HPC 2014-15 | Soſtware tools


Tools for efficient computing


End-user scientists and engineers fear the complexity of running jobs in HPC. But there are software tool-kits available to help, as Tom Wilkie discovers


Scientists and engineers want results – fast and without fuss. Hardware suppliers and systems integrators are making computers faster, by increasing the number of cores, adding accelerators or co-processors, and speeding up the interconnects. But these hardware innovations inevitably make HPC clusters more complicated, and so less easy to use. Meanwhile, Governments are trying to push the technology down the path to Exascale computing. In the outside world, data-centric computing is becoming as important as traditional numerical computation (see Why storage is as important as computation page 20), leading companies to try to integrate resources from the cloud as a way of complementing and extending their in-house compute resources. And one issue of growing importance, lying behind the whole of high-performance computing, is that of rising energy bills (see Power and the processor page 4). Caught in the middle are the companies


who supply the soſtware tools that make configuration of a cluster easier, or that manage the scheduling, resourcing, and the workload of compute jobs running on the machines and out into the cloud. In the face of all these pressures, the soſtware tool-makers are innovating furiously.


Innovative software tools At the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC’14) in Leipzig at the end of June 2014, Adaptive Computing offered delegates a sneak preview of the latest release of its Moab optimisation and scheduling soſtware: Moab HPC Suite-Enterprise Edition 8.0 (Moab 8.0). A month later, at the end of


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July 2014, Bright Computing, which provides cluster management soſtware, announced that $14.5 million of venture capital funding was being invested in the company to develop its products further and to expand its markets. By September, Altair had a major release


of its workload management soſtware, PBS Professional, in beta testing, with a release date for the new soſtware – version 13 – early in 2015. Meanwhile SysFera, which was spun out of the French computing research organisation INRIA in 2010, timed its next release for SC14, the supercomputing conference and exhibition in New Orleans in November 2014. SysFera stresses its innovation credentials, with participation in both national research


“In the face of all these pressures affecting high- performance computing, the soſtware tool-makers are innovating furiously”


projects, such as SOP (global Services for persOnal comPuter) run by the French Agence nationale de la recherché, and the EU’s Framework Programme’s project: PaaSage on Model-based Cloud Platform Upperware. Te competitive landscape is changing


too, according to Matthijs van Leeuwen, CEO and founder of Bright Computing, to the point where Bright is one of the few independent companies leſt offering cluster management tools. Platform Computing has been absorbed by IBM, while StackIQ appears to be repositioning itself more towards the Big Data market. According to its website, StackIQ’s soſtware ‘automates the deployment,


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