SCIENCE

Intel recognised Concurrent Thinking for its contribution to the Intel Cluster Ready (ICR) program at its annual ICR partner awards at SC10.

The "Pathfinder" award is presented to companies that find or create a pathway or route, with Intel Cluster Ready, through previously unexplored markets. The award recognises Concurrent Thinking's design and implementation of the SmartCluster I and SmartCluster II products -- out-of-the-box cluster solutions based on Supermicro OfficeBlade servers. These have been developed jointly with Boston Ltd, a leading provider of Supermicro-based products in Europe and India.

At the heart of the SmartCluster sits Concurrent Thinking's concurrentCOMMAND cluster management appliance, itself an ICR-certified product. concurrentCOMMAND provides state-of-the-art system management and monitoring through an innovative Web 2.0 GUI, allowing system administrators to manage their compute resources with simplicity from any Web-capable device. While concurrentCOMMAND provides comprehensive tools for image capture and deployment, these capabilities have been enhanced with a simple deployment 'wizard' that makes the provisioning of SmartCluster systems extremely simple. At the end of the short installation process, the system runs Intel's Cluster Checker tool in order to validate the system as being Intel Cluster Ready compliant.

"The design brief of the SmartCluster solution was to make system deployment no more complicated than setting up a home router -- so that anyone could build an HPC cluster quickly and effectively. By embedding Intel Cluster Checker within this framework, the end-user can be assured that the system is running efficiently and can re-test the solution at any time," said Michael Rudgyard, CEO of Concurrent Thinking.

Richard Altmaier, Intel Cluster Ready director of marketing and business development, commented, "While Intel Cluster Ready is all about making clusters that just work out of the box, it is quite a visionary move to make it as simple as SmartCluster has done, which makes provisioning and testing a cluster with a single button a reality today. We are delighted to work with Concurrent Thinking as part of the Intel Cluster Ready community!"