Click here to download "Penguin Announces Releases Based on Intel® Xeon 5500 Processors

We at Penguin really like the ICR certification concept. It instills confidence in customers who are unsure as to whether their applications will run on an HPC cluster "out of the box". Customers who may otherwise be deterred by the seeming complexity of Linux clusters will be more likely to purchase a cluster when they see that the cluster has undergone a certification process for all software and hardware components that are required by their applications. The fact that a company like Intel is behind this certification initiative adds a lot of credibility.

While ICR increases the overall demand for Linux clusters the program still allows for differentiation. Scyld ClusterWare for example has a unique single system image architecture. Scyld offers a single process space across all systems in the cluster. It also replaces remote execution services with a processes migration mechanism, obviating the need for remote execution services and ensuring consistency of the application environment. ICR accommodates this functionality and still meets the objective of ensuring interoperability of clusters and applications.

ICR though is still relatively new and I would be lying if I said that there is no room for improvement. One of the key obstacles to rolling it out on a bigger scale has been the issue of variation. Typically no two clusters we ship are identical and while the tool has made great progress accommodating the variance of hardware configurations there are still many manual steps involved that keep us from applying the certification "per default" on all Intel based clusters. The other issue that is inherent to trying to certify against many applications is the fact that each application has unique requirements making the common denominator very broad. The Java runtime (JRE) for example is required by relatively few applications. ICR however does require the installation of JRE on every compute node. An alternative to a single broad certification may be the certification against applications of a certain category or for a specific industry vertical to cut down on cluttering systems with packages that are not needed.

San Francisco CA, (March 30th, 2009) - Penguin Computing, an Intel® Premier Partner, announced today three new Relion™ 1700 Series products based on the Intel® Xeon® processor 5500 – the Relion 1700 and 2700 dual processor enterprise servers and the Relion 1702 twin-node, dual processor per node HPC cluster server. Penguin's new servers, coupled with advanced fine grained power control, deliver significantly greater performance and scalability, offering a foundation to refresh aging IT infrastructure, overcome server sprawl and accelerate return on investment.

Click here to read the press release