Red Hat Takes on HPC Market, Microsoft - Page 2

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Red Hat isn't the only Linux vendor active in the HPC space. Rival Linux vendor Novell has it own play as well.

"By looking at the Top500.org Web site you can quickly see that SUSE Linux Enterprise Server is the operating system of choice on the world's largest HPC super computers in use today," said Michael Applebaum, senior product marketing manager for SUSE Linux Enterprise.

"Of the Top 500 supercomputers, more than 85 percent are running on Linux. And six out of the top 10 are running SUSE Linux Enterprise Server," he told InternetNews.com.

One challenge that Novell is seeing in the HPC market is many customers want to virtualize their workloads sooner rather than later, he said. But each percentage point users lose in performance because of the hypervisor overhead requires an incremental investment in hardware. In addition, there are a couple of operating system challenges, such as debugging and self-healing, which HPC customers need to have addressed.

"We will see great improvements in such areas in the upcoming SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11, which will be released in the first half of 2009," Applebaum said.

Although Red Hat's product competes with Novell, Red Hat's Riveros preferred to take aim at another product.

"Red Hat HPC Solution is for price-conscious customers or customers new to HPC computing," Riveros said. "It competes against do-it-yourself solutions that customers put together and maintain themselves and it competes against Microsoft Windows HPC Server 2008."