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Cluster Resources Expands Beyond HPC

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Cluster Resources spent the better part of the decade working on high performance computing (HPC) automation. But now Cluster has announced it’s expanding its Moab unified intelligent automation middleware technology into the datacenter.

The company behind supercomputing automation software is moving into data center management.

As part of the move, the company is also changing its name to Adaptive Computing and
creating a second division to service the datacenter market.

Adaptive’s Moab software is widely used in high performance computing, including 12 of
the 20 fastest computers on the Top 500 supercomputer
list
.

Normally, HPC systems are considered a different animal than the standard issue
datacenter, but Adaptive Computing sees the two coming together.

“The foundation for data centers for the enterprise is starting to look a lot like the
architecture of supercomputing facilities. That’s creating an opportunity for ourselves,”
Peter ffoulkes, vice president of marketing for Adaptive Computing told
InternetNews.com. “The capabilities you need to automate a datacenter is exactly
what we’ve been doing alongside IBM and HP for years.

Effective today, Adaptive has two business units: Cluster Resources, which will
continue to serve HPC customers, and Adaptive Computing, which will serve the datacenter
market. For the datacenter market, Adaptive is introducing the Moab Adaptive Computing
Suite platform, which adds functionality specific to the datacenter.

The Moab series of products is built around a middleware technology that manages
workloads to match demand. Moab Adaptive Computing Suite (MACS) works in an IT
datacenter, where the usage is different. A supercomputer like Roadrunner at Los Alamos
National Laboratories is used to run massive simulations that can utilize every core.

A datacenter, on the other hand, might have applications assigned to each physical
processor. One server might run ERP, another runs HR, a third handles mail. So with the
workloads distributed and scattered, MACS had to be tuned differently.

Managing virtual machines alongside physical resources

MACS adds support for communication between enterprise apps, support for transactional
pipelines and lightweight apps that are often implemented in a virtual machine
environment. MACS also have the ability to manage virtual machines alongside physical
resources.

“That means when making priority and policy decisions about what workloads to place
where and when, you are now able to think of resources as just this virtualized pool of
logical resources. So whether an app is deployed on a single physical resource, a group
of physical resources or as part of a virtual machine environment inside of a server,
it’s just a part of the calculations we take into account,” said ffoulkes.

In addition, MACS has adaptive capabilities where it monitors requests coming in to
the network and can reconfigure the environment. As the need for resources change from
day to day, if there’s a different mix of requirements, such as needing more compute
power for certain tasks, MACS shifts resources around to give the priority applications
all the horsepower they need.

The Moab Adaptive Computing Suite is available now from Adaptive Computing.

Article courtesy of InternetNews.com

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