Supercomputing

IBM makes the case for cloud computing at Red Hat Summit

This post was written by Bridget Botelho, news writer.
The first hour of keynote addresses at the fourth annual Red Hat Summit at the Hynes Convention Center in Boston wrapped up with Jim Stallings, the general manager of enterprise systems division of IBM.

Stallings talked for about 30 minutes to a packed house about the ways in which data center infrastructure must change over the coming decade to handle increasing power costs, security issues and user demands for information.

“The new enterprise data center is greener, is open and is virtualized. It is much more dynamic and uses shared resources,” Stallings said.

Stallings made many mentions about cloud computing, which IBM refers to as dynamic computing, and said IBM will collaborate with companies to help them adapt their software for use in a managed cloud environment.

“Dynamic computing is the idea of not paying for peak capacity until you are at peak capacity. It is really a utility model, and industries are transitioning to this model today,” he said.
Stallings likened the evolution of the data center to that of businesses like banks, which have shifted from face to face to ATMs and Web-based enterprises. “With banking, you used to have to interact with a human, … then it moved to ATM machines, … and now we can electronically access our assets via the Web, and the software may be run from [some foreign country],” he said. “The physical bank as we used to think about it has changed completely.”

Many data center managers question the stability and security of cloud computing, but companies like Google, HP, Amazon.com and VMware Inc., use and advocate cloud computing environments.

Recently, VMware President and CEO Diane Greene said that VMware’s focus is on cloud computing.
Cloud computing appears to be the destination for enterprise data centers, and many are in the evolutionary stages today, Stallings said. “You don’t buy an enterprise data center, you evolve towards it in stages, starting with consolidation,” Stallings said.

Stallings threw out a lot of factoids and expectations about data center infrastructure but, oddly enough, did not use his pulpit to push IBM products.

Stallings’ only product mention involved a quick case study demonstrating how Volkswagen recently took 76 Unix systems and consolidated them onto six IBM mainframes to decrease its energy footprint.

Given that IBM appeared at Red Hat’s event, Stallings ended his presentation by flattering Linux. He said IBM uses Linux in its data centers, and expects Linux to be the standard operating system in cloud computing, where the OS is heavily used.

Linux still dominates the HPC arena

For some time now, Linux has been the dominant operating system in high performance computing. For everything from IBM, with its rockstar status supercomputer Blue Gene, to NEC or U.S. HPC players SGI and HP–the bulk of the leading HPC clusters today are Linux-based.

Four of the top five HPC systems in existence today are based on Linux, according to Top500 Supercomputing Sites, an independent web site that tracks the largest, fastest HPC deployments in the world. In 2005, when Top500.com started calculating which specific OS was dominating HPC, it found that Linux was used in nearly 80% of the world’s the fastest HPC systems.

The next TOP500 list will be released Nov. 13th (that’s tomorrow) during the Supercomputing Conference (SC07) in Reno, Nevada, but why wait until then for more Linux HPC goodness? UPDATE below: The list arrived early.

This morning our sister site SearchDataCenter.com broke the news that Sun Microsystems would be releasing two new systems designed to address the extreme computation, scale and storage requirements of today’s high-performance computing (HPC) customers. Called the Sun Constellation System the supercomputers are open computing environments that combine ultradense, high-performance compute, networking, storage, and software into an integrated “petascale” general-purpose system. Running Solaris, Linux and Microsoft Windows, the Sun Constellation System is designed to scale from departmental clusters to the largest supercomputer configurations, enabling customers to solve complex computational problems, the company said.

And that’s the first big Linux news of the day. Apparently, Constellation’s first user is the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC), which will put the finishing touches on a 504 trillion floating-point operations per second (teraflop) compute cluster in December. This CentOS Linux Cluster, named Ranger, will have 3,936 nodes, 123 terabytes of memory and 62,976 processor cores from AMD Opteron quad-core processors. All system components will be connected via a full-Clos InfiniBand interconnect. Eighty-two compute racks will house the infrastructure, which will sit in TACC’s J.J. Pickle Research Campus in Austin, Texas. IDC seems to think Constellation will make a pretty big impact in the HPC space. We’ll have to keep an eye out for it on future Top500 lists.

But wait, there’s more! According to 451 Group analyst and CAOS Theory blogger Jay Lyman, last week supercomputer superpower Cray rolled out its super scalable XT5 supercomputer and wouldn’t you know it, the thing runs Linux. It’s apparently the company’s biggest use of Linux to date, with Cray using AMD quad-core processors in a configuration of more than 1,000 CPUs to top 40 teraflops of performance. “As far as I know this is the highest density of Opterons you can buy in a system,” said Jan Silverman, senior vice president of corporate strategy, in an interview with EFTimes.com.

But let’s not forget about Microsoft’s HPC endeavors in the midst of all this Linux HPC love. Microsoft’s Windows Computer Cluster Server (CCS) is designed for the lower end of the HPC market, and industry watchers said the technology has been well received, particularly for small computing clusters. Vendors too have jumped onto the Windows CCS bandwagon, including HP, which extended a multimillion-dollar investment agreement with Microsoft to drive HPC into the mass market. It is also selling CCS 2003 as part of its HP Unified Cluster Portfolio, and Fujitsu Computer Products of America Inc., which recently published a best-practices paper for HPC cluster deployment, is using Microsoft Windows instead of Linux. But I’m still willing to bet that Linux has a lock on the list tomorrow. Call it an educated hunch.

Like I said, the list hits tomorrow at SC07. Let the chips fall where they may (and that’s a lot of chips — lolz!)

UPDATE: Or we could just have the list today. It’s out at 2:45 p.m. EST. Blue Gene again takes the top spot, but apparently there were plenty of surprises. More below… Continued »