Red Hat turns to Platform for Linux cluster charge

Getting its Rocks on

By Ashlee Vance in Reno • Get more from this author

Posted in Servers, 14th November 2007 15:26 GMT

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SC07 Red Hat and Platform Computing have opted to attack the high performance computing realm together.

The software makers this week touted a partnership will see Platform marry its Open Cluster Stack with Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The end result? The Red Hat HPC Solution, of course.

Linux remains the dominant force in the clustering market. And this deal opens a chance for Red Hat to capitalize on that success.

Red Hat gains access to Platform's cluster manager, file system, workload manager and development tools. The management software helps out with things such as cluster installs and job scheduling.

As it happens, Platform already ships OCS for RHEL and CentOS. Now, however, we see Red Hat branding and promoting its own product. Red Hat plans to reveal a list of supported hardware for the software by the end of this year. In addition, it looks to make special cluster packages aimed at smaller customers.

Red Hat made this announcement at the Supercomputing conference here in Reno where Platform also promoted Version 5 of OCS.

"Platform OCS 5 has been developed specifically to improve performance and simplicity, while also lowering the costs of supporting and operating an HPC infrastructure," Platform said. "Traditionally, cluster deployments are time, service and personnel-intensive, with an average install time per node of three to four minutes. Supporting an image-based install, Platform OCS 5 can cut deployment time by up to 75 percent — making it one of the fastest cluster deployment toolkits available."

OCS relies on some of the open source Rocks cluster software developed at the San Diego Supercomputer Center. ®

Bootnote

While Platform plugged Rocks in its statement about this partnership, we're told that Project KUSU is the base of OCS.

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