SAN FRANCISCO — Taking advantage of the power of multiple CPUs is a common task in modern
computing environments. Taking advantage of multiple graphics processors is
not.
It’s a situation that HP is aiming to rectify with the open sourcing of
its Parallel Compositing Library today. The technology could have wide-ranging implications for compute-intensive visualization tasks with large datasets.
“The APIs and libraries that we’ve built allow us to use graphics cards in
the nodes of a cluster, and we’re able to use their possessing power and the
additional memory that are on the cards to help do visualization
calculations much faster,” Jeffrey Wade, worldwide marketing manager of open
source and Linux at HP, told internetnews.com.
The APIs and libraries are software that run on top of the operating system
and are not direct kernel modifications.
Wade noted that the software was originally developed in HP’s high-performance computing group (HPC). By making it open source the idea is to
make is easier for ISVs that want to adopt the technology to incorporate the
technology into their applications. HP is also hoping to make visualization
mainstream, as well.
Wade explained that the Parallel Compositing Library will be useful for a
number of different industries and use cases. Among them are environments
with large datasets that need to be visualized, such as oil and gas with
seismic data analysis, medical imaging, weather modeling and any kind of
animation. Wade noted that HP had used this technology to help DreamWorks
with the rendering of the Shrek movies.
Taking full advantage of processing power is also a theme that HP is
expanding on with its Partner Virtualization Program.
The partner effort is
all about letting independent software vendors run virtual machines and
appliances on HP’s hardware in a supported manner. Previously, HP only
supported VMware and HP Integrity VM in the program but has now expanded the effort to Xen,
though only when running on Novell’s SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 and not
on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, which also supports Xen.
“Xen on SLES 10 has been out for longer,” Wade explained. “It’s just more
stable in their release.”
HP is now also adding Linux servers to its utility computing on-demand
effort. Until now the HP’s pay per use effort supported HP-UX, OpenVMS and
Windows. Wade noted that the reason why HP is adding Linux to the mix now is
a question of demand.
“We’re seeing more customers deploying in high-end data centers, and we’ve
now got enough demand to add Linux to our platform,” Wade said.
It is that demand for Linux that HP sees as pushing the open source
technology deeper into the enterprise, which is a topic that HP Executive
Vice President Ann Livermore is expected to talk about in her keynote at
LinuxWorld here this week.
“She’ll talk about the role of open source in IT today and where we stand in
the next generation date center,” Wade said. “She’ll be talking about scale
up, scale out manageability, security, green IT and things like that.”
