HPC technology has advanced quite a bit in recent years, with dramatically improved application processing performance across a widening range of disciplines - from computer generated designs and graphics to scientific calculations. But in speaking with our customers, we’ve noticed that even sophisticated HPC centers are still struggling to take full advantage of the processing capacity within the HPC infrastructure. Customers are increasingly using clusters to run a variety of applications and many are also dealing multiple SLA requirements, which can make it very difficult to orchestrate job management and submissions to ensure optimum cluster utilization and performance.
With that in mind, we built LSF 8 to better handle even more complex workload scheduling in distributed HPC environments, allowing more work to be done with fewer computing resources in the fastest time possible. It provides new intelligent workload scheduling capabilities, such as letting IT managers delegate administrative rights to the appropriate user groups, and incredibly useful enhanced fairshare rules. These new HPC management features continue to demonstrate why our market-leading workload solutions continue to dominate the market.
The new bells and whistles in version 8 include:
- the ability to delegate administrative rights to line of business managers
- live, dynamic cluster reconfiguration
- guaranteed resources to ensure service level agreements (SLAs) are met
- flexible fairshare scheduling policies
- unparalleled scalability to support the large clusters in use today; certified up to 100,000 slots.
The ultimate goal of all these new features is higher processing utilization. This will allow our customers to keep down IT costs while improving application processing throughput and getting jobs done faster!
Platform makes HPC in the Cloud a Reality
I wasn’t kidding when I mentioned that we’ve been busy these past couple months…besides launching Platform LSF 8 today, we’ve also announced three solutions geared toward helping HPC users to take advantage of high performance computing cloud bursting. For those HPC users that often face unpredictable workloads, they can now save time and money by taking advantage of the cloud when internal resources are overloaded. We’ve outlined three separate paths for HPC users to dynamically scale resources to handle peak workload necessary for HPC applications:
Solution 1 – Integrated Cluster with the Cloud – Uses Platform LSF’s dynamic host capabilities along with a cloud service, such as the Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), to provide cloud resources that appear to operate within the HPC datacenter (local IP addresses, host names, etc.).
Solution 2 - MultiCluster to the Cloud – Allows users to start up a new cluster in any cloud or hosting provider environment without a dedicated link such as Amazon VPC.
Solution 3 - Dynamic Cluster Extension to the Cloud – Platform LSF and Platform ISF create a powerful and flexible cloud management solution that dynamically scales clusters to include resources within the data center infrastructure or externally to a cloud provider based on the application workload.
All of these paths to HPC clouds are based on products we ship today. They allow customers to improve utilization and resource capacity while avoiding the costs and delays due to lack of resources. For more information get a copy of our HPC Cloud Bursting whitepaper.
If you’re here in New Orleans attending Supercomputing ’10 (SC’10), feel free to stop by the Platform Computing’s booth (#2739), and we can show you a demo of these new products and offerings. Hope to see you there!
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