ENGINEERING

Absoft Corporation has announced a new Cluster Builder’s Kit version 2.0 which replaces its Beowulf Tool Kit v1.0. The Cluster Builder’s Kit (CBK) is used in conjunction with Absoft high performance compilers and debugging solutions and is designed to facilitate building and setting up cluster systems. Customers who purchase Absoft compilers for clusters receive the CBK at no additional charge. The software products included with the Cluster Builder’s Kit CD are the leading open source software packages commonly used in today’s cluster configurations. Absoft supplies source code, pre-built libraries and executables optimized for Absoft compilers as a service to customers. Clusters are groups of computers based on commodity hardware, on a private system network, with open source software (Linux) infrastructure. The designer can improve performance proportionally with added machines. The commodity hardware can be any of a number of mass-market, stand-alone compute nodes as simple as two networked computers each running Linux and sharing a file system or as complex as 1024 nodes with a high-speed, low-latency network. Major components of the CBK include: - LAM/MPI v7.1 from Open Systems Laboratory (for message passing) - MPICH v1.2 from Argonne National Laboratories - ScaLAPACK from netlib (for parallel numerical analysis and linear algebra) - Torque from supercluster.org (for batch scheduling) - Ohio Supercomputer Center Parallel Training Tutorial - “Beowulf How To” by Jacek Radajewski and Douglas Eadline - “Cluster Quick Start” by Douglas Eadline - MPI 2.0 Standards Document from the University of Wisconsin, Madison - MPI User Guide in FORTRAN by Dr. Peter S. Pacheco, University of San Francisco and Woo Chat Ming, University of Hong Kong The Absoft CBK is included with the purchase of all cluster licenses of Absoft high-performance Fortran compilers. Commercial and Academic pricing for the Absoft cluster licenses are available based on the number of nodes and simultaneous users hosted on the system. Versions of the Absoft CBK are available for 32-bit x86, PowerPC and POWER based systems as well as 64-bit x64, PowerPC and POWER based systems. Product and detailed information is available at http://www.absoft.com/Products/Clusters/clusters.html , by calling Absoft at (248) 853-0050, or by emailing sales@absoft.com. For cluster users who require a complete Software Development Kit, Absoft and IBM announced at Supercomputing 2004, Absoft’s new HPC SDK for IBM’s Linux on POWER based systems. The new Absoft HPC SDK differs from the CBK in that the HPC SDK includes a complete collection of pre-configured tools for the Compile, Debug, Run and Optimize stages of developing high performance applications for clusters. For product information and details visit http://www.absoft.com/Products/Clusters/hpcsdk.html .