INDUSTRY

Meiosys, a provider of transparent application virtualization and stateful application relocation solutions for Utility Computing, High-Performance Computing and Fault Tolerance markets, today announced the availability of MetaCluster HPC 2.0. A second generation product, MetaCluster is the only commercial solution on Linux today offering checkpoint/restart and on-demand application relocation. MetaCluster HPC 2.0 now supports MPI-based applications for most demanding applications in the Life Sciences, manufacturing, oil and gas, government, financial engineering and education markets. MetaCluster HPC allows enterprises to protect long running jobs by capturing periodic checkpoints, and should a failure occur, resume the application from the latest checkpoint. This provides enterprises with the assurance that long (sometimes days or weeks) jobs complete in time. Additionally, MetaCluster HPC enables on-demand relocation of high performance computing applications from one set of servers to another, opening new means of optimizing and prioritizing workloads and reducing maintenance windows. MetaCluster HPC provides these functions totally transparently to applications, without the need to modify, re-install or re-link them. MetaCluster HPC is built on a patented infrastructure virtualization layer that dynamically instruments system resources used by the application, combined with a low overhead holistic checkpoint/restart. In essence, MetaCluster decouples applications from the underlying hardware and rendering them mobile. This offers IT managers new ways to manage resources effectively without having to learn new applications or disrupt ongoing operations. "Today's high performance computing sites have hundreds or thousands of clustered nodes. From a pure statistics perspective, these systems will fail, sometimes before long MPI runs have a chance to complete. We are seeing much demand for higher availability and management flexibility and we are pleased to release MetaCluster HPC 2.0 to the high performance computing community," said Jason Donahue, President and CEO of Meiosys. "Supercomputing sites around the world are eager to embrace MetaCluster to restore high availability and manageability characteristics of proprietary supercomputers on standards-based Intel/Linux systems." Features and Benefits MetaCluster HPC 2.0 offers several unique features that provide cost and time savings benefits: -- Transparency -- MetaCluster HPC delivers checkpoint and restart, application relocation and resource optimization without modifying applications. -- Holistic checkpoint mechanism -- MetaCluster HPC captures the full context of an application such as memory usage, file status and any open TCP/IP connections, leaving nothing to chance. Checkpoint files can be stored locally or on remote or shared storage within the network. -- Application protection with periodic checkpoints and automated restart -- IT managers can "set it and forget it," virtually guaranteeing completion of long batch runs. -- Integration with existing batch managers -- Meiosys seamlessly operates with leading batch managers such as PBS Pro and Platform LSF, eliminating the need to learn new user interfaces. -- License usage optimization -- With MetaCluster HPC, applications can be checkpointed and licenses immediately released. For example, engineers from one department may borrow licenses owned by another department when not in use, and upon request, checkpoint their own jobs and release the licenses. Checkpointed jobs can be resumed at a later time when the licenses become available. Large scope of supported applications MetaCluster HPC 2.0 supports a range of clustered and traditional HPC application types, including single and multi-process, single and multi-threaded, sequential and distributed (e.g., OpenMP, MPI), legacy, off the shelf and custom applications. MetaCluster HPC 2.0 supports 32 and 64-bit Linux installations (Opteron and IA64) and is integrated with standard batch managers.