eXludus' SchedOpt Can Supercharge Throughput Performance in Multicore Clusters

eXludus Technologies today announced Schedule Optimizer (SchedOpt), new multi-core optimization software that boosts throughput performance on clusters up to 8-fold. SchedOpt will be available as a standalone module or as part of the Grid Optimizer suite, during the second calendar quarter of 2007. "Current workload managers, such as LSF and Grid Engine, are not designed for multi-core clusters. Multi-core systems require a more aggressive tuning strategy. SchedOpt was specifically engineered to provide the dynamism and fast reaction times needed for high performance in the emerging world of multi-core and many-core clusters," said eXludus founder and CEO Benoît Marchand. "SchedOpt is applicable across a wide range of applications. It can provide significant performance benefits for single node systems, as well as for clusters or Grids." Multi-core processor technology provides immense processing capacity. Most of the focus has been on increasing performance by parallelizing applications, but very few of these scale well for high processor core counts. SchedOpt employs an innovative real-time optimization algorithm that automatically improves process scheduling. SchedOpt requires no modification to applications or workload managers. In the initial comparison test, SchedOpt was activated on a 24-core cluster that was running NCBI-BLAST. SchedOpt increased throughput (CPU efficiency) by 8.76 times. “We are always looking for ways to further enhance the performance of our customers’ workloads," said Rob Walsh, Director of Grid Computing, Altair Engineering. "Our PBS Professional Version 8.0 supports automatic and efficient job placement, and optimized backfilling to increase throughput of smaller jobs. eXludus’s SchedOpt technology is highly complementary to PBS Professional for such throughput-oriented workloads." To learn more about SchedOpt, go to its Web site