PROCESSORS

Mountain View Data, Inc. (MVD), a leading provider of Linux management framework software, today announced that the Scientific Computing and Imaging (SCI) Institute at the University of Utah has standardized on PowerCockpit for provisioning, configuration and management of their clusters. SCI clusters represent some of the fastest computers in the world and are used to create complex 3D visualizations for some of the world's leading research institutes. PowerCockpit simplifies the management of SCI's clusters which consist of hundreds of individual servers linked together. Using PowerCockpit's central management console, system administrators can single-click to install or update hundreds of servers with the newest and most secure versions of operating systems and applications. "PowerCockpit allowed us to reduce installation and update time from weeks to hours, which is more than a 20x time reduction," said Mark Harter, researcher and system administrator for SCI. "We only have to update one machine and then it's a simple matter of using PowerCockpit to deploy the update across all the nodes in the cluster. I can't imagine updating our clusters without PowerCockpit." With the growing trend to replace big and expensive supercomputers with cheaper clusters running on commodity Intel or AMD servers, the number of servers under administration and associated costs have grown dramatically, taking vital staff resources away from core business work. "Our business is research," said Dr. Greg Jones, associate director for SCI. "Time we spend managing or administering a cluster is time taken away from our mission. PowerCockpit makes HPC cluster administration a non-issue, letting us concentrate on getting work done." PowerCockpit allows the SCI Institute to focus on the development of key visualization software such as SCIRun and BioPSE, which are produced under funding for the National Institute of Health National Center for Research Resource Center for Bioelectric Field Modeling, Simulation, and Visualization. SCIRun was recently used to produce 8 ft by 10 ft interactive 3-D images for a life-saving brain tumor surgery on a young girl at the Primary Children's Hospital in Salt Lake City, Utah. "The PowerCockpit Linux Management Framework allows organizations to focus on their job," said Cliff Miller, CEO of Mountain View Data. "Our solution enables people to use and maintain hundreds of computers as easily as their everyday desktop."