IBM Makes HPC Easier

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IBM has introduced a new way for organizations of all sizes to buy and acquire a full HPC management suite including a community edition for those just starting out. According to Gabor Samu, Portfolio Marketing Manager, HPC, “The new IBM Platform LSF Suites are packages that include more than IBM Platform LSF, they provide additional functionalities designed to simplify HPC for users, administrators and the IT organization.”

The IBM Platform LSF product family is a powerful workload management platform for demanding, distributed and mission-critical HPC environments. It provides a comprehensive set of intelligent, policy-driven scheduling features that enable you to take full advantage of your compute infrastructure resources and provides up to 150X greater throughput for faster time to result.

Gabor Samu, IBM

Gabor Samu, IBM

Says Samu, “Platform LSF has become even more essential given the demanding and constantly changing nature of today’s HPC environments.”

Across enterprises of all sizes, application capability and data volumes continue to grow significantly, driving the need for more and more compute capacity and high performance management and analysis tools. Even in traditional high performance computing (HPC) environments, multiple compute silos, uneven processing, design cycle leaks and delayed results are common. Facing increasingly restrictive economic pressures, organizations are looking for better ways to improve IT performance, reduce infrastructure costs and expenses, and meet the demand for faster time to solution and market.

He notes that today’s organizations are facing new and intensified competitive challenges. They are looking to HPC to address many of these problems and leverage the technology to bring products to market “better, cheaper, faster.” This creates an increasingly complicated IT environment – carefully managing this environment has become essential.

“With data volumes growing, the size of your clusters are growing as well,” he says. “These factors challenge you to administer the environment to get the most out of it and ensure that your users are receiving maximum benefit. It all boils down to making sure you can allocate the right resources to the right users at the right time.

“You’re walking a tightrope meeting different organizational needs,” he continues. “Are you agile enough to meet these conflicting demands both from the users and the business itself? What new technologies can your introduce into your environment – such as accelerators – to make your HPC resources function more smoothly and cost effectively? And can you do this efficiently, with out being saddled with large financial outlays?’

The Platform LSF product family helps you ensure that all available resources are fully utilized by enabling you to take full advantage of all technical computing resources—from application software licenses to available network bandwidth. The Platform LSF family can help:
• Reduce operational and infrastructure costs by providing optimal SLA management and greater flexibility, visibility and control of job scheduling.
• Improve productivity and resource sharing by fully utilizing hardware and application resources, no matter where they are located.

Now IBM has introduced simplified packaging that makes it easier for you to choose what you need. IBM Platform LSF Suites provide an all-in-one solution that is inclusive from the ground up – from provisioning to job scheduling and cluster administrator and management to a web-based application-centric portal.

lsf“These not only include the application portal, but also infrastructure life cycle management as well,” Samu explains. “It all depends on the Suite your choose – one is targeted to work groups and the other is geared toward assisting departmental level HPC. You get a wide range of capabilities in a single package.”

He points out that if you choose not to purchase the suites you can select à la carte from the various add-ons that provide different levels of capabilities.

For organizations or users just starting out with HPC, IBM Platform LSF Community Edition and IBM Platform Cluster Manager Community Edition are available no-cost downloads from IBM developerWorks.

IBM Platform LSF Community Edition is a fully-integrated solution for HPC management featuring cluster provisioning and management, workload scheduling, application-centric portal and an MPI library.

From small to large infrastructures, Platform Cluster Manager, Community Edition is the framework of choice for infrastructure lifecycle management. From bare metal provisioning to application deployment, it includes all the scalable tools needed for OS patching, firmware update, monitoring and reporting. It greatly benefits from advanced features like the cluster template framework that allows admins to import pre-configured, certified cluster templates for rapid solutions deployment and includes its own GUI driven cluster designer so the admins can tune the install flow and manage install dependencies. Platform Cluster Manager is certified up to 2500 nodes.

Comments

  1. PBS pro has gone open source with a Redhat model. I wonder how IBM will handle the high cost of Platform LSF and other platform computing related products.

  2. DArtanean says

    All of HPC is a value prop. Open source doesnt mean no cost.