February 11, 2008
PROVO, Utah, Feb. 7 -- Cluster Resources Inc., a leading provider of workload and resource management software and services for cluster, grid, datacenter and utility-based computing environments, today announced the release and availability for download of the most recent versions of TORQUE Resource Manager and Gold Allocation Manager. Both TORQUE and Gold are open source solutions, and can be downloaded from hwww.clusterresources.com/downloads/torque/ and www.clusterresources.com/downloads/gold/, respectively.
“Cluster Resources continues to improve the performance and reliability of the open source applications we develop and maintain,” stated Michael Jackson, president of Cluster Resources. “Since TORQUE was released in a number of years ago it has been installed on many of the world’s largest clusters and grids. To date we have recorded tens of thousands of downloads from our Web site alone; this doesn’t take into consideration the numerous installs from cluster deployment kits and partners. And Gold continues to benefit sites that need and open source accounting and allocation management solution, providing valuable cost and resource sharing controls.”
TORQUE 2.3 -- Resource Management
TORQUE, an open source resource manager based on the original *PBS project, now features high availability (or redundant) mode, which ensures clusters will continue to run even if the host server fails. Two host servers will boot at the same time but only one server does a complete boot. The backup server partially boots, and then regularly cycles between a sleep mode and checking the main host server for system failures every second. If the backup server detects the head node has gone down it will immediately replace the failed node.
This most recent version of TORQUE includes the long-awaited job arrays. Job arrays allow multiple jobs to be created at one time with one qsub command. Each job within an array runs using the same script in nearly identical environments. Users have the option of having each job in the array run slightly different actions based on defined variables. A job naming convention within this feature allows users to reference the job array as a whole or to reference an individual job within the set.
Additional new capabilities include dynamic jobs, advanced diagnostics, high throughput support and other functionality. Customers who purchase Moab Workload Manager receive free technical support for TORQUE.
Gold 2.1.5 -- Allocation Management
Significant performance enhancements have been made to Gold Allocation Manager, an open source accounting system, including the addition of indexes to tables, which increases database performance dramatically. Karl Lindekugel of ASU and Brock Palen of LSU contributed this improvement, demonstrating that the use of indexes speeds up common operations such as balance, reservation, charge and bank statements by as much as 10x. The ability to query based on a NULL or NOT NULL value of object attributes was also added, and improvements were made in responding to server failures.
“Cluster Resources is dedicated to maintaining our open source solutions with the ongoing input from the user/open source community,” added Jackson. “There is just no better development team, and no better way to enhance TORQUE and Gold than with the power of distributed peer review.”
Current Gold users do not need to upgrade in order to take advantage of index performance improvements. Indexes can be added to an existing Gold database to achieve the full benefit by running the “CREATE INDEX” queries found in bank.sql.in within the sql prompt. Additional information is located at www.clusterresources.com/downloads/gold/changelog.txt.
Gold is fully compatible with Cluster Resources’ Moab Cluster Suite and Moab Grid Suite, interacting to track and charge job resource usage, create billing statements and generate usage reports. Gold works seamlessly with Moab’s workload management, scheduling and advanced reservation functions.
About Cluster Resources
Cluster Resources Inc. is a leading provider of workload and resource management software and services for cluster, grid, datacenter and utility-based computing environments. With more than a decade of industry experience, Cluster Resources delivers software and services that enable organizations to understand, control, and fully optimize their compute resources and related processes. For more information, visit www.clusterresources.com.
The ever-growing complexity of scientific and engineering problems continues to pose new computational challenges. Thus, we present a novel federation model that enables end-users with the ability to aggregate heterogeneous resource scale problems. The feasibility of this federation model has been proven, in the context of the UberCloud HPC Experiment, by gathering the most comprehensive information to date on the effects of pillars on microfluid channel flow.
Read more...
Large-scale, worldwide scientific initiatives rely on some cloud-based system to both coordinate efforts and manage computational efforts at peak times that cannot be contained within the combined in-house HPC resources. Last week at Google I/O, Brookhaven National Lab’s Sergey Panitkin discussed the role of the Google Compute Engine in providing computational support to ATLAS, a detector of high-energy particles at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
Read more...
Frank Ding, engineering analysis & technical computing manager at Simpson Strong-Tie, discussed the advantages of utilizing the cloud for occasional scientific computing, identified the obstacles to doing so, and proposed workarounds to some of those obstacles.
Read more...
May 23, 2013 |
The study of climate change is one of those scientific problems where it is almost essential to model the entire Earth to attain accurate results and make worthwhile predictions. In an attempt to make climate science more accessible to smaller research facilities, NASA introduced what they call ‘Climate in a Box,’ a system they note acts as a desktop supercomputer.
Read more...
May 16, 2013 |
When it comes to cloud, long distances mean unacceptably high latencies. Researchers from the University of Bonn in Germany examined those latency issues of doing CFD modeling in the cloud by utilizing a common CFD and its utilization in HPC instance types including both CPU and GPU cores of Amazon EC2.
Read more...
05/10/2013 | Cleversafe, Cray, DDN, NetApp, & Panasas | From Wall Street to Hollywood, drug discovery to homeland security, companies and organizations of all sizes and stripes are coming face to face with the challenges – and opportunities – afforded by Big Data. Before anyone can utilize these extraordinary data repositories, however, they must first harness and manage their data stores, and do so utilizing technologies that underscore affordability, security, and scalability.
04/02/2012 | AMD | Developers today are just beginning to explore the potential of heterogeneous computing, but the potential for this new paradigm is huge. This brief article reviews how the technology might impact a range of application development areas, including client experiences and cloud-based data management. As platforms like OpenCL continue to evolve, the benefits of heterogeneous computing will become even more accessible. Use this quick article to jump-start your own thinking on heterogeneous computing.