The Release of Platform HPC 3.0.1 Dell Edition

Last week, Platform HPC 3.0.1 Dell Edition was released. One of the significant features of this release is the support of high availability for management nodes on the latest version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.1. Why is support for management node HA special when many cluster management tools support it already?

Well, Platform HPC is not just a cluster management solution. It is an end-to-end cluster management and productivity tool. When handling management node failover, Platform HPC not only needs to ensure all the cluster management functionalities can fail over, it also has to ensure other functionalities fail over at the same time so that the end user and administrator won’t see the difference before and after the failover. The functionalities that failover handles include but are not limited to:

1. Provisioning
2. Monitoring & alerting
3. Workload management service
4. Web portal for users and administrators

In a heavy production environment, the failover function of the user web portal is far more critical than the failover of the cluster management functionality. This ensures users have non-stop access to the cluster through the web portal even if the primary management node running the web server is down.

Other capabilities included in Platform HPC 3.0.1 Dell Edition include:

1. Dell hardware specific setup for management through IPMI
2. One-To-Many BIOS configuration via the idrac-bios-tool
3. Dell OpenManage integration
4. Mellanox OFED 1.5.3-1 kit
5. CUDA 4 kit
6. Management software integration provided by QLogic and Terascale
7. Dell fully automated factory install

With the complete and integration software components, the cluster solution that Platform Computing delivers together with Dell has gone a long way since the release of Open Cluster Stack in 2007.

The Experience of Building a Scalable Supercomputer

This week, the TOP500 ranked the system at Taiwan’s National Center for High Performance Computing as #42 in their June 2011 bi-annual supercomputer list. This system was provided by Acer together with its technology partners, AMD, DataDirect Networks, QLogic, and Platform Computing. Platform Computing provided the management software and MPI libraries for the system, as well as services for deploying these software components.

During the period of system installation and configuration, a number of areas demonstrated the advantages of partnering with Platform Computing:

(1) Management software: Platform HPC was chosen to manage the system. The scalability and maturity of the software components simplified the installation and the configuration of the management software layer. Both the workload scheduler (based on Platform LSF) and MPI library (Platform MPI) on the system scale effortlessly.

(2) MPI expertise: To achieve maximum Linpack performance results, it is critical to ensure MPI performance is optimized. During the installation and configuration stage, the Platform MPI development team provided numerous best practices to help maximize the benchmarking results, from checking cluster healthiness to MPI performance tuning. They collaborated closely with developers from QLogic, who provided Infiniband interconnects.

(3) Dynamic zoning: The system will be used by multiple research user groups. There is a separate workload management instance for each user group. Based on the workload of each user group, the size of the workload management zone will change from time to time. Each zone has its own user account management system and scheduling policies. Platform HPC was set up to easily manages such dynamic configuration changes.

The maturity of Platform HPC, as well as the expertise from Platform Computing’s development and services teams played a key role in ensuring the success of this Acer project. The maximized performance and stability of the benchmarking runs enabled the results to be submitted in time for the June TOP500 list. But mostly importantly, when the system is in hands of hundreds of users in production, the robustness of the workload management, the performance of MPI, as well as the support from experts who built the software will make a difference in delivering the quality of services from this top Taiwanese supercomputer.