Brings a wide range of system architecture, IO and operating systems concepts together toenhance application scalability, usability and flexibility in hybrid HPC systems

SEATTLE, Washington, and NEW DELHI, India, Nov. 13 – HPC Links Pvt. Ltd. announced today that it is offering a new open source hybrid supercomputing software product named Open VERTEX 1.0.

Open VERTEX 1.0 is the first product to be released by HPC Links based on the company’s innovative VERTEX architecture http://www.hpclinks.com/solutions/VERTEX.shtml. VERTEX is a Hybrid HPC platform architecture where VERTEX control nodes transparently connect light-weight, heterogeneous compute nodes to storage and system services. VERTEX addresses the challenges posed by today's Hybrid HPC systems that use traditional CPUs as well as compute intensive processors such as GPGPUs, many-core, and Cell processors on the same HPC system. By employing a set of unique features, VERTEX provides unprecedented levels of ease-of-use, flexibility and scalability for commodity hybrid HPC systems. Open VERTEX 1.0 makes many of these features available to the users for free.

HPC Links also announced a range of integration and support services for the Open VERTEX 1.0 product to help customers use this software to boost their HPC productively. In addition, HPC Links will also provide advanced, custom development and engineering services around Open VERTEX 1.0 in order to bring the customer closer to an ideal VERTEX architecture experience. These advanced services include customization of VERTEX to new instruction set architectures for compute nodes, scaling existing customer applications using the hybrid VERTEX HPC architecture, developing new applications for this platform, as well as adding customer specific software features and modules to the VERTEX environment.

Founder and CEO of HPC Links, Dr. Ashwini K Nanda said, “Hybrid supercomputing using a variety of compute intensive commodity processors is an undeniable reality today. But managing the different execution binaries to scale applications on hybrid machines remains a significant challenge for our customers. The VERTEX architecture, Open VERTEX 1.0 software product, and our related services offerings bring a comprehensive set of scalable and flexible software solutions to the users of commodity hybrid supercomputing.”

“The world has truly woken up to the outstanding performance improvements which hybrid HPC using NVIDIA Tesla GPUs can bring to the most challenging parallel applications,” said Shanker Trivedi, vice president of worldwide Sales (PSG) at NVIDIA. “With the Open VERTEX 1.0 software platform and services, HPC Links is making the compute power of NVIDIA’s Tesla GPUs even more usable for a wide range of HPC applications.”

Open VERTEX 1.0 has been tested extensively using Boston Ltd/Supermicro SUPERFLEX blades based x86/NVIDIA GPU clusters in a major European Oil & Gas customer’s lab, and on clusters consisting of x86, NVIDIA GPU  and IBM Cell based PS3’s at University of Massachusetts and Air Force Research Labs in Rome, NY. 

“Supermicro provides the largest selection of high-performance, high-efficiency Server Building Block Solutions® ideally suited for any scale VERTEX deployment,” said Wally Liaw, Vice President of Sales, International, at Supermicro, Santa Clara, CA. “Our supercomputing solutions are optimized for the widest range of HPC requirements with first-to-market support of the latest multicore processors, high performance GPUs and high-speed interconnect technologies. With our SuperBlade®, Twin architecture, SuperServer®, Workstation, Storage and Network Switch product lines, our customers can quickly scale up and out to achieve maximum application benefits with leading edge technologies such as VERTEX from HPC Links”
 
"The Air Force Research Lab has been experimenting with the VERTEX software from HPC Links and found it to be quite useful for getting data to our cluster of Cell processors on Sony PS3s.  We like the fact that we do not have to port any of our infrastructure software to compute nodes using special purpose processors such as Cell.  We can consolidate our infrastructure software including file systems, workload management, and authentication, on VERTEX nodes using commodity general-purpose CPUs." said Mark Barnell, Senior Computer Scientist and HPC Director at Air Force Research Lab – Information Directorate, Rome, NY.

Dr Gaurav Khanna, Associate Professor of Astrophysics at UMass, Dartmouth, who has been a beta-tester of VERTEX said, "The VERTEX platform enabled us to tightly integrate our x86 and Cell BE based PS3 systems into a cluster, thus paving the way for our scientific applications to make efficient use of multiple processor architectures, simultaneously. In addition, the light-weight nature of the VERTEX compute nodes helps make additional resources available for computation and improve scaling. The highly experienced HPC scientists and engineers of the VERTEX team provided us with tireless support and insight, until we got our complex parallel applications working perfectly.”

The Open VERTEX 1.0 software is available for free download at https://github.com/HPCLinks/Open-Vertex.

About HPC Links

HPC Links provides leading edge services, systems and solutions in the areas of multicore, cloud and high performance computing to our worldwide customers. The new venture has been formed by industry veterans who in the past played key roles in the development of several top supercomputers  around the world – the LANL Roadrunner machine in the US, first to cross the PetaFLOP barrier, the Barcelona Marenostrum machine, fastest in Europe 2004-06, and the CRL Eka machine, Asia’s fastest 2007-08, India’s fastest 2007-10. HPC Links is based out of both the US and India. Our unique, interdisciplinary skill pool covering broad areas of computer science and major HPC application domains, continuously strive to make parallel programming easier for our scientific, engineering and business customers.

For further information on HPC Links, please visit http://www.hpclinks.com, Send your queries to query@hpclinks.com. All product and company names herein may be trademarks of their registered owners.

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Source: HPC Links