* Scyld Beowulf Series 29 cz-5 is used to simulate the behavior of molecules
Attendees at the BioIT World conference last week got a first look at a powerful new Linux clustering package for supercomputing environments.
Scyld Software and its parent company Penguin Computing, showed off the Scyld Beowulf Series 29 cz-5 software. The cluster was given a workout by running the Assisted Model Building with Energy Refinement (AMBER) software, used for simulating the behavior of molecules.
The Scyld Beowulf Series 29 cz-5 package provides a single interface for loading and running applications across parallel Linux-based nodes in a cluster. In addition to application management and configuration, the software also provides control of individual nodes in a cluster, treating processors – connected via LAN links or high-speed interconnects – as cogs in one large machine, as opposed to a loosely tied together group of boxes.
Penguin says its Scyld software offers a more simple way to control a Linux cluster vs. do-it-yourself implementations of Beowulf or other open source clustering tools. The use of Linux clusters vs. large-scale symmetric multi-processing (SMP) servers for supercomputing tasks is also less expensive, the vendor says.
Penguin Computing is one of the remaining smaller Linux server hardware vendors, with a focus on clustering and distributed computing. In 2003, the firm acquired Scyld, which develops and sells a commercial version of the Beowulf open source high performance computing (HPC) clustering software, allowing multitudes of servers to run large clustered applications in parallel. On the HPC clustering front, the firm competes with large IT vendors, such as IBM and HP, as well as specialty firms such as Linux Networx.
