate scalability. With the advent of cloud computing and its ”pay as you use” business paradigm, the availability of HPC clusters is becoming a reality for all of the HPC community, not just the elite few. This has the potential of bringing another 55 million users online within the next few years.

Dean goes on to say that with these developments, he can easily see HPC becoming a larger part of mainstream corporate America in the near future.

Do Falling 10GbE Prices Spell Doom for Fibre Channel?

RichB — Fri, 10 Dec 2010 09:37:56 +0000

Our favorite storage pundit Henry Newman writes that the days may be numbered Fiber Channel, the dominant data storage interconnect technology.

I have been tracking the prices of 4Gb and 8Gb Fibre Channel (FC) and 10Gb Ethernet (10GbE) for more than a year, and just recently I have started to see what I have been expecting: Dramatic price drops in 10 GbE. The price drops started with NIC pricing, as that is the easiest and lowest-cost component to develop, store and ship. I believe that this price drop, combined with FCoE and other market forces, means the slow death of Fibre Channel has begun.

Interview: Adaptive Computing CEO Michael Jackson on TOP500 System Management

Rich Brueckner — Thu, 02 Dec 2010 08:01:35 +0000

www.youtube.com/watch?v=RxRY9snNlzo

In this video from SC10, Adaptive Computing CEO Michael Jackson describes why the highest-ranked systems on the TOP500 uses the company’s MOAB system management software.

At SC10, Adaptive announced significant product upgrades that address the increasing complexity and size of next-generation HPC systems. Moab 6.0 and Moab Viewpoint 2.0 improve and simplify the command communications and reporting processes that have traditionally restricted the usability of HPC systems scaling beyond a few thousand nodes. The upgrades will undoubtedly help Adaptive Computing maintain its leadership position managing the world’s most advanced supercomputing systems as ranked by the Top500 list. Moab 6.0 and Moab Viewpoint 2.0 will be available in December 2010.

The Call for More Hardware Innovation in Cloud Computing

Rich Brueckner — Mon, 29 Nov 2010 08:54:12 +0000

Theodore Omtzigt over at the High-productivity Cloud Computing Blog asks, Why is there so little hardware innovation in Cloud Computing?

The market dynamics of IT has created this situation. It used to be the case that the enterprise market drove silicon innovation. However, the enterprise market is now dragging the silicon investment market down. Enterprise hardware and software is no longer the driving force: the innovation is now driven by the consumer market. And that game is played and controlled by the high volume OEMs. Secondly, their cost constraints and margins make delivering IP to these OEMs very unattractive: they hold all the cards and attenuate pricing so that continued engineering innovation is hard to sustain for a startup. Secondly, an OEM is not interested in creating unique IP by a third party: it would deleverage them. So you end up getting only the non-differentiable pieces of technology and a race to the bottom.

Video: Virident 800 GByte SSD Speeds HPC Applications

Rich Brueckner — Sun, 28 Nov 2010 08:02:39 +0000

www.youtube.com/watch?v=CdqOZgi7ThQ

In this video from SC10, Virident CTO Vijay Karamcheti describes the company’s new tachIOn SSD with 800 GBytes of usable capacity. This increased capacity doubles the storage in a low-profile, half-length form factor. Learn more at Virident.com.

Rocky Mountain Super Center Welcomes New Board Member

John Leidel — Tue, 21 Sep 2010 01:53:54 +0000

The Rocky Mountain Supercomputing Center announced a new member to their Board of Directors. Susan L. Baldwin, Executive Director of Compute Canada, was named to the board.

Susan is an excellent addition to the RMSC Board because she shares our vision of bringing High Performance Computing technology to small- and medium-sized businesses,” said Earl J. Dodd, RMSC Executive Director.

RMSC and the State of Montana have seized the leadership position in harnessing HPC technology as an economic driver that makes businesses more competitive in the global market place,” said Susan Baldwin.

Under Baldwn’s direction, Compute Canada has integrated HPC resources from seven partner consortia across Canada to create a powerful and dynamic computational resource. Compute Canada and the university-based regional HPC consortia provide for overall architecture and planning, software integration, operations and management, and coordination of user support for the national HPC platform.

Congrats to RMSC and Susan Baldwin. For more info, read their full release here.

Mainstreaming HPC Hampered by Skills Gap

Rich Brueckner — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 08:00:42 +0000

El Reg has a new feature story on how HPC adoption in mainstream enterprise IT has been hampered by a skills gap.

From our research, it is clear that the impact of HPC on mainstream IT is less to do with technology, and more to do with skills and operations management. Commodity hardware is widely regarded as suitable for HPC, with custom hardware reserved for the most demanding tasks. One of the reasons for this, apart from the direct cost advantage, is the pool of available skills. This has undoubtedly broadened the use of HPC, but the lack of high-end HPC skills has the potential to be a barrier to translating HPC experience into more general IT performance improvement.

Based on research published by Freeform Dynamics, the author concludes that enterprises tackling virtualization can benefit from HPC know-how in things like I/O, networking, storage systems, and fabrics. The report is interesting reading and is available as a free download.

NCSA gets $200k from NSF to push simulation further into industry

John West — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 15:00:03 +0000

This week NCSA announced that it has won an NSF grant to understand the gaps between the needs of industry today and the capabilities of simulation-based engineering and science

The National Science Foundation has awarded $200,000 to the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) to investigate the use of simulation-based engineering and science in industry and to report on areas where scientific advances are required to achieve gains in simulation capability. This Early-Concept Grants for Exploratory Research (EAGER) project will be carried out over the next 15 months by NCSA’s Private Sector Program staff.

NCSA will host a series of meetings and surveys to capture the perspectives of current industry users about the challenges they face in using simulation more extensively in their businesses

“Private sector engagement at NCSA has revealed significant opportunities for bringing science and industry together more completely,” said Merle Giles, leader of NCSA’s Private Sector Program. “It is our intention to document the industrial challenges sufficiently so as to bring scientists from both the public and private sectors together to pursue breakthroughs that are likely to lead to economic development.”

NCSA will focus on large original equipment manufacturers (companies that manufacture products or components that are then sold and retailed under the purchasers brand name). The Ohio Supercomputer Center and the Information Sciences Institute at the University of Southern California have received related grants from NSF’s EAGER program and will focus on small and medium enterprises.

I was unaware of the EAGER program, and I think its a good thing if it actually pushes a boundary. We already know, having asked dozens of times over the past decade and gotten the same answer every time, that skills, software, and cost of entry are the major challenges that industrial users identify when discussing obstacles to adoption of modeling and simulation. What we need is information that is specific enough to form a nucleation site for ideas that address the challenges to start to crystallize and fall out of solution.

DataRush posts 2 TB per hour on MalStone B

John West — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 14:16:43 +0000

I thought this might be of interest to at least some of you — Pervasive Software announced last week that their flagship DataRush product posted a rate of 2 TB/hr on MalStone B (a stylized benchmark for data intensive computing, Robert Grossman describes it here) using a 32-core Intel Xeon 7550 server. MalStone B10 has 10 billion records, which equates to just under 1 Terabyte of data (100 byte, fixed record size).

“These results provide powerful validation of the ability of Pervasive DataRush to scale massively and consume all available cores as commercially available core counts increase,” said Ray Newmark, vice president of sales and marketing for Pervasive DataRush. “This kind of performance is a beacon for organizations struggling with complex or large data who want to harness the power of multicore. We enable users to process large amounts of data to obtain actionable information faster and more cost-effectively than other technologies.”

Pervasive DataRush ran the 10-billion-row benchmark on an Intel server with a 64-bit JVM 6 installed on 64-bit Windows 2008. The Pervasive DataRush runtime of 31.5 minutes was 26 times faster than the same test in a published benchmark using Hadoop on a 20-node cluster. Not only did Pervasive DataRush achieve superior performance, the application showed excellent scalability from two to thirty-two cores. This level of performance and scalability allows organizations to leverage the most appropriate hardware for the performance desired.

We’ve written about Pervasive before; you can find an in-depth piece here.

I didn’t really have a point of reference for the significance of this result, so I got in touch with the company. Here’s what they had to say

The run-time we are publishing (31.5 minutes) is faster than many of the other published runtimes (maybe faster than all, we’d need to double check on the latest published). One of the main precepts of DataRush is our ability to process large amounts of data, hence our focus on the throughput rate, not just the wall clock time.

The 2 Terabyte/hour rate is excellent for this benchmark. This is especially so given that we are comparing ourselves against other runs that were made using clusters. This shows that a single machine can handle jobs that once were only considered feasible on cluster configurations. Again, one of our focuses with DataRush is to run on commodity hardware. We configured the system using the RAID card that came with the box using terabyte drives we bought at a local electronics store. We used a RAID-0 configuration.

Private cloud starter kit from Platform

John West — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 13:54:47 +0000

Yesterday Platform Computing announced the launch of the Platform ISF Starter Pack, “an out-of-the-box, end-to-end software product and services offering for companies to quickly set up a private cloud.”

Platform ISF was introduced in 2009; the Starter Pack is aimed at letting small groups get their feet wet without investing in a substantial deployment.

For only US$4,995, the Platform ISF Starter Pack includes a one-year Platform ISF license for 10 sockets, consulting, training and support.

…“Organizations have plenty of toolkits to choose from as they evaluate private cloud, but they require multiple tools that users must string together themselves,” said James Pang, Vice President Product Management, Platform Computing. “What’s more, these toolkits can cost $50,000 or more, and require 30-plus days of onsite consulting to build and customize an evaluation environment. We wanted to provide a cheap and easy way for users to get up and running quickly with a single product. The Platform ISF Starter Pack is an ideal entry into private cloud computing for organizations that want to first demonstrate the value of private cloud to their organizations without making a large upfront time or resource investment.”

The Starter Pack also includes training and consultation to get you going.

Unrelated: I really like Platform’s spiffy logo.

Whamcloud aims to make sure Lustre has a future in HPC

John Leidel — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 13:25:33 +0000

Brent Gorda

insideHPC had a chance this week to sit down with the executives of the newly minted Whamcloud, Brent Gorda [CEO] and Eric Barton [CTO]. Many of you probably know Brent from his work within the US Department of Energy supercomputing circles. He’s also very active in organizing various technical and community events for the IEEE/ACM Supercomputing conference series. Eric Barton brings 25 years of development experience in supercomputing to the Whamcloud team. He has been working on Lustre since he was brought in to stabilize its network stack when the project first received DOE funding. Most recently he was a Principle Engineer at Sun/Oracle where he served as Chief Architect of the Lustre group.

As you may know, Whamcloud’s business model is centered on the Lustre parallel file system. But what exactly does this mean? Lustre is an open source project, managed and held by the Oracle Corporation via their acquisition of Sun Microsystems. Given that Oracle’s core business isn’t dependent upon Lustre, many folks with large-scale Lustre deployments have been worried about the progression of the code base. We wanted to dig a little deeper and find out exactly what Whamcloud is up to with respect to our little friend Lustre.

During the interview, Brent Gorda summed up their intentions best: “Reduce the complexity and increase the community.” Whamcloud intends to pour their own efforts into developing, hardening and improving what has become a real asset to the high performance computing community. They plan on doing so via code contributions to the root Lustre source tree. Unlike many other open source efforts that have become commercial products, they will not fork the source tree for their own endeavors. This is extremely important in building and maintaining their idea of community: Lustre is everyone’s Lustre.

Eric Barton

So how does affect their view of development? I asked Eric Barton what their three top goals were with respect to development. First, he said that Whamcloud is committed to working to improve the quality and stability of the code. Without a stable code base to work from, scalability is simply a pipe dream. This also implies de-prioritizing several of the features requested for the initial Lustre 2.0 release.

The second major development goal is to begin preparing for the exascale deployments. This one really threw me for a loop. However, Eric is very grounded is his thought when he explains why. Given that they want to always maintain the quality and stability of the file system, they need to begin to think intelligently about how to address systems with hundreds of thousands of nodes in the future. They want to ensure that these features make it into the code base gracefully, as opposed to dropping the features in the community’s cage all at once. Finally, he wants to make sure that the proper health and monitoring features gracefully make it into the source. Exascale means nothing if the platform can’t be kept stable long enough to run an application. A healthy system is a happy system.

So where is Oracle in all of this? Brent and Eric were very adamant that they do not intend to directly compete with Oracle. Oracle, via their inherited Sun support contracts, receives revenue based on the service and support of the Lustre file system. They both indicated that Whamcloud will carefully manage its relationship and impact on Oracle. Whamcloud’s focus is Lustre on Linux for HPC — particularly the high end — whereas Oracle is more focused on commercial deployments. Whamcloud would rather be good stewards of the community and garner revenue through non-recurring engineering.

All in all, Whamcloud seems to be off to a raging start. They’re growing on a daily basis [up to 10 employees at the time of the interview] and they’ve already had significant interest from partners and potential customers. What was recently a damsel in distress with Lustre, now has its knight in shining armor with Whamcloud.

HPC gives scientific computing on your cell phone a boost

John West — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 14:23:48 +0000

Reader Jay Blair sent me a pointer to this story from TACC about an Android app that runs a reduced model locally on the cell phone based on results computed over a long series of runs on Ranger.

The team performed a series of expensive high-fidelity simulations on the Ranger supercomputer to generate a small “reduced model” which was transferred to a Google Android smart phone. They were then able to solve problems on the phone and visualize the results on the fly.

The project proved the potential for reduced order methods to perform real-time and reliable simulations for complicated problems on handheld devices.

This approach is already used operationally in a variety of civilian and defense scenarios to allow professionals ranging from bridge fatique assessment teams to rapid crisis response forces to tradeoff some accuracy for an answer right now. Typically these reduced models have run on laptops or larger portable computers, but today’s mobile devices are becoming quite powerful in their own right.

This is not the first time that model reduction algorithms have been used to ameliorate the complexities of large-scale physical simulations. The advantage of the system designed by Knezevic and his colleagues is its rigorous error bounds, which tell a user the range of possible solutions, and provide a metric of whether an answer is accurate or not. The error bounds are based on mathematical theory developed in Prof. Patera’s research group at MIT over a number of years.

“We have a bound on how much accuracy we’re losing with our reduced model, so we can say with rigor that we’re doing supercomputing on a phone,” Knezevic said.

The quantitative understanding of the error bounds is very important, and its a nice addition in this work.

X-ISS Beefs Up HPC Administration Products and Services

John Leidel — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 22:42:46 +0000

X-ISS made two big announcements today regarding some new HPC-centric products and services. Those of you with reasonably sized Dell clusters might know X-ISS has the integration and services company that, on occasion, assists Dell in performing HPC deployments. The first press release officially announces what they call the DecisionHPC monitoring suite. The web-based monitoring and analytics package helps collect and report data on heterogeneous computing systems. The goal of DecisionHPC is provide information to systems administrations such that they can make more reliable decisions.

“With more than 500 HPC cluster system installations and support services since 1993, X-ISS has observed that most users of HPC systems struggle to maximize system productivity, aligning computing resource usage with organizational goals, and plan for future needs; these problems stem from what until now, has been a lack of detailed and insightful system statistics and analytics, and is the reason we have developed DecisionHPC. The ability to monitor, report on and provide immediate, historical and forecasted system data and analytics, even on heterogeneous and geographically separate systems, provides HPC users new capabilities that are critical to optimizing ROI on HPC investments.” [Deepak Khosla]

The second announcement involves managed HPC services. Not only can X-ISS install your machine now, they can also manage it remotely. ManagedHPC from X-ISS is the outsourced HPC system management service that allows customers without systems administration expertise in house to purchase HPC resources.

“As a part of this significant investment into the Engineering Department at the University of Wisconsin, we were able to procure a 142-node cluster computer from Dell and funding for a cluster system administrator. After an extensive search for this position, we only received a small handful of candidates, of which only a few were qualified. We didn’t have the timeframe to hire and train the right person for the job, which is where X-ISS and its ManagedHPC program came into play. X-ISS has been able to handle getting the system up and running,
software installations, and proactively handle technical issues so we could focus on working with the Engineering staff on specific code needs and department usage of this shared resource. It has allowed us to focus our attention where it was most needed.” [David Crass, University of Wisconsin Director of Research Computing]

ManagedHPC services include:

Turnkey outsource system management service
On-site installation & setup
Secure remote system monitoring, management & support
Seasoned X-ISS Team w/ more than 500 HPC installations
Proactive management & reporting process
Uses DecisionHPC to help guide growth

For more info on DecisionHPC, check out its website here.

Verari Changes the Sign Out Front

John Leidel — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 00:01:52 +0000

Verari has announced that they have changed the sign on the front of the building. Why, you ask? They’re focusing their business model specifically on providing hardware for cloud-like environments. You mean big datacenters? Yeah, those too.

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 Marc Brown, President and COO, Cirrascale. “These products, based on Verari’s patented Vertical Cooling Technology, generated over $500 Million in installed systems in the high performance computing and enterprise markets; these customer segments are the foundation of the burgeoning cloud market of today. This technology is a winning formula for the cloud customer.”

Cirrascale was actually organized under the “Verari Technologies” name while acquiring the intellectual property and other assets of Verari Systems back in January 2010.

Technology innovation is only half the story at Cirrascale; we must also innovate with our business model,” said Dave Driggers, Chairman and CEO, Cirrascale. “Cloud and Web 2.0 businesses are placing new demands on their suppliers. Unlike the enterprise data center customer served by traditional computer companies with established product lines and large IT consulting businesses, the agile, self-sufficient cloud and web 2.0 customers want to collaborate to define their platforms and create a purpose-built data center infrastructure that addresses their unique requirements.”

Quoting their release: “Cirrascale will focus on customers buying at the data center and rack infrastructure level, across a range of storage and computing models including low-power micro-servers, high density storage, scale-out multi-core, HPC cluster and GP/GPU computing. Customers are served by the same physical rack infrastructure that accommodates the customer-defined power, density and cooling requirements.” This sounds surprisingly like the previous Verari business model. It also sounds very much like the business model of Rackable, now SGI and portions of the Dell business. Ultimately, this is a very tough market niche.

For more info, read their full press release here.

Industry experts form new Lustre startup

John Leidel — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 10:00:39 +0000

Following the official acquisition of Sun Microsystems by Oracle Corporation, there have been quite a few HPC industry pundits debating the eventual fate of the famed parallel file system Lustre. Lustre made its name by anchoring super-scale computational centers such as Oak Ridge National Lab. Considering Oracle’s core business model does not rely on technologies such as Lustre, the many folks who depend on Lustre for their high performance parallel file system have question marks beside support and continued development. Well, the skies have cleared: lets give a round of applause to Whamcloud.

What’s Whamcloud? Whamcloud is a new venture-backed startup that emerged from stealth mode this morning dedicated to filling the gap for future Lustre development and support. Their business model is clear, concise and quite refreshing from a startup company in HPC. As a company, they have three goals:

Whamcloud will combine the world’s leading HPC and storage talent to evolve the state of parallel storage with a strategic focus on the most scalable applications, specifically high performance and cloud computing
Whamcloud will contribute and evolve open source file storage technologies, including the Lustre file system, upon an open-source Linux foundation using Linux storage technology
Whamcloud will focus on enabling open source Lustre storage technology in the industry by opening up file system support to the whole industry, with a hardware-agnostic storage certification and support program

So why the enthusiasm? Whamcloud has assembled a serious team of industry experts. Not the kind with the typical “CEO of Foo” resumes. These experts are real HPC gurus. So who’s lurking the halls of Whamcloud? Brent Gorda will hold the title of CEO. Those of you familiar with the Department of Energy know that Brent has been around big HPC for quite some time. He’s also a former contributor to the Supercomputing Cluster Challenge. Eric Barton, CTO, was most recently a Principal Engineer at Sun/Oracle and Chief Architect with the Lustre group. Robert Read, Whamcloud’s Principal Engineer, was also formerly at Sun/Oracle leading the charge for Lustre 2.0 development.

What’s not to like? You have two of the leading visionaries behind recent development efforts in Lustre and one of the thought leaders in Lustre implementation and operations.

There is tremendous demand for leadership from a professional engineering organization that is focused on evolving Lustre for the next 10 years of HPC and cloud storage,” said Brent Gorda, Whamcloud CEO. “History has proven that hardware-oriented purchases of open-platform file storage technologies are disruptive to the growth of scale-out storage technology. First and foremost, Whamcloud will ensure broad and continued international adoption of these technologies through a hardware-agnostic customer approach, across a broad array of data-hungry markets.”

Folks, this is one to keep and eye on. Lustre is and will continue to be a vital piece of the HPC puzzle. As larger systems and scalable applications begin to become the norm in HPC, the pressures of I/O and storage will continue to increase. Whamcloud is well positioned to take Lustre to the next stage of scalability and performance.

OSC partners with Moldex3D to bring industrial simulation software to Blue Collar Computing

John West — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 16:08:13 +0000

In mid-July OSC let me know about a new development with their Blue Collar Computing program, which is seeing something of a resurgence these days (then I went on vacation and forgot to publish it).

OSC has partnered with Moldex3D to demonstrate the performance of its pioneering 3-D simulations for efficient verifications of part/mold designs for educational use. As part of this partnership, Moldex3D is donating 30 eDesign licenses over a three-year period with a cost value of $1,050,000 in support of OSC’s Ralph Regula School of Computational Science education program.

…As part of its Blue Collar Computing™ offerings, OSC will provide manufacturers with the training and computational resources needed to use advanced modeling and simulation to test processes and product design. Industries participating in the OSC’s Blue Collar Computing program gain access to its advanced modeling and simulation resources and services in order to reduce the time and expense involved in determining proof of concept and designing new products, as well as to improve production efficiency. The program also uses custom-designed web portals to give businesses secure, easy access to processing power, and mass storage systems without the need for in-house infrastructure or computational science expertise.

More at the link above. This announcement is part of OSC’s partnership with PolymerOhio, a statewide effort to increase use of modeling and simulation in the polymer industry in Ohio. This kind of effort is key to catalyzing the adoption of HPC to solve “everyday” problems in industry and manufacturing in order to build out the “missing middle” in the HPC marketplace.