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Researchers with the National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (NPACI) at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) have released version 2.3.2 of the NPACI Rocks cluster toolkit for both 64-bit and 32-bit processors. NPACI Rocks is developed by the Grid and Cluster Computing Group at SDSC and by partners at the University of California, Berkeley, Singapore Computing Systems in Singapore, and individual open-source software developers. NPACI Rocks provides turn-key software installation and update capabilities for Linux clusters, such as the "Beowulf" clusters widely used by scientists and engineers to realize high-performance processing power from collections of ordinary PCs acting in concert. It also provides de facto standard cluster tools such as the Portable Batch System (PBS), Sun Grid Engine (SGE), Maui Scheduler, and MPICH for Ethernet and Myrinet. This newest version builds on previous releases and includes maintenance fixes and updated security patches. This is the first co-release for both Itanium2 (IA64) and x86 (Pentium, Athlon, and others) based clusters. The release is available to download and burn onto a bootable CD for x86 or DVD for Itanium2. Versions for both processor families are available at http://www.rocksclusters.org/. "By providing a common software base for x86 and Itanium2 clusters, Rocks allows users to build clusters of either platform with equal ease," said Philip Papadopoulos, program director for SDSC's Grid and Cluster Computing group. "Scientists and engineers can build x86 clusters for their labs and then step up to Itanium2 clusters when they need the features of 64-bit machines. And Rocks scales very well, from small clusters -- even just a couple of nodes -- to supercomputers on the Top500 list." "I am extremely happy with the performance of the NPACI Rocks cluster distribution," said Tim Carlson of Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. "I have been installing clusters for the past five years and have tried Scyld, OSCAR, and various 'roll-your-own' techniques. In my experience, Rocks clusters provide the right combination of stability, maintainability, and ease of installation." NPACI Rocks adds functionality to the base Red Hat Linux distribution without specific kernel hooks. This approach allows the software to handle the natural evolution of Linux updates. It enhances the Linux cluster environment with features that allow users to start, monitor, and control processes on cluster nodes from the cluster's front-end computer while supporting standard Linux interfaces and tools. The result is a stable, extensible, production environment that appeals to both end users and software developers, and provides a supported platform for the deployment of advanced clustering applications. "As the sole cluster operations administrator charged with the management of our 301-node high-performance computing cluster, a distribution such as NPACI Rocks allows me to deliver on the promise I made to provide a stable computational infrastructure," said Steve Jones, administrator of the Bio-X program's Iceberg Cluster at Stanford University. "It feels as if I have a crew of admins and engineers working with me by having the team at NPACI Rocks answering questions and providing assistance." New features in NPACI Rocks 2.3.2 include: Itanium2 support Web-based PBS queue monitoring Upgraded Ganglia server and client, used for collecting and visualizing cluster-wide monitoring metrics Upgraded MPICH-GM implementation for Myrinet interconnects Upgraded PBS, SGE, and Maui Additional GCC version 3.2 Rocks 2.3.2 for the x86 is based on Red Hat Linux 7.3. The IA64 release is based on Red Hat Advanced Workstation 2.1 recompiled from Red Hat's publicly available source RPMs. --Mike Gannis