Cray and ScaleMP, a leading provider of virtualization solutions for high-end computing, today announced a strategic alliance to offer joint solutions based on the Cray CX1 deskside supercomputer and ScaleMP's vSMP Foundation. Available immediately, the joint solution will target the High Performance Computing (HPC) segment allowing customers to operate a shared-memory, deskside supercomputer that scales up to 128 cores and 1TB of shared memory.
The Cray and ScaleMP strategic alliance is focused on enabling supercomputing at the workstation level. The combined Cray CX1 system and vSMP Foundation solution enables workgroups and small organizations to deploy high performance computing capabilities that harness the power of multiple processors while simplifying their operational environment. This solution is versatile, able to run a variety of Linux workloads such as large memory, parallel workloads and high core count shared memory applications, and delivers excellent performance across many programming models ranging from MPI, OpenMP and legacy code.
"Cray and ScaleMP are addressing important requirements for HPC by offering a personal supercomputer workstation," said Earl Joseph, IDC Program Vice President. "Many departmental and work group users of HPC applications have been constrained by the lack of in-house skills to move up to clusters from workstations. This solution will allow these users to more easily scale up their simulations and models and boost productivity and competitiveness without the added complexity."
"I am very excited about our collaboration with Cray," said Shai Fultheim, founder and CEO of ScaleMP. "Cray is synonymous with excellence in the high-end supercomputer segment. This announcement enables HPC customers to get Cray performance at the deskside, in a cost-effective, workstation-like simplicity. Cray customers will be leveraging the capabilities of vSMP Foundation to achieve a flexible compute resource capable of solving bigger problems -- accelerating time to market and innovation."
"The ScaleMP vSMP Foundation virtualization software is an excellent fit for the Cray CX1, which was designed specifically to harness HPC for individuals and departmental workgroups," said Ian Miller, senior vice president of the productivity solutions group and marketing at Cray. "By creating a single shared memory virtual system, the joint solution can now support large memory and large core count workloads in addition to parallel workloads, while simplifying the installation and management of the system."
vSMP Foundation aggregates multiple industry-standard, off-the-shelf x86 servers (rack mounted or blade systems) into one single virtual high-end system for the HPC market. vSMP Foundation provides customers with an alternative to traditional expensive symmetrical multiprocessor (SMP) systems and also offers simplified clustering infrastructure with a single operating system. It currently allows customers to create a single virtual SMP system with up to 32 sockets (128 cores) and up to 4 TB of shared memory in an energy-efficient, dense package.