Software Features Easy Installation and Configuration with Optional Support for Global File System (GFS), High Availability NFS and OpenFabrics Enterprise Distribution: Concurrent Computer Corporation, a leading provider of time-critical Linux operating systems, integrated software and computer solutions for mission-critical applications, today announced the general availability of RedHawk Cluster Manager software for its line of commercial off-the-shelf X-86 based systems including iHawk multiprocessor systems and ImaGen visual servers. The RedHawk Cluster Manager allows users to install and configure Concurrent iHawk systems and ImaGen visual servers as highly-integrated, high-performance computing clusters. RedHawk Cluster Manager includes a user interface to effectively utilize and manage a cluster’s full capabilities. "More and more of our customers are taking advantage of the economics of clustering, yet need to maintain real-time response and be easy to use," said Gary Beerman, Director of Real-Time Marketing, Concurrent. “We designed RedHawk Cluster Manager software environment to take on that challenge head on.” A cluster contains a host system and multiple nodes. Each node contains its own CPUs, memory, operating system and I/O subsystem and is capable of communicating with other systems via Ethernet LAN. Clusters can be used to run parallel programs for time-intensive computational applications, such as simulations and model analysis. Nodes can contain a hard drive or be diskless. Any Concurrent iHawk or ImaGen can be configured as a node in the cluster. RedHawk Cluster Manager includes a mechanism for network booting multiple nodes with the same version of RedHawk Linux, Concurrent’s real-time operating system compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux. It includes Grid Engine, an open source batch-queuing system developed by Sun Microsystems, that manages and schedules the allocation of distributed resources such as processors, memory, disk space and software licenses. Grid Engine is designed for use on computer clusters and is responsible for accepting, scheduling, dispatching and managing the remote execution of large numbers of standalone, parallel or interactive user jobs. RedHawk Cluster Manager companion products include RedHawk Global File System (GFS), High-Availability NFS and OpenFabrics Enterprise Distribution. GFS is a common storage file system that allows all computers on a network to locally maintain an identical, shared block device. GFS reads and writes to the block device like a local filesystem. Changes made to the filesystem on one computer are immediately written to all other computers in the cluster. GFS uses a lock module to allow the computers to maintain I/O consistency. RedHawk High Availability NFS provides the components needed for a resilient file system under Concurrent RedHawk Linux. A High Availability NFS cluster is a pair of computers acting as a single dual-redundant file system. In normal operation, each node acts as a primary supplier for a subset of the total filesystem resources. Upon failure of either node, the resources of the failed node are acquired and made primary on the working node. OpenFabrics Enterprise Distribution for RedHawk is a collection of software components intended for use on a computer cluster constructed as an InfiniBand network. InfiniBand can be deployed in clusters ranging from two to thousands of nodes.