INDUSTRY

Revolutionary Cluster and Grid Performance Booster Offers World's First Asynchronous Results Transfer, Parallel File Serving To Subsets of Nodes: eXludus Technologies Inc. today introduced version 2.1 of RepliCator, the company's software product that has demonstrated revolutionary performance improvements on customers' compute clusters and Grids. "RepliCator 2.1 adds two important capabilities that are world firsts," said eXludus Technologies CEO Benoît Marchand. "Our new features, Asynchronous Results Transfer (ART) and Groups, expand the range of applications for which RepliCator can substantially boost performance. ART can make an important difference in the manufacturing, life sciences, financial services, EDA and public sector research markets, as well as in high performance computing wherever checkpoints or output data sets are bottlenecks today." Asynchronous Results Transfer (ART) RepliCator 2.1 is the world's first cluster/Grid software to provide fault-tolerant and data resilient data transfer from any source to any destination. RepliCator's powerful Asynchronous Results Transfer (ART) capability can be applied to output files (e.g., intermediate results, checkpoints, final results) or to input files. On a real-world workload using checkpoint files, Durham University's Institute for Computational Cosmology (United Kingdom) improved cluster throughput by a factor of 1.48 by using RepliCator to allow overlapping of output checkpoint data movement with computation. Wall clock time was reduced from 445 seconds to 301 seconds, and I/O wait time shrank dramatically from 145 seconds to 0.1 seconds "It doesn't matter what the underlying application is. If it involves large files and is doing substantial checkpointing on a medium to large-size cluster, RepliCator's new ART feature can make a major difference," said Marchand. With ART, data can be transferred at the end of a task automatically, using eXludus's MetaLanguage Processor, or manually through a command-line interface, or on-the-fly through the API interface. RepliCator allows the compute nodes to get back to what they do best – run your simulation. Parallel File Serving To Targeted Nodes (Groups) RepliCator 2.1 also offers the world's first ability for parallel file serving of an input file to a targeted subset of cluster nodes, as opposed to the entire cluster. With RepliCator 2.1's new Groups feature, the cluster subset can be made to match the workload manager's group definition (e.g., "Send this Nastran input file to Nastran nodes"). The Groups feature allows an unlimited number of groups to be used concurrently on a cluster. "Groups allows RepliCator to operate in multi-application clusters more efficiently, by caching data only on likely target nodes, those that are candidates to run certain job types," according to Marchand. U.S. list pricing for an annual subscription license for RepliCator starts at $100 per CPU, Marchand said. For more information about eXludus Technologies and RepliCator 2.1, visit booth #227 at the SC06 conference in Tampa, Fla. (November 13-17, 2006), or go to its Web site.