INDUSTRY

Novell and Scali, today announced that Novell has appointed Scali to power the Novell High Performance Computing (HPC) Centre of Excellence. The Centre will serve the Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) region and is located at Scali's facilities in Oslo, Norway. Under the agreement, Scali and the HPC Centre of Excellence will help customers and Independent Software Vendors (ISV) streamline the adoption and testing of the Linux platform. The centre is equipped with a mix of hardware platforms and software components from leading vendors plus an interconnect-interoperability lab to maximize the efficiency of cross-platform testing and tuning. "The establishment of Scali as Novell's HPC Centre of Excellence is important for our customers as it provides a single business critical hardware and software testing centre that is both simple and standardized while being easy to set-up and maintain," said Johan Rosius, Vice President, Alliances, Novell EMEA. "Equally, the fact that Novell with Scali and the HPC Centre of Excellence now provides a secure and complete solution cluster testing service under one roof is vital to our ISV partners." Bjørn Skare, President and CEO of Scali commented, "Scali and Novell both firmly believe that the ability to deliver standardized and fully supported software is a critical requirement to ensure the rapid adoption of Linux clustering in the commercial HPC market. By establishing the Novell HPC Centre of Excellence, we are able to deliver a fully supported and certified solution stack together with the services and expertise to facilitate the streamlined adoption of the Linux platform." The Novell HPC Centre of Excellence at Scali enables customers to test their applications with different hardware and software components of a HPC solution to ensure that they work effectively once deployed in a production environment. Customers are allotted a team of dedicated experts from Novell and Scali to design their clusters, as well as offer design, optimization and benchmarking expertise. Through the Centre of Excellence, Novell clients have access to the following services: * Cluster planning and design services with architectural diagram * Proof of concept and benchmarking facilities * Consultation on migrating from legacy HPC solutions to Linux * Analysis of existing infrastructure to determine what can be re-used or are potential problem areas * Advice on software porting and performance optimization