This week SGI announced the release of two software products. SGI Management Center is a new (as far as I know anyway) product that is a unified control interface for system management. ProPack 7 is the latest rev of the companies suite of parallel tools and libraries, including MPI and compilers.
SMC includes a rich graphical user interface (GUI) that provides a single view of system health, server status, performance metrics and software images. Display options include dashboards and a broad set of metrics thumbnails to allow users to evaluate the health of their entire system at a glance. SMC is also a bare metal, high-speed provisioning engine that incorporates a highly configurable image management and versioning system. It provides full remote server control using interfaces such as SGI Roamer, Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI) and Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM). It is designed to be a complete system to allow system administrators significant flexibility in configuring systems to local needs. SMC interfaces directly with Altair PBS Professional to provide workload driven dynamic provisioning.
ProPack is the software suite that includes MPI and compilers, and has been around for a while. I’ll wager that this release is primarily motivated by the need to support the forthcoming UV x86 shared memory platform
SGI ProPack 7 enables industry-leading application performance on standard Linux distributions. It leverages the next generation of SGI’s low latency Message Passing Toolkit (MPI), a MPI-2 compliant MPI library, to provide scalability to 10,000s of processors. ProPack 7 introduces MPI PerfBoost, which allows applications written for other MPI implementations such as Intel MPI, MPICH and Platform MPI (HP-MPI), to take advantage of the performance and scalability of MPI at runtime without recompiling. ProPack 7 also introduces the SGI Unified Parallel C (UPC) compiler.
ProPack 7 includes tools for IO acceleration, optimizing data placement, high-speed solvers and hard real-time support, all in a single software package. SGI’s current world performance records in SPEC CPU2006 integer rate with SGI Altix UV and SPECmpiL on SGI Altix ICE are powered by ProPack 7.
SMC is available right now for Altix UV and XE, Octane III, and Rackable and CloudRack systems, but not the Altix ICE (later this year). You can get ProPack 7 right now on everything but Origin 400 (no word on if/when ProPack 7 will move to this platform).
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