GOVERNMENT

Scyld Software, the leader in scalable Linux clustering software, announced the introduction of Scyld Beowulf Series 29 cz-5, the next version of its commercial-grade clustering solution. Key enhancements include advanced performance monitoring and additional hardware support. Additionally, Scyld announced expansion of its customer support offering to include a new Scyld portal. Scyld Beowulf Series 29 was designed from the ground up for ease-of-use. The robust, single point of management and unified process space of Scyld BeoMasterTM has been extended in the upcoming version. In addition to the current performance monitoring capabilities of BeoMaster, customers now have access to a graphical, browser-based, dashboard view of their entire cluster via integration with the Ganglia distributed monitoring system for high performance computing. Unlike other Ganglia implementations, the Scyld approach utilizes the efficient BeoMaster subsystem and APIs for data collection - eliminating compute node daemons and improving cluster scalability and performance. "There is no other product on the market with the level of functionality as Scyld Beowulf - and no other product that demonstrates as much thought in its design, or contributes as much to our operations as the Scyld product," said Joshua Bernstein, IT administrator at the University of Arizona's Lunar and Planetary Lab. "With the addition of Ganglia we will be able to quickly see those parts of the cluster that are running well, and those parts that need attention." Scyld Beowulf's advanced performance monitoring tracks real-time and historical resources utilization statistics such as processor load, memory utilization, and inter-processor communication. For system administrators, this type of data is used to supervise the usage of the cluster and intervene when resources are under- or over-utilized. Application developers, on the other hand, may optimize their code by monitoring how programs consume cluster resources. "Scyld Beowulf has always dramatically simplified Linux cluster management," said Marco Annaratone, General Manager of Scyld Software. "The new browser-based dashboard, integrated with BeoMaster, allows customers to quickly and easily analyze the performance of their systems, identify issues, and make informed decistions about allocating cluster resources. Ultimately, improved information means increased productivity and improved system ROI." Scyld Beowulf Series 29 cz-5 provides expanded hardware support for Penguin Computing's BladeRunner with SATA storage and new Infiniband drivers with automatic update of Host Channel Adapter (HCA) firmware. Scyld also announced that it is broadening support for customers with the introduction of a Scyld portal, which not only enables customers on support agreements to have self-service, 24/7 support capability, but also serves as a community site designed for sharing cluster knowledge as well as application experience. Scyld Beowulf Series 29 cz-5 will be available for customer shipment in March 2005.