Newsletter – November 2005
Optimizing your Compute Resources
NEWS/ANNOUNCEMENTS
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CLUSTER RESOURCES RELEASES NEW MOAB GRID SUIT
Cluster Resources, Inc. released Moab Grid Suite 4.5 this month. The new grid management, monitoring and reporting tool reduces barriers to enabling grid computing by allowing organizations to create grids on the environments they already have, with little to no adjustments, providing political sharing solutions and improving ease-of-use on grid environments.
“While powerful, one of the highlights of Moab Grid Suite 4.5 is its incredible simplicity,” said Dave Jackson, Cluster Resources' Chief Technology Officer. “We have been doing grids for a number of years and have found that one of the greatest barriers to grid adoption is the fear associated with introducing an entirely new layer of software and complexity. With Moab Grid Suite, these issues are effectively eliminated. In many cases, a cluster can be rolled into a grid in a matter of seconds, with no new tools and no new training.”
Moab improves ease with seamless transitioning from clusters to grids with its support for heterogeneous resource managers, operating systems, hardware and other cluster features. Moab makes grid management and usage easier with a virtual view of resources that provides information on downed, idle and active nodes. To improve ease for end-users Moab has a Web-based access portal that lets end-users remotely submit and manage jobs through a graphical interface.
Moab also makes it easier for organizations to create grids with its political sharing policies and settings. With these features, organizations can manage a grid centrally while allowing contributors to manage their own clusters, so contributing organizations do not have to relinquish control of their computing investments. These and many other features make Moab Grid Suite an industry-leading solution that will enable more organizations to easily evolve from cluster to grid computing.
To learn more about Moab Grid Suite and its benefits, visit www.clusterresources.com/mgs. For product and purchasing inquiries, or for a free evaluation, e-mail info@clusterresources.com or call +1(801)873-3400.
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MOAB CLUSTER & GRID PRODUCTS ADDED TO HP/SUSE VALIDATION SUITE
Cluster Resources announced the Novell SUSE Linux and HP hardware validation of Moab Cluster Suite and Moab Grid Suite through the Novell/HP Validation Program for high performance computing (HPC).
The SUSE Validation Suite contains a variety of HPC applications certified through a Validation Program implemented by HP and Novell. The program allows for an application to receive certification when it installs and runs seamlessly with other validation suite solutions in an established HPC architectural setup. Cluster Resources used the program to certify the integration of the Moab products with the other validated components. The validation further demonstrates Moab's heterogeneous nature and provides an industry leading cluster and grid workload management solution to HP and Novell customers.
“We are proud to see Moab Cluster Suite and Grid Suite become an effective part of this validated cluster and grid solution,” said Michael Jackson, President of Cluster Resources, Inc. “HP and SUSE users can implement the Moab products to increase their system utilization up to 90 to 99 percent, a rate that is commonly 10 to 30 percent higher than that achieved without Moab.”
To download an evaluation copy of Moab Cluster Suite, visit www.clusterresources.com/eval. The Moab products also run on a variety of operating systems such as other Linux/UNIX distributions, Mac OS X and Windows.
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CLUSTER RESOURCES RELEASES TORQUE 2.0
Cluster Resources, Inc.TM this month released TORQUE Resource Manager* 2.0, an open source high performance computing (HPC) resource manager based on OpenPBS that has added over 1,200 improvements in the areas of scalability, usability and stability in the last 18 months.
“TORQUE's progress is remarkable for an open source product,” said Dave Jackson, Chief Technology Officer of Cluster Resources. “TORQUE has proven itself to be an effective and stable platform for thousands of clusters worldwide.”
TORQUE's move to 2.0 is based on the enhanced stability and capabilities contributed in the last year. The contributed patches improve open source resource management in the areas of scalability, usability, scheduling interface and fault tolerance. TORQUE's improvements since the last patch include an improved start up feature for quick start up of downed nodes, enhanced internal diagnostics, simplified install, and improved API reporting abilities.
“Congratulations to everybody for making TORQUE successful,” Jackson said. “We are still working with the community to improve usability, self-diagnostics, reliability and scalability. With these and other improvements, TORQUE will continue to become more intuitive and easier to use through joint efforts with many contributing sites.”
Community members may contribute to TORQUE Resource Manager by e-mailing help@supercluster.org. Cluster Administrators may download TORQUE for their own clusters at www.clusterresources.com/torque. Support for TORQUE or other software products such as Maui Scheduler may optionally be purchased from Cluster Resources at www.clusterresources.com/techsupport.
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Cluster Resources wishes to thank all of the visitors to our booth at SC|05. We enjoyed getting to know customers, partners and contributers. Cluster Resources presented on Cluster, Grid and Utility computing. If you are interested in any of these topics and will be attending next year's event, please e-mail info@clusterresources.com and let us know. We invite you to visit us again November 2006 at SC|06 at the Tampa Convention Center in Tampa Bay Florida. Learn more about the conference by visiting http://sc06.supercomputing.org/.
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DID YOU KNOW: INTEGRATING MOAB WITH XCAT
Many organizations have critical applications that require a custom compute environment to operate properly and effectively. These application requirements greatly limit the organization's flexibility in responding to dynamic changes in application workload, resource failures and adjustments in business priorities. Moab Cluster Suite can tightly integrate with IBM's xCat Cluster Management ToolSet to combat this problem, providing a highly optimized and flexible solution. Integrating Moab with xCat allows organizations to submit application tasks, expand cluster management functions and consolidate management.
Application tasks may be submitted using any of the following mechanisms:
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Command line (manual)
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Web based (manual or automatic)
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Desktop graphical cluster management tool (manual)
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Calendar based periodic trigger (automatic)
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Event based trigger (automatic)
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Load based trigger (automatic)
This flexibility allows organizations to initiate application execution based on time of day, admin need, network failures, external load, and a host of other factors. When a task is submitted, Moab first identifies compute resources which can best accommodate the request. Next, using xCat's architecture aware provisioning facilities, Moab then provisions the node to provide the complete required application computing environment.
Using Moab's industry leading quality of service, fairness and optimization policies, organizations better harness their resources and deliver on mission objectives. Leveraging xCat's broad architectural reach and resource management capabilities, Moab allows departments to bring all of their computing resources under a single umbrella and coordinate their use. Advanced accounting, reporting, and billing tools allow the organization to understand short and long-term workload requirements on a per application and per department level.
Moab Workload Manager®, Moab Cluster Manager® and Moab Access Portal® are trademarks or registered trademarks of Cluster Resources IncorporatedTM.
* TORQUE Resource Manager software developed by NASA Ames Research Center, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and Veridian Information Solutions, Inc. Visit www.OpenPBS.org for OpenPBS software support, products, and information. TORQUE is neither endorsed by nor affiliated with Altair Grid Solutions, Inc