Clustering For the Rest of Us


SAN JOSE, Calif. — IBM took the wraps off a
variety of pre-packaged and pre-tested cluster servers targeted toward small to
mid-size organizations Tuesday.

Under the marketing name of “Departmental Supercomputing Solutions,” the
Armonk, N.Y.-based company is targeting universities, departments within
universities and research companies with a combination of IBM eServers like
its Intel Xeon-based BladeCenter HS20, AMD Opteron-based
e325 and xSeries 335 and xSeries 345 systems.

The company said the management server acts as the single point of
administration for all cluster resources, which communicates with the other
servers in the cluster over a highly secure Ethernet virtual LAN (VLAN).


Each of the offerings also has a separate Gigabit Ethernet VLAN to interconnect all servers for application inter-node communications and a terminal server network for remote console applications.

“We’ve identified nine different optimization tools for the little guy
getting started,” Art Wieboldt, IBM Departmental Supercomputing Solutions
marketing manager told internetnews.com. “The next step is
application specific clusters. For that we are targeting key ISVs and key
industries.”

Wieboldt said the ramp up of enterprise clusters is based on the
availability of less expensive, over-the-counter hardware such as 2-way and
4-way servers and the fact that so many of these systems are already in data
centers. For IBM’s customers, Wieboldt said reliability and security remain
the hot button issues.

IBM said the systems range from around $25,000 for a baseline system to
$35,000 to $38,000 for an average Xeon- or Opteron-based system. At the top
of the line, IBM said it offers 32 node system made up of
two-way blade servers for roughly $200,000. The company said the
prepackaged systems can also easily fit into its e-business On Demand Center
in Poughkeepsie, N.Y.

Once the exclusive domain of governments, large-scale universities and
Fortune 500 enterprises, clustering servers and workstations together is trickling down to
small- to medium-size businesses (SMB).


IBM is one of several companies turning the enterprise onto
supercomputing aspects during this week’s ClusterWorld Conference here.

IBM has also received support from a variety of HPC software tool
vendors, including Sunnyvale, Calif.-based PathScale. The two
companies announced a joint marketing deal Tuesday that tailors
PathScale’s AMD64-optimized Linux compiler suite to IBM HPC
customers on a global basis.


IBM said it will offer a trial version of the
PathScale EKO Compiler Suite, including C, C++ and Fortran 77/90/95
compilers, with one of its new Departmental Supercomputing Solutions based
on the IBM eServer 325.

Annual subscription fees for the complete PathScale Compiler Suite start
at $1,495 per license, the company said in a statement. The license includes
software, updates, upgrades and support services.

Get the Free Newsletter!

Subscribe to our newsletter.

Subscribe to Daily Tech Insider for top news, trends & analysis

News Around the Web