By Robert Roe
With SC14, the US Supercomputing Conference in New Orleans, less than a week away, announcements on new technology are already highlighting that change is afoot in the HPC Industry.
The German Fraunhofer research society has released the newest release of BeeGFS, a parallel file system specifically designed to meet the extreme requirements of High Performance Computing. Simarlarly eXcellence in IS Solutions (X-ISS), a provider of High Performance Computing and Big Data solutions, has announced Version 14.2 of its DecisionHPC business analytics software.
The parallel file system, originally designed by the German Fraunhofer research society has now been spun-out into a separate company called ThinkParQ. Simarlarly the system has been renamed from FhGFS to BeeGFS, it is expected to be released formally by the end of the year.
ThinkParQ has been working closely with partners such as HP, transtec, Dell, ClusterVision, MegWare and others to strengthen their offerings with BeeGFS. This has already culminated in the cluster software stack ‘Qlustar 9’ being released with full support for BeeGFS at SC14. To compliment this work, ThinkParQ will also be publishing a series of whitepapers, of which the first one is online here.
There will be several demos and presentations concerning the BeeGFS release at SC14, these will include:
ThinkParQ, together with Scalable Informatics, will present ‘FastPath Unison BeeGFS’ at booth #3053 – a extremely fast, dense, and scalable hyperconverged storage appliance.
ThinkParQ will also give a talk about BeeGFS in the SC'14 exhibitor forum on Tuesday, November 18th (3:30pm to 5:00pm, Room 291) and to provide a general overview as well as an update about recent developments and performance figures.
Sven Breuner, CEO of ThinkParQ said: ‘We are looking forward to meet the community at SC'14 and talk about the recent changes and updates around BeeGFS. This great technology enables everyone to use a parallel filesystem to improve performance of I/O-intensive applications, because it is just so extremely easy to use and maintain - This eliminates one of the biggest holdbacks in parallel storage.’.
Jan Heichler, Sales Director at ThinkParQ, added: ‘SC'14 is an excellent opportunity to get in contact with users and talk about their needs and requirements. We will have members of the development team at our booth and know that users like the opportunity to get some more insight into our technology.’
Fraunhofer ITWM and ThinkParQ can be found at booth #3147 on the SC'14 exhibition floor.
Also at SC14 is the newest release of X-ISS’s Decision HPC software. Introduced by X-ISS in 2013, DecisionHPC is a platform-neutral reporting and analytics SaaS solution which uses a single dashboard to gives insight into the value HPC is providing to the business.
In addition to monitoring technical performance of clusters, schedulers and other resources worldwide, DecisionHPC adds intelligent analytics of current and historical data related to projects, users and applications.
X-ISS President Deepak Khosla said: ‘We developed DecisionHPC for organisations that want insight into their HPC clusters so they can determine how best to improve productivity, reduce costs and optimise the systems.’
DecisionHPC 14.2 offers several new features or functions that significantly facilitate its use and enhance value for clients including; job specific metrics, multiple user profiles, email batch reports, additional scheduler metrics, and enhanced attribute heat maps.
‘All of the enhancements in DecisionHPC 14.2 resulted from client feedback,’ said Khosla. ‘We have made Release 14.2 more user-friendly so our clients have faster access to the HPC insights they need to keep their clusters running smoothly and profitably.’
X-ISS will be demonstrating many of the new features of DecisionHPC 14.2 at SC’14 this year. For more information on DecisionHPC, please visit visit X-ISS in booth #3760 at SC14.
