Scyld Demonstrates 64-bit Beowulf Cluster OS

San Francisco – Scyld Computing unveiled the 29-series release of Scyld Beowulf. Scyld Beowulf™ provides an integrated operating system platform designed specifically to address the performance, manageability and scalability issues in beowulf clustering.

The platform provides scientists and application developers with pre-integrated parallel programming code libraries, a scalable deployment architecture and cluster management interfaces, which significantly reduces the time to develop and deploy a distributed parallel application.

The 29-series is the first Scyld release with native support for the 64-bit Intel® Itanium 2 and AMD® Opteron architectures. In addition to 64-bit support, it also includes software code library compatibility and binary compatibility with other market-leading, commercial Linux distributions. The 29-series release will be demonstrated on an Opteron cluster at LinuxWorld Expo (Penguin Computing, Booth #865).

"High-performance computing applications in life sciences, computational fluid dynamics, integrated circuit design and data warehousing have massive processing and memory addressing requirements," said Donald Becker, founder and chief technical officer of Scyld. "The successful deployment of the Opteron and Itanium architectures is driving the migration from 32-bit to 64-bit computing, which significantly expands the class of problems addressable with beowulf clusters."

In response to customer needs, many new features have been added to the 29-series release, including:

-- Integrated cluster management tools using either command line or graphical user interfaces, which reduce the human resources and complexities in managing a cluster infrastructure,

-- Support for the latest network interconnect topologies, which improve application performance by providing high-bandwidth, low-latency connectivity between compute nodes

-- An enterprise-class job scheduler that can improve cluster utilization through better policy management, job scheduling and load balancing.

"This new release of Scyld Beowulf with 64-bit platform support and key feature enhancements demonstrates our commitment to bring innovative high-performance computing solutions to our enterprise customers," said Enrico Pesatori, president and CEO of Penguin Computing. "We believe this new release of Scyld Beowulf will provide outstanding performance and manageability enhancements for our cluster customers."

Availability

The IA-32 and Opteron versions will be available through both the Scyld reseller network and direct channels in March 2004.