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An Extreme Computing cluster needs to have all the qualities you would expect from an effective production system: it must be available and capable of delivering the best performance under normal working conditions, with a varied and fluctuating workload, multiple users and multiple applications. This means the choice of supercomputer management suite is crucial, and has a real impact on the effective availability rate of the computing environment. At the same time, users should be able to concentrate on their own applications, rather than spend their time on administering the system.

Bull Extreme Computing solutions offer a choice between the bullx supercomputer suite - Bull’s comprehensive Extreme Computing software suite for Linux environments, and Microsoft® Windows® Server 2008.

bullx supercomputer suite

bullx supercomputer suite is a comprehensive, powerful and robust software solution that meets the requirements of even the most challenging high performance computing needs.  It is the result of Bull’s long experience in deploying HPC software to the strictest specifications and major investments and continued efforts in R&D. 

bullx supercomputer suite is designed, thanks to its Standard and Advanced editions and its Extreme Pack option, to address a broad range of needs, from small supercomputers with just a few hundred cores demanding ease of use and flexibility, scaling up to clusters with several tens of thousands of cores, where very high availability, reliability, automated event and health management, optimized energy footprint, very high data throughput, and a fine-tuned MPI library are all essential features.

A comprehensive, open, integrated and flexible solution

The bullx supercomputer suite is a comprehensive solution to manage supercomputers, data and applications. It includes all the components necessary to install, provision, monitor and administrate supercomputers, as well as those needed to develop, run and fine-tune HPC applications.  The suite is based on best-of-breed open source software and leading open standards, enhanced with Bull’s added value features. bullx supercomputer suite components are integrated through common access to the Supercomputer Information Repository, which provides a centralized and consistent view of the supercomputer and its application states for all components. This results in a dramatic increase in reliability as well as a whole new set of features.

Total flexibility

bullx supercomputer suite is modular by design. Users have total flexibility to implement tools from other leading software providers in conjunction with bullx supercomputer suite. Furthermore, these tools have been thoroughly tested and validated within the supercomputer suite environment to make sure that the overall solution achieves the required levels of performance and robustness.

Bull services to take full advantage of bullx supercomputer suite

As a leading provider of end-to-end Extreme Computing solutions, Bull provides consultancy services to help its customers to take full advantage of the benefits of bullx supercomputer suite throughout their projects: design, deployment and operations.

bullx supercomputer suite users can benefit from Bull’s worldwide and highly professional support offer, comprising traditional maintenance and upgrade services as well as dedicated, personalized and pro-active services.

bullx supercomputer suite components:

Microsoft® Windows® HPC Server 2008

Bull, as a Microsoft Gold Partner, supports Microsoft Windows HPC Server 2008. bullx clusters can be delivered with Windows HPCS pre-installed, to provide an easy to use, scalable HPC infrastructure.

Microsoft Windows HPC Server 2008 (HPCS), the next generation of high performance computing, provides enterprise-class tools, performance, and scalability for a highly productive HPC environment. HPCS provides a complete and integrated cluster environment including the operating system, a Job Scheduler, Message Passing Interface v2 (MPI2) support, and cluster management and monitoring components. Built on Windows Server® 2008 64-bit technology, HPCS can efficiently scale to thousands of processing cores and includes a management console that helps proactively monitor and maintain system health and stability. Job scheduling interoperability and flexibility enables integration between Windows and Linux-based HPC platforms, and supports batch and service-oriented architecture (SOA) workloads. Enhanced productivity, scalable performance, and ease of use are some of the features that make Windows HPC Server 2008 best-of-breed for Windows environments.

Windows HPC Server 2008 can help shorten user time-to-insight for HPC workloads through easier deployment and management. By using the existing Windows-based information technology (IT) infrastructure, HPCS simplifies management, security, and storage for the cluster, and provides seamless access from the desktop.

HPCS includes improved provisioning based on the Windows Server 2008 Windows Deployment Services technology, a faster Microsoft Message Passing Interface (MS-MPI) that includes new NetworkDirect support, an advanced Job Scheduler, and a new management interface built on the Microsoft® System Center 2007 user interface (UI), which has support for Windows PowerShell™ as a preferred scripting interface.

HPCS uses the failover clustering capabilities of Windows Server 2008 Enterprise and of Microsoft® SQL Server® to provide high availability and redundancy of the head node in your HPC cluster.