IBM debuts supercomputing private cloud

IBM has announced a family of supercomputing products designed to give companies access to large amounts of processing power within their private cloud.

The high-performance computing (HPC) products, announced by IBM on Thursday, include the IBM HPC Management Suite, the HPC cloud implementation service, and the IBM Intelligent Cluster integrated hardware appliances.

The products should allow "organisations in industries like oil and gas or manufacturing that capture large volumes of unstructured data to pool and scale internal computing resources," IBM said in a statement, and to aid them "respond to fluctuating amounts of data that need to be processed and analysed".

"Today's announcement is an evolution of IBM's cloud strategy and delivery capabilities with workload and industry optimised cloud solutions targeted at delivering client-ready clouds to help reduce costs [and] optimise resources," Brian Connors, vice president of HPC at IBM, said in a statement.

The announcement is an extension of the company's IBM SmartCloud strategy, which seeks to closely tie IBM's public cloud into hardware and software tools based inside customer's clouds.

The company plans to also tailor the products for specific industries and announced a range designed for electronics companies and automotive and aerospace manufacturers.

The main product announced is the IBM Intelligent Cluster, which is a pre-integrated appliance available in a variety of build outs. It's based on IBM Blade servers, Enterprise Servers, iDataPlex servers or Rack Servers; switches from BLADE Network Technologies, Cisco, Force10Networks, LG Ericsson, Voltaire; adapters from Chelsio and Mellanox; InfiniBand switches and adapters from Mellanox, QLogic and Voltaire; Fibre Channel from Brocade, Emulex and QLogic and storage from IBM's System Storage range.

The hardware and software products should be available in the third quarter of 2011, IBM said.