NCSA NEWS

SDSC and Compaq Announce Alliance

released July 11, 2001

 

Contact
David Hart
SDSC
dhart@sdsc.edu
858.534.8314

Combination Provides Powerful Commodity Supercomputers with an Open-Source Easy-to-Use Clustering Operating Environment

SAN DIEGO — The San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California, San Diego, and Compaq Computer Corporation (NYSE:CPQ) have announced their teaming to provide an industry-standard, high-performance computing platform based on the easy-to-use open-source NPACI Rocks Clustering Toolkit from SDSC and Compaq's ProLiant line of servers.

This alliance will enable the easy and confident deployment of high-performance clusters with Compaq's extensive hardware support and the high-performance cluster management from the NPACI Rocks system with advanced recovery capability for cluster node failures. These high-performance computing clusters will provide the most stringent computing needs for the academic, research, and technical markets as well as offer a stable, supported, standardized platform for the increasing demands from financial, multimedia, and data-serving markets.

SDSC and partners at the University of California, Berkeley, have created the NPACI Rocks environment (http://rocks.npaci.edu/), based on the Red Hat 7.1 version of the popular Linux operating system, specifically for clustering to enable the installation, configuration, and optimization of clustered Compaq servers. Customers can expect a reliable integrated turnkey solution for high-performance computing needs with increased performance, streamlined administration, and simplified scalability.

Gary Campbell, ISSG CTO said, "A cornerstone of Compaq's systems business strategy is to develop strong relationships with industry market leaders to deliver integrated solutions for the distributed enterprise. Today's announcement with the San Diego Supercomputer Center is a tangible example of this strategy. We plan to team with SDSC to continue delivering jointly tested, integrated and optimized cluster systems. Compaq's tightly integrated solutions, based on industry-standard platforms with leading price/performance, will increase the development and deployment of commercial cluster applications to provide a much needed solution to meet the ever increasing processing demands of research and IT markets."

"The Rocks software allows us to transfer SDSC's 16 years' experience operating the world's most powerful computing environments to groups interested in managing their own Linux clusters," said Fran Berman, director of SDSC and NPACI. "The impact to discoveries in science and advances in other computationally demanding areas will be dramatic as even more research is conducted on locally managed high-performance resources. This transfer of expertise through partnership with Compaq is an important example of how NSF support for development of information technology yields significant scientific and economic benefit."

The NPACI Rocks management software from SDSC adds functionality to the base Linux distribution without specific kernel hooks. This general approach allows Rocks to handle the natural evolution of Linux updates more effectively than other offerings in the marketplace. The Rocks Toolkit provides a stable, standard, supported platform for the deployment of advanced clustering applications. It enhances the Linux cluster environment with features that allow users to start, observe, and control processes on cluster nodes from the cluster's front-end computer while supporting standard Linux interfaces and tools. The result is a stable and extensible environment that appeals to both end users and software developers.

"Rocks is designed to support a wide variety of hardware by leveraging a enormous wealth of open-source tools and a market-leading Linux distribution," said Phil Papadopoulos of SDSC, leader of the NPACI Rocks development effort. "It adds to the base RedHat distribution with techniques and software to make Linux clusters easy to deploy and maintain because it retains RedHat's familiar installation and de facto standard RPM packaging tool. We're working with Compaq to further improve the stability of Intel-server clusters because of their deep expertise in computer health management, solid hardware platforms, and responsiveness to market needs."

Compaq has been working closely with SDSC to develop a relationship that delivers cost-effective, manageable and scalable solutions for customers using the Beowulf-style of cluster computing. These solutions, including NPACI Rocks, are designed to reduce the requirement for on-site technical support while handling many of the traditional problems associated with traditional Beowulf systems. The Compaq/SDSC alliance focuses on these key areas when evolving their integrated products: reliability and performance, scalability and reduced administration and on-site technical support.

SDSC (http://www.sdsc.edu/) is an organized research unit of the University of California, San Diego, and the leading-edge site of the National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (NPACI) (http://www.npaci.edu/). As a national laboratory for computational science and engineering, SDSC is funded by the National Science Foundation through NPACI and other federal agencies, the State and University of California, and private organizations. For additional information about SDSC and NPACI, contact David Hart, dhart@sdsc.edu, 858-534-8314.

Compaq Computer Corporation, a Fortune Global 100 company, is the second largest computer company in the world and the largest global supplier of computer systems. Compaq develops and markets hardware, software, solutions, and services, including industry-leading enterprise computing solutions, fault-tolerant business critical solutions, networking and communication products, commercial desktop and portable products, and consumer PCs. The company is an industry leader in environmentally friendly programs and business practices. Compaq products are sold and supported in more than 100 countries through a network of authorized Compaq marketing partners. Customer support and information about Compaq and its products are available at http://www.compaq.com/ or by calling 1-800-OK-COMPAQ. Product information and reseller locations are available by calling 1-800-345-1518.

 

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