SYSTEMS

Singapore-based Scalable Systems, a high performance computing company announced the immediate availability of the Scalable Rocks Enterprise (N1GE Edition) that incorporates the Sun N1 Grid Engine cluster software. The new Scalable Rocks Enterprise Edition includes a 100 per cent web-enabled cluster management console (RxConsole) to manage a Rocks cluster, a new Rocks web-services framework for user and jobs management, embedded enterprise Linux and the Sun N1 Grid Engine. The Sun N1 Grid Engine is a distributed resource management (DRM) product that aggregates available computing resources and delivers computing power as a network service, and is based on the open source Grid Engine project. The Sun N1 Grid Engine has many enterprise-ready features, such as a new scheduler with reservations, multi-threading daemons, new communication protocols, Berkeley DB spooling, accounting DB with web console, and reporting. Said Laurence Liew, chief technology officer of Scalable Systems, "Scalable Rocks Enterprise (N1GE Edition) enables system integrators and cluster administrators to achieve maximum productivity, ease of user and throughput performance in the shortest time based on the core Rocks technology, enhanced with our web-based cluster management console and integrated with Sun N1 Grid Engine. Leveraging on these platforms, we are able to offer our customers a fully supported HPC solution stack from the operating system and cluster software to job management." Scalable Rocks is based on Rocks software, developed by the Grid and Cluster Computing Group at San Diego Supercomputer Center and its collaborators. "Scalable Systems continues to extend Rocks into critical areas over the years, from Sun Grid Engine integration into Rocks in 2002, to Rocks' web-console and web-services framework earlier last month, and now into Sun N1GE. It has been a tremendous effort from the Scalable team," said Dr Philip Papadopoulos, director of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure Lab, San Diego Supercomputer Center. Added Dr Papadopoulos, "Rocks works because it has been developed on top of an enormous community standard open-source software. The Sun N1GE reinforces this approach as they can count on Rocks to provide the scalable provisioning vehicle and be assured that validated kernels, c-libraries, and other software remains unchanged." Said Bjorn Andersson, director, HPC and Grid Computing, Sun Microsystems, "The Scalable Rocks Enterprise with Sun's N1 Grid Engine solution complements our strategy by providing a fully supported open-source cluster solution."