Penguin Computing Scyld ClusterWare - putting Beowulf to work on Novell SUSE Linux

Tom Coull, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Products and Engineering, of Penguin Computing and I had a chance to catch up a few days ago. I've spoken with the "super computing simplified" people on several occasions in the past. This time the conversation focused on Penguin's announcement of Scyld ClusterWare support for SUSE Linux from Novell. The company now supports both Red Hat and Novell SUSE Linux distributions directly.

What Penguin Computing has to say about Scyld ClusterWare

Penguin Computing, experts in high-performance computing (HPC), today announced the immediate availability of Penguin Computing’s Cluster Management suite Scyld ClusterWare with support for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server from Novell.

Through a new ‘hybrid’ provisioning method, Scyld ClusterWare supports HPC clusters that run a mix of heterogeneous Linux operating systems. SUSE Linux Enterprise Server is the first Linux Standard Base compliant operating system that has been qualified by Penguin for ‘hybrid’ operation, enabling customers to take advantage of an open, standards-based operating system with outstanding multi-core performance. With Scyld Hybrid, it is now possible to use a single Scyld cluster as a compute platform for applications built for any of the two leading Linux Enterprise distributions.

Snapshot Analysis

There are a number of different open source clustering products and a number of single-vendor products as well. Since high performance or technical computing is an area that previously was of interest to a narrow segment of the overall IT market, each of the suppliers has gravitated towards a focus on a specific sub segment. Penguin is therefore battling to own a piece of a small, but potentially lucrative, portion of the overall IT market.

Nearly all of the suppliers in this market have spoken about adding support for cloud-based clusters. Penguin Computing is no different in this respect.

Tom and I marveled at how current system and software capabilities have made it possible for smaller and smaller organizations to use clusters of systems, virtual systems or cloud-based systems to address needs for modeling financial risk, simulate market forces surrounding their product or other areas of computationally intensive tasks.

All-in-all, Penguin has interesting offerings, but  I can't think of a single client conversation in the last four or five years that included references to either Penguin Computing in general or Scyld ClusterWare in specific.  This indicates to me that Penguin really needs to focus on building industry awareness. After all, if a person is not aware of a company or its products, they won't consider them. If they don't consider them, they most certainly won't buy them.