HP is the LINUX market leader and has recently introduced a family of pre-configured compute clusters, termed "Unified Cluster Products", to facilitate configuration, deployment and service. Those are based on the three most important architectures, namely the x86, and x86 with 64 bit extensions, and IA64. Correspondingly HP has introduced UCP3000, UCP4000, and UCP6000. Besides 1st and 2nd level support, HP is pre-testing the entire software stack that goes on the cluster, and this helps supporting customers looking to a Linux deployment. A similar approach has been taken for the technical computing market place as well as for commercial deployments, the latter being based on the HP Linux Reference Architecture (LRA).
While the paper will summarize some major accomplishments in the LRA space, it will provide a more detailed discussion about the technical market. Specifically the "XC" software stack will be described. This consists of an Open Source source management tool that is integrated at HP with Load Sharing Facility (LSF) of Platform Computing, Inc to provide flexible job-management and scheduling capabilities. In addition, various interconnects are transparently supported at run-time by the high-performance HP MPI library, which therefore streamlines the ISVīs version release and also provides additional performance gain over other MPI implementations. Finally, a suite of software development tools from Open Source and 3rd party vendors are provided for compiling, debugging and profiling of codes in Fortran, C, and C++.
Two case studies illustrate the usage environment. The first case study is on an AMD-Opteron-based compute cluster and is about porting and debugging a CFD code using TotalView from Etnus, inc.
The second case study demonstrates the interplay of the Open Source resource manager "SLURM" with LSF for some capability and capacity workloads. Using the XC software stack allows enterprises to leverage the economies provided for by the Open Source, while retaining the HP level of support and engineering prowess of proprietary environments. Therefore it helps customers significantly reduce the total cost of ownership.
Joseph Pareti, Hewlett-Packard GmbH, Loc. SUO04