TORONTO, April 8 -- GridCentric Inc., a Toronto-based software company, today announced the availability of Copper, a cluster management system for high-performance computing workloads. Copper combines virtualization and grid computing technologies to enable simple, efficient and flexible cluster deployment, management, and use.

The GridCentric Copper platform enables real-time, on-demand sharing of high-performance computing resources and makes cluster administration a one-click task. With Copper, organizations reduce IT expenditures through significantly lower installation and management costs, higher utilization of their physical infrastructure, and improved sharing of their data assets.

Operators of large clusters face enormous challenges due to system complexity -- compute clusters are typically composed of hundreds or even thousands of individual computers, each requiring separate software components for hardware provisioning and management, resource allocation, job scheduling, and application support. Initial setup of a compute cluster can take several months because of these challenges.

By combining technologies from cloud and grid computing, GridCentric's Copper platform provides server provisioning, resource management, job control, and high-level application support in a single integrated software package. With Copper, the time required to set up and configure a compute cluster goes from months to days. Additionally, Copper has built-in support for operating hundreds of "virtual clusters" on the same set of physical resources, scaling their compute footprints on-demand in real time -- the industry's first true high-performance cloud computing platform. Copper gives cluster users the power of a supercomputer with the ease-of-use of a PC.

"GridCentric's approach to cluster management will enable many organizations to service users in ways that would have otherwise been impractical or impossible. Our experiences with it to date have been very positive. Copper is the way of the future for many organizations," said Professor Michael Bauer of the University of Western Ontario, and Associate Director of the SHARCNET academic supercomputing consortium.

Copper has been in limited trial on a SHARCNET compute cluster located at York University in Toronto, Canada since late 2009, and is now open to all researchers from SHARCNET's 17 academic member organizations.

"GridCentric's Copper product represents a new class of cluster management software," said Tim Smith, co-founder and CEO of GridCentric Inc. "Systems integrators, cluster operators, and end-users will all benefit from Copper's unprecedented ease of installation, management, and use."

About GridCentric Inc.

GridCentric Inc. is a technology-leading systems, networking, and virtualization software company. It is the mission of GridCentric to make high-performance computing easy, without sacrificing performance and flexibility. GridCentric is a privately held corporation, and is funded in part by Rogers Ventures. GridCentric was recently named as one of the "Top 25 Canadian ICT Up and Comers" by the Branham Group.

About SHARCNET

SHARCNET was established in 2001. It is one of seven world-leading Compute Canada (http://www.computecanada.org/) supercomputing consortia. SHARCNET currently serves 14 universities, two colleges, and one research institute across western Ontario. For more information, visit http://www.sharcnet.ca/.

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Source: GridCentric Inc.