Cluster Computing:

SCALI RELEASES NEW PRODUCTS FOR MULTI-PLATFORM CLUSTERS

Scali, a leader in high performance clustering solutions, announced the 4.3 release of their cluster management (Scali Manage) and message passing interface (Scali MPI Connect) software. The latest version includes support for enhanced scalability, new functionality and the ability to gain greater visibility into cluster/grid operations. The total solution provides increased customer value for large scale Linux-clustering and grid computing with heterogeneous environments in demanding industries such energy, defense, manufacturing and life sciences.

One of the design criteria for the release of version 4.3 of Scali Manage and Scali MPI Connect was to further enhance scalability, manageability, heterogeneous support and performance. In order to do this, the engineering team at Scali put in place a rigorous program to drive improvements. Scali Manage and Scali MPI Connect includes the following new offerings, built on existing capabilities and third-party heterogeneity:

• Scalability to 1000’s of Nodes: Enhanced scalability of Scali Manage and Scali MPI Connect include increased efficiency of installation and configuration on large clusters plus a high performance parallel shell implementation that executes commands on over 1200 nodes in less than five seconds.
• Flexible grouping: Provides the ability to easily group resources in a cluster or grid environment such that systems can be treated as one or several coherent images.
• Usage accounting: Provides the ability to account for the consumption of a system's resources to support fully commercial services or internal "customers" in a cost center environment.
• History view: Offers a visual representation and analysis of past performance and system health.
• Torque integration: Offers batch queue management with increased scalability, fault tolerance, and feature extension patches.
• Flexible Licensing schemes: Floating Licenses simplify the administration of licenses that are no longer locked to a specific machine. OEM Licensing offers an easy to use approach to embedded solutions.
• Expanded InfiniBand Support and Performance: Offers broader commitment to the InfiniBand platform by supporting software stacks from leading InfiniBand vendors – InfiniCon, Mellanox, Topspin and Voltaire. Performance tuning exploits the full InfiniBand bandwidth and minimizes MPI overhead.

"The 4.3 release of Scali software continues to add value by enabling our customers to more effectively manage large clusters, accelerate installation and administration, gain visibility into cluster operations and ultimately increase the return on their IT investment," says Håkon Bugge, Chief Technology Officer and founder at Scali. "Recent large cluster installations have facilitated the process of further driving product scalability, functionality and heterogeneous support for truly complex cluster and grid environments."