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.

Is Platform HPC 3 Just a GUI around Linux?

Platform HPC 3 has a new skin, a brand new web interface that is modern and future looking. While we are emphasizing the usability of Platform HPC with this new product release, some people think Platform HPC is just a GUI around Linux. They couldn’t be more mistaken.

GNOME and KDE are graphical desktop interfaces for Linux, which are included in most Linux distributions. They make Linux easier to use. However, making Linux easier to use does not turn a bunch of servers into a cluster. A cluster that acts as a single system for users and administrators requires more capabilities from management software.

First, it requires a cluster management system. This allows administrators to easily manage a large number of nodes within a cluster without perming tasks node by node. Management tasks include installing the OS and software, patching the OS and upgrading applications, etc. on nodes. Cluster monitoring is also an important component of the cluster management. Without cluster monitoring capabilities, administrators would have to login to individual nodes to get cluster health and performance information, which is impractical for a cluster with more than 10 nodes. Using consolidated alerts can release administrators from having to closely watch the cluster all day long. Cluster management is the foundation that allows all nodes within a cluster to act like a single system from an administration perspective.

Second, a cluster requires workload management. This helps make a cluster into a single system for multiple users. Without workload management, a cluster is many discrete servers from user’s perspective. Instead, workload management helps run each user’s application instance as a “job”. It schedules jobs according user specified requirements and available resources. Workload management software automates fault tolerance and load balancing. It also turns multiple discrete commodity servers into a single reliable system.

Finally, a reporting system is essential for management so administrators can understand how cluster capabilities have been used and whether or not additional capabilities are required. It also shows how well users are being served using performance indicators like average job wait time, job run time, etc. This is to ensure a good return on investment for the valuable computer cluster.

There exist open source software solutions for cluster management, workload management, and reporting on the market today. However, nothing replaces a solution that integrates them together with an easy-to-use web interface while the command line interface is still there. This dramatically reduces system set-up time and the learning curve for users. It also helps users focus on their work rather dealing with complex cluster issues. For power users, the flexible command lines are still there for customization and extension. This is what Platform HPC 3 delivers. It is far more than just a nice GUI around Linux.