HPCwire
 The global publication of record for High Performance Computing / April 9, 2004: Vol. 13, No. 14

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Cluster Computing:

SCYLD SHIPS NEW 64-BIT, 32-BIT VERSIONS OF BEOWULF OS

Scyld Software, the leader in second-generation Beowulf clustering software, announced the immediate availability of the 29-series release of Scyld Beowulf for the Intel Xeon and AMD Opteron platforms. The 29- series significantly reduces the time necessary to develop and deploy a distributed parallel application by providing scientists and application developers with out-of- the-box integrated parallel programming code libraries, a scalable deployment architecture and cluster management interfaces.

Scyld Beowulf provides an integrated operating system platform designed specifically to address the performance, manageability and scalability issues in Beowulf clustering environments. The 29-series is the first Scyld release with native support for the 64-bit AMD Opteron and the Intel Itanium 2 architectures. In addition to 64-bit support, the 29-series includes software code library compatibility and binary compatibility with other market-leading commercial Linux distributions.


Often referred to as "cluster computing on steroids," Grid computing is for real. Web services, utility computing, .NET, CPU harvesting and distributed computing are just a few of the technologies that fall under the Grid computing umbrella. Gt04 -- a premiere enterprise Grid computing conference targeting industrial and commercial users -- will gather experts, and outline strategies and road maps for Grid deployment. For more information, visit http://www.gt04.com.

"High-performance computing applications in bioinformatics, computational fluid dynamics, electronic design and analysis as well as many others have massive processing and memory addressing requirements," said Donald Becker, founder and chief technical officer of Scyld Software. "The 29-series release of Scyld Beowulf enables cost-effective computing platforms based on open software and hardware standards to solve these needs. In particular the combination of the new 64-bit releases of Scyld Beowulf coupled with the AMD Opteron and Intel Itanium architectures dramatically expands the market reach for Linux cluster solutions."

In response to customer needs, many new features have been added to the 29- series release, including:

  • Integrated cluster management tools using either command line or graphical user interfaces, which simplifies management of a cluster and its infrastructure
  • Support for the latest high-performance network interconnect topologies, for improved application performance by providing high-bandwidth, low-latency connectivity between compute nodes
  • An enterprise-class job scheduler that can improve cluster utilization through better policy management, job scheduling and load balancing.

The high-performance interconnection options supported include Myricom Myrinet, Dolphin SCI and InfiniBand, in addition to standard support for Gigabit Ethernet.

"This new release of Scyld Beowulf with 64-bit platform support and key feature enhancements demonstrates our commitment to bring innovative high- performance computing solutions to our enterprise customers," said Marco Annaratone, VP and general manager of Scyld Software. "We believe this new release of Scyld Beowulf will provide outstanding performance and manageability enhancements for our cluster customers."

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