ACADEMIA

ScaleMP announced vSMP Foundation Advanced Platform, an extension to its vSMP Foundation product. The new platform offers customers enhanced capabilities over the traditional SMP systems available with vSMP Foundation.

vSMP Foundation Advanced Platform offers:

-- On-demand SMP -- using the same cluster nodes to create a virtual SMP, providing customers with a unified architecture for all their supercomputing needs. Customers deploying large-scale clusters can now have on-demand SMPs provisioned by traditional provisioning systems such as Bright Cluster Manager, Insight CMU, ROCKS, XCAT, and others. On-demand SMP provides greater utilization by reusing the same systems for both distributed and shared-memory workloads.

-- Partitioning -- creating multiple smaller, isolated and independent SMP systems from a larger one allows different groups to work on a dedicated resource rather than share the same SMP machine and interfere with one another. vSMP Foundation Advanced Platform also provides tools to resize system partitions to accommodate a customer's changing needs.

-- Support for very large SMPs -- vSMP Foundation Advanced Platform offers greater system scalability, enabling the creation of a Very Large Virtual Machine (VLVM) from over 32 systems.

-- Active-active multi-rail InfiniBand support -- using multiple HCAs in parallel, vSMP Foundation Advanced Platform provides an improved performance for the most demanding applications. This unique capability removes the need for distributed application awareness with multi-rail InfiniBand. In addition, it allows customers to design virtual SMPs to deliver the needed performance based on the number of cores in the system and application requirements. vSMP Foundation Advanced Platform supports up to 4 parallel InfiniBand links providing up to 224Gbps per node using InfiniBand FDR (56Gps) -- over 3 times more bandwidth than SGI's Altix UV product line.

"ScaleMP has always been at the forefront of high-performance computing systems by delivering powerful tools that allow customers to completely utilize all their resources," said Shai Fultheim, founder and CEO of ScaleMP. "Our vSMP Foundation Advanced Platform is no exception, offering customers SMP capabilities that are practically impossible to get with traditional SMPs, such as repurposing same cluster nodes for virtual SMP on an as-needed basis."

Pricing and Availability

vSMP Foundation Advanced Platform is priced at $800 per socket.

General availability of vSMP Foundation Advance Platform is expected on November 21, 2011.