New Sun clustering tools for terascale technical and supercomputing environmentsPalo Alto 30 July 2001 Sun released the HPC ClusterTools 4 software. It provides high performance computing (HPC) capabilities designed specifically for resource-intensive, high performance and technical computing environments. Sun HPC ClusterTools 4 is a complete suite to develop and manage a workload of highly resource-intensive applications on individual Sun systems, as well as clusters of these systems.
The source code is freely available
for developers through the Sun Community Source Code License
(SCSL) model. By the SCSL model Sun is committed to the open
development of key technologies, will spur innovation and foster
a broader relationship with the technical computing community.
Sun HPC ClusterTools 4 software realises a new high-performance,
multi-protocol implementation of the standard Message Passing
Interface (MPI), a full implementation of the MPI I/O protocol,
and tools for debugging, performance analysis and tuning of
technical computing applications. Programmers can now easily
port existing applications to individual and clusters of Sun
Enterprise systems and Sun Fire, the new symmetric
multiprocessor (SMP)-based systems with 24 processors. Now its
scales up to 2048 processes and 64 nodes,
which sums up to 1536 processors. It realises a stable and
scalable environment across a grid of systems and clusters.
Prism is the graphical programming environment. Now developers
can effectively debug,
monitor the performance and tune large-scale parallel
applications with an efficiency that is equal to a single
process applications. HPC ClusterTools 4 software additionally
supports parallel I/O operations. These can span across multiple
storage systems and multiple processors. Sun's Parallel File
System allows parallel applications to read and write large data
sets without having the serial bottlenecks of single storage
device interfaces.
The HPC ClusterTools 4 software enables end-to-end scalability
from individual single-processor Sun Blade 100 workstations to
Teraflop capable clusters of Sun Fire Midframe systems. Now it
is possible to work with a single binary compatible architecture
and a family with thousands of processors. It allows a wide
range of compute environments from small to large SMPs and
thin-node to fat-node clusters. It supports UltraSPARC III
based systems, Loadable Protocol Modules, Remote Shared Memory
protocol over the new generation of Sun interconnect hardware,
and advanced reliability, availability and serviceability (RAS)
and security features.
Sun has already delivered the Sun HPC ClusterTools 4 software to
various technical and high
performance computing centers and customers around the world
including RWTH Aachen,
University of Edinburgh, Danish Technical University, Myricom,
Inc., and University of California at Davis.
Sun HPC ClusterTools 4 software will be offered for free direct
Web download without Sun service and support for an unlimited
number of users at
http://www.sun.com/software/hpc/tryandbuy.html. The complete
product suite is available across the entire Sun system product
line, running the Solaris 8 Operating Environment, and can be
licensed for 750 US $ per system domain, including Sun service
and support.
The source code for the new Sun HPC ClusterTools 4 software will
be offered
for free to developers through the Sun Community Source Code
License program at
http://www.sun.com/solutions/hpc/communitysource .
Uwe Harms |
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