News

Researchers with the National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (NPACI) at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) and the University of California, Berkeley have released version 2.3.2 of the "NPACI Rocks" cluster toolkit.

NPACI Rocks provides turnkey software installation and update for Linux clusters, as well as de facto standard cluster tools such as the Portable Batch System (PBS), Sun Grid Engine (SGE), Maui Scheduler, and MPICH for Ethernet and Myrinet. This newest version builds on previous releases and includes maintenance fixes and updated security patches.

This is the first co-release for both Itanium2 (IA64) and x86 (Pentium, Athlon, and others) based clusters. The release is available to download and burn onto a bootable CD for x86 or DVD for Itanium2. Both are available free at http://www.rocksclusters.org/.

NPACI Rocks for Itanium2 is based on the identical cluster software stack as the x86 version. "By providing a common software base for x86 and Itanium2 clusters, Rocks allows users to build clusters of either platform with equal ease," said Philip Papadopoulos, program director for SDSC's Grid and Cluster Computing group. "Domain-specific scientists can build x86 clusters and step up to Itanium2 clusters as application requirements increase."

NPACI Rocks adds functionality to the base Red Hat Linux distribution without specific kernel hooks. This approach allows the software to handle the natural evolution of Linux updates. It enhances the Linux cluster environment with features that allow users to start, monitor, and control processes on cluster nodes from the cluster's front-end computer while supporting standard Linux interfaces and tools. The result is a stable, extensible, production environment that appeals to both end users and software developers, and provides a supported platform for the deployment of advanced clustering applications.

• Itanium2 support
• Upgraded Ganglia server and client, used for collecting and visualizing cluster-wide monitoring metrics
• Upgraded MPICH-GM implementation for Myrinet interconnects
• Upgraded PBS, SGE, and Maui
• Additional GCC version 3.2

NPACI Rocks is developed at SDSC and partners at the University of California, Berkeley, Singapore Computing Systems in Singapore, and individual open-source software developers.

About NPACI:

NPACI (www.npaci.edu) is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and directed by Fran Berman, director of SDSC and the first Endowed Chair in High Performance Computing at UCSD's Jacobs School of Engineering and professor of computer science and engineering at UCSD. The mission of NPACI is to advance science by creating a ubiquitous, continuous, and pervasive national computational infrastructure for the 21st century that builds on dramatic advances in information technology to enable distributed research by interdisciplinary teams.

About SDSC:

SDSC (www.sdsc.edu) is an organized research unit of UCSD and the leading-edge site of NPACI. SDSC's mission is to develop and use technology to advance science, and to provide leadership both nationally and internationally in computing, data management, biosciences, and other areas. As a national laboratory for computational science and engineering, SDSC is funded by NSF and other federal agencies, the state of California, the University of California, and private organizations.

Contact:
Rex Graham, 858-822-5408, rgraham@sdsc.edu