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Penguin Computing announced the immediate availability of new access and management features on its public HPC cloud Penguin Computing on Demand (POD).

POD’s new sign-up automation enables immediate user access to Penguin’s on-demand infrastructure. The sign-up procedure has been reduced to a simple process: After completion of a short web-based sign-up form, new users select an operating system image for a virtual gateway node that is then provisioned instantly for launch. After a virtual gateway server has been launched users can access POD’s HPC infrastructure by submitting compute jobs through a scheduler of choice. The POD compute infrastructure itself executes HPC compute jobs directly on physical compute nodes to ensure optimal performance and enable the use of Infiniband interconnects and GPUs.

POD’s new capabilities also include a web-based management dashboard. The dashboard enables privileged administrators to create and manage POD end-user accounts, assign accounts to gateway nodes, manage virtual gateway images and allocate storage resources. The dashboard also provides a graphical user interface for monitoring resource usage and track cycle and storage expenses.

Under the hood of the new management capabilities is a new storage system that is based on the distributed open-source storage system Ceph, which supports distributed file-based, block-based and object-based storage. The management of virtual gateway servers leverages OpenStack, an open-source solution for creating and managing large groups of virtual servers in cloud computing environments.

“With our new instant sign-up capability and management dashboard we have reached a milestone for POD. Penguin is now the only cycle provider that offers instant access to non-virtualized HPC compute resources,” says Tom Coull, GM of Software and Services at Penguin Computing. “We are also very excited about our new dashboard functionality that we developed in response to feedback from POD resellers and administrators at our largest customer sites who can now better support their POD consumers and track their respective resource usage.”

Penguin also announced today that due to the tremendous demand for POD cycles it has been increasing the available POD compute capacity by over 30%.

Live demos of the new features as well as live customer demos by Michael Waltrip Racing, Callaway Golf and IMMI will be shown in Penguin Computing’s booth 1217 at SC’12 in Salt Lake City from Nov. 12-15.