L CASE STUDY e T n In O e As a leading provider C of turnkey computing ur clusters for bioinformatics, O PSSC Labs delivers the computing power and en S storage needed to analyze P O the enormous data sets in today’s next-generation sequencing environments. MANAGING COMPLEX COMPUTING ENVIRONMENTS: CHALLENGE PSSC Labs’ objective OPen SOurCe On InTeL® was to expand the ArCHITeCTure MAkeS capabilities of high- performance cluster computing to a wider range of SuPercompuTInG AcceSSIBLe customers. As part of this goal, its development team set out to enhance the manageability of complex fOr ALL compute environments and to customize individual deployments to meet the requirements of high-end With the rising popularity of open-source-based solutions, high- customers in scientific, financial, and educational performance computing (HPC) has infiltrated research labs, data markets. centers, financial institutions, and engineering suites. Given these increasingly complex environments, IT professionals face an SOLUTION ongoing challenge: finding suitable tools to effectively monitor, The team sought to integrate the latest, most reliable, manage, and configure complex cloud-computing installations and HPC clusters. To tackle this challenge, PSSC Labs combines high- open-source components into solutions to increase performance, open-source components with proven Intel® Xeon® performance and enhance stability. The adoption of processor-based platforms to create competitive solutions for the Intel® software drivers enabled PSSC Labs to handle top tiers of computing requirements. Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI) operations in a consistent, predictable way. Validation of PSSC solutions through the Intel® Cluster ready program strengthens their credibility. RESULTS Commodity supercomputing By leveraging open-source components on Intel® has really transformed the industry. I think the architecture, PSSC Labs has been able to bring exceptional, cost-effective solutions to market faster. world has evolved to the point where you want With CBeST* and PowerWulf* Clusters, PSSC Labs’ variety and you want choices and you want customers are better able to manage and monitor their “ cloud-computing or supercomputing infrastructures. inexpensive supercomputing. Customers of PSSC Labs have a single – Alex Lesser, Vice President of Sales and Marketing, PSSC Labs point of contact for deployment, “ support, and maintenance. C=70 M=94 Y=38 K=38 The Shift to Open Source in Supercomputing The technology acceleration spurred by open-source development has propelled Linux* to the top of the charts in the supercomputing realm. The vast majority of the world’s supercomputers are running some variant of Linux, with estimates By leveraging community- invent1 developed, open-source software components on ranging from 91 to 95 percent. Of the supercomputers on the TOP500 list, compiled by Hans Meuer of the university of Mannheim, Germany, over 70 percent Intel architecture, we are able to bring our high- feature Intel® processors. performance computing solutions to market “ faster and with less cost. This significantly The prevalence of Linux at these high levels creates a strong need for management tools and open-source expertise to harness supercomputing capabilities effectively reduces the purchase price of our solutions. and make it easier to monitor, administer, and customize HPC installations. – Alex Lesser, Vice President of Sales and Marketing, PSSC Labs With more than 10 years of experience in open source, PSSC Labs relies on the flexibility of Linux to tailor its flagship products, CBeST and PowerWulf Cluster, for production environments, including life science facilities, data centers, and design “ and engineering installations. Taming the Complexities of As one of the most prolific contributors to the Linux* kernel, Intel has helped High-Performance Computing establish Linux as a leading commercial PSSC Labs has built its business around the fact that to the uninitiated the price operating system for the most demanding of entry to supercomputing—both financially and technologically—can be steep. environments, such as high-performance To address this challenge, the company packages its CBeST and PowerWulf Cluster computing. These contributions help solutions as a comprehensive offering, complete with setup, support, and training improve the performance, scalability, at an attractive price point. Alex Lesser, vice president of Sales and Marketing at security, and power-efficiency of Linux PSSC Labs commented, “As intimidating as supercomputing can be, the fact that for systems of every size and application. customers receive a turnkey solution with the software, the hardware, and the networking already installed and configured makes life a lot easier for them.” The heart of PSSC Labs’ flagship solution, CBeST (Complete Beowulf Software Toolkit), includes utilities, custom scripts, and monitoring tools for comprehensive cloud and cluster management. CBeST, based on CentOS Linux, also incorporates a number of open-source components, including Ganglia Monitoring Suite, System Imager (for replication and updating), TOrQUE / Open PBS (for batch scheduling), and Open MPI (for messaging passing). Intel® Compiler Suite is available as an add-on ® and the IPMI driver provides monitoring and management at the hardware level. Intel x86 technology has gotten so powerful that you can Opening the Market to High-Performance Computing do supercomputer-level computations One of the most dramatic breakthroughs in both open source and HPC is the and solve complex problems using [Intel- tremendous market potential that has been created. Lesser comments that open- “ source software on Intel® x86 architecture has opened up a whole new area of the based] x86 processors, instead of using market to supercomputing applications. “People can now actually get into an HPC SPARC or other proprietary products. solution for less than $50,000,” he said. “A lot of that is because the open-source packages have become more and more accepted, and, in fact, they are more or less – Alex Lesser, Vice President of Sales expected when purchasing a system.” Lesser noted that historically, if you wanted and Marketing, PSSC Labs to buy a supercomputer, you could expect to spend tens and maybe hundreds of millions of dollars. Today, with Intel architecture and open-source software, market adoption of HPC has increased significantly. Intel’s long-term commitment to the open-source community—including “ development of drivers to unlock advanced hardware capabilities and optimization work on open-source projects to improve scalability and performance—has been a vital factor in democratizing supercomputing across the market. 2 Reducing Both Operating Costs and Capital Costs Summary PSSC Labs takes advantage of energy-efficiency features built into PSSC Labs has channeled their expertise in Linux and open- the Intel® Xeon® processor e7 family and Intel® Xeon® processor e5 source development into a product offering that delivers family. Intel® Intelligent Power Technology monitors how power is genuine turnkey supercomputing capabilities at a fraction of being used in different operating states and maximizes performance the cost of conventional solutions. Through kernel optimization, while conserving power. In turn, Intel’s contributions to open-source comprehensive management tools, and performance projects make these capabilities more accessible to applications and and reliability of Intel architecture, PSSC has produced a help deliver optimal levels of functionality. competitive solution that has been embraced by nASA, the United States Department of Defense, United States National for example, PSSC Labs uses the GNU* Compiler Collection (GCC) Labs, and over 100 prestigious universities. in its solutions. The porting of Intel® Cilk™ Plus into GCC enhances parallel programming constructs so that PSSC Labs delivers improved performance on multicore processors to its customers. PSSC Labs solutions also benefit from the extensive work that Intel “ has done to improve the performance, scalability, and reliability of the Linux kernel (upon which CentOS Linux is based). These World-Record Technical Computing improvements are manifested as enhanced capabilities in PSSC and High-Performance Computing Labs solutions. PSSC Labs delivers a substantial advantage to its customers According to Lesser, PSSC Labs customers are primarily concerned by optimizing its solutions for Intel® platforms. The Intel® with two things: capital costs and operating costs. The cost- Xeon® processor e5 and Intel® Xeon® processor e7 families effective Intel®-based server components help lower initial capital have achieved an impressive array of world records and other costs of the hardware. And ongoing IT operating costs, which top results on technical computing and high-performance are substantially tied to energy usage, can be lowered through computing benchmarks, and these results give PSSC an intelligent engineering. outstanding foundation on which to build. As each generation of Intel® Xeon® processors continues to deliver new “We optimize the BIOS to work with the capabilities of the Intel breakthrough performance, and Intel contributions to the Linux Xeon processors and to manage how the power is being used in kernel unlock these capabilities, PSSC’s customers can be different states,” Lesser said. “The latest Intel Xeon processors let confident that their solutions will benefit even further. us deliver energy efficiency