News

Scalable Systems Pte Ltd, a pioneering High Performance Computing (HPC) company based in Singapore has announced the release of a new, enhanced version of the Rocks Roll with Intel® Software Development Products.

The Rocks cluster toolkit is an easy-to-use cluster configuration and management package developed by the Grid and Cluster Computing Group at San Diego Supercomputer Center and its collaborators. Rocks is designed to allow end-users to quickly and easily build a high performance computing (HPC) cluster. Scalable Systems is aco-developer of Rocks.

Rocks is extensible via "Rolls," packages that add a specific capability to the cluster. The new Roll released by Scalable Systems automatically installs Intel Software Development Products onto a Rocks cluster.

"A Rocks cluster combined with Intel development tools makes it easier for end-users to achieve maximum performance," said Mr. Laurence Liew, Chief Technology Officer for Scalable Systems. "We are pleased to be working with Intel to provide this solution to our customers."

The previous version of this Roll contained only the Intel® Compilers and an Intel-ready version of MPICH. The latest version includes the Intel® Fortran Compiler for Linux, the Intel® C++ Compiler for Linux, the Intel® Cluster Math Kernel Library (Intel® Cluster MKL) and the Intel® Integrated Performance Primitives (Intel® IPP).

Intel Cluster MKL includes the optimized BLAS, LAPACK, DFT, PARDISO (Parallel Direct Sparse Solver), and Vector Math and Statistical Libraries of the basic Intel MKL product, plus ScaLAPACK (Scalable LAPACK) for parallel linear algebra computations on Linux clusters. Intel IPP is a highly optimized software library that provides a broad range of functionality for audio, video, image, graphics, speech, math, signal processing and more.

The new Roll also installs an Intel-ready version of the popular LAM MPI onto the cluster. Future versions will contain the Intel® VTune™ Performance Analyzer for Linux, the Intel® Threading Tools, and the Intel® Trace Analyzer and Intel® Trace Collector for MPI applications tuning.

"We are delighted to be working with Scalable Systems to provide such innovative technology to our Linux cluster customers," said Dr. David Scott, the Intel HPC Director for Asia-Pacific. "The current version of the Rocks Roll with Intel Software Development Products will help our customers get the most out of their Intel-based clusters."

"We are pleased to provide support for this solution," said Dr. Henry Gabb, who is leading Rocks projects within the Intel Parallel and Distributed Solutions Division. "We expect future versions to include new parallel computing technologies currently under development in our software labs."

The Rocks Roll with Intel® Software Development Products currently supports Intel® Pentium processors, Intel® Xeon™ processors, and Intel® Itanium® 2 processors. Support for Intel® Extended Memory 64 Technology (Intel® EM64T) is expected later this year. The Roll can be downloaded from http://www.scalablesystems.com.

Rocks is freely available for download at http://www.rocksclusters.org/.

About Scalable Systems

Scalable Systems Pte Ltd (www.scalablesystems.com) is a leading provider of high performance and grid computing solutions and services in Singapore and the Asia Pacific region. Scalable Systems is a co-developer of Rocks (since 2001) contributing Parallel Virtual Filesystem, Grid Engine and various drivers and mathematical libraries integration into Rocks. The Scalable Rocks Cluster Toolkit provides users with a commercially supported Rocks cluster platform based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and integrated with the Scalable Rocks Console (RxC) - a web-based cluster management and end-user tool.