Cluster Computing:
ALTREIA STUDY ON LINUX CLUSTERS IN THE GERMAN INDUSTRY
by Uwe Harms
Dr. Karsten Gaier, Altreia, recently published a study on the Linux Cluster
usage in the German industry. Additionally, he evaluated a questionnaire
concerning actual aspects of Linux Clusters in the MDA (Mechanical Design
Automation) environment. Development departments in the engineering arena, for
example in the automotive and aerospace, use small and huge clusters because
of the price/performance reasons. The study, based on data from May 2003,
looks for the distribution in the technical and scientific market.
In Germany, industry is extremely interested in Linux clusters as their
workhorse for sequential and parallel batch jobs. Audi, DaimlerChrysler and
Volkswagen are examples of this approach. Recently the chemistry company
Boehringer installed a cluster with 167 nodes, 334 Intel Xeon 2.8 GHz. The
peak performance sums up to 1.9 TeraFlop/s.
In the study, Karsten Gaier found about 65 German companies using 90 clusters
with 5650 processors. The automotive industry with its suppliers leads with
3100 processors, followed by the life science application, 1135 CPUs and the
aerospace industry with its 515 CPUS. Life science installed big clusters with
an average size of 227 processors. In the automotive industry the average is
only 80 processors. In the usage one automotive company leads with 14 clusters
with more than 1250 processors for a broad spectrum of applications like
Crash, CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) and EMC (Electromagnetic
Compatibility).
As Fujitsu-Siemens Computers started very early with Linux Clusters in 1999.
With 2100 sold CPUs, they are ahead of IBM and NEC. The status of Fujitsu
SiemensComputers of November 2003 is about 4500 processors in more than 120
clusters in academia and industry. Half of the companies install and operate
their clusters themselves, the other half is supported by hardware vendors or
specific service providers. Altreia got filled questionnaires from 19
companies, e.g. Audi. For them the Linux Clusters are an established component
of their computing environment. Some of their future planning, the cost
issues, the price/performance and the stability of the systems are discussed
in the study. But there are still some open questions like the porting of
applications to SMP systems based on PC hardware.
The content of the study is listed on the Altreia web site. A personal license
of the study costs in German 395 Euro plus VAT, the English edition costs 595
Euro plus VAT. http://www.altreia.com.
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