INDUSTRY

Cluster Resources, Inc. unveiled today a new partnership with Panasas, Inc., delivering a holistic next-generation, compute and storage solution through the integration of Cluster Resources’ Moab Workload Manager with the Panasas ActiveScale Storage Cluster. This combined solution is believed by many to be the next logical step in the evolution of the cluster, allowing more unified system optimization, more adaptable resources and more powerful policy-based service delivery. The integration of these technologies provides Moab with the information it needs to more efficiently drive user workloads in a storage-aware manner, avoiding failures, and data bottlenecks while intelligently directing the ActiveScale Storage Cluster to adapt to storage requirements of the upcoming workload schedule. This partnership is creating a complete clustered environment that optimizes compute and storage resources for maximized return on investment “The collaborative work of Cluster Resources and Panasas enables HPC customers to more fully maximize the value of their infrastructure by tightly mapping Panasas Storage Clusters to the workload that accesses them under a single policy engine,” said Len Rosenthal, chief marketing officer of Panasas. “Customers will have the ability to schedule and run workloads in order to achieve maximum I/O performance in an intelligent and highly adaptive manner in line with high-level mission objectives.” Cluster Resources and Panasas are currently delivering on the early phases of the integration effort allowing Moab to automatically learn and even predict the I/O requirements and characteristics of cluster workload. Further, Panasas is generating and exporting storage contention information that is now being used by Moab to prevent over-commitment of storage resources, minimizing data thrashing through intelligent workload selection. The joint solution also allows the correlation of storage with workloads for reporting, billing and accounting purposes and provides other benefits such as improved overall response time and automated handling of dynamic changes in the system. Additionally, Moab will be integrating with the Panasas Storage Cluster to identify jobs in the queue and reallocate, where necessary, storage resources before a job starts in order to maximize data transfer rates and increase storage productivity. By mutually sharing information with Panasas Storage Clusters, Moab will provide a more effective allocation of storage resources by fine-tuning the selection of when and where to launch data-heavy workload. At the same time, the Panasas Storage Cluster will optimize the data placement to enhance both current and future storage performance. This approach allows the respective tools to work together in a collaborative fashion while continuing to do what they do best “Imagine a storage solution that eliminates data hotspots before they occur. Imagine a system that schedules workload in space and time allowing both compute and storage resources to continuously operate at peak performance,” said David Jackson, CTO of Cluster Resources. “This is how high performance computing should have been done from the beginning,” The partnership of Cluster Resources and Panasas unites two HPC industry leaders in clustered high performance computing. The Panasas ActiveScale Storage Cluster is the industry’s most comprehensive offering of storage systems for HPC applications, including oil & gas exploration, life sciences, academic/government, financial risk analysis, and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) markets. Cluster Resources’ Moab product line is the leading orchestrating and scheduling tool of advanced HPC environments. Using Moab’s active learning technology, the scheduler identifies the usage footprint of jobs as they run and schedules workloads to keep the storage system and compute resources constantly within a performance “sweet spot.” These powerful capabilities allow network administrators to automate tasks, decrease downtime and improve cluster availability to take on more jobs and users. “We’re excited to work with Panasas in providing customers with a more complete HPC solution that is highly advanced, flexible, and intelligent,” said Jackson. “This joint solution will orchestrate and coordinate storage, job selection and compute resources, allowing all components of the cluster to operate at optimal storage performance and be in line with a site’s true mission objectives.” The solution is immediately available from Panasas and Cluster Resources and their respective partners.