New cluster appliance products aim to simplify the build and support of High Performance Computing systems. Concurrent Thinking has announced the imminent availability of its concurrentCommand and concurrentControl system management appliances. These provide a comprehensive infrastructure for managing third-party servers through a Web 2 GUI or Command Line Interface. Scalable imaging capabilities allow system integrators and end-users to image complete clusters in near constant time, regardless of the number of compute nodes, while an O/S independent content management system offers the ability to configure and manipulate images with pre-defined HPC content. The products also provide full system-level and component-level monitoring, with real-time and historical views of IPMI hardware metrics, usage metrics and error conditions, and scriptable responses to any breaches of user-defined conditions. Other built-in tools offer system testing and benchmarking capabilities which may be used for factory acceptance tests and problem diagnosis. Used in combination with the concurrentProcess appliance, which provides the user and application-oriented services that are typical of a traditional cluster ‘head node’, Concurrent Thinking aims to make the process of building clusters from third party servers a straightforward, repeatable and easily supportable task. Concurrent’s appliance framework supports server and storage technology from multiple vendors including Dell, HP, IBM, Sun and Supermicro, as well as network technology including Ethernet, Infiniband, Myrinet and QsNet. Supported content, including commercial and open-source tools, middleware and applications, is available for multiple Linux operating systems including SuSe SLES and OpenSuSE, with Red Hat Enterprise, Centos and Scientific Linux support expected soon. “Our appliance strategy is all about making clusters easy – easy to build, easy to run and easy to support”, said Dr John Taylor, CTO of Concurrent Thinking. “But customers also want choice; that’s what they like about the cluster architecture. Years of experience in this marketplace have shown us that the conflicting requirements of simplicity and choice can only be offered if you have a highly systematic approach to the problem. This systematic approach is embodied within our hardware management and content management solutions. Our appliance framework then provides the mechanism to deliver this in a manner that minimises technical risks for both our partners and end-users.” Concurrent Thinking will be demonstrating their new products at the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC) in Dresden, Germany, June 17-20th.