Platform HPC Workgroup Edition offers capabilities not found in other cluster management suites.

At its heart is Platform Cluster Manager, an easy to use web-based cluster provisioning and management tool. Industry leaders including Dell™, Intel®, HP, Cray, and Red Hat® have all embraced Platform Cluster Manager as the basis of their own HPC cluster management solutions, recognizing its technical superiority, flexibility and ease of management features. Some of the benefits include:

Fast and efficient software installation – Platform HPC Workgroup Edition can be installed and configured in less than one hour on a master node by inserting an installation DVD and answering a series of simple questions. Layered software packages are deployed as self-describing “kits”, and installing software on cluster nodes is simply a matter of associating cluster nodes with flexible node group definitions through the web-based interface.

Flexible provisioning – Unlike competing solutions, Platform HPC Workgroup Edition can deploy multiple operating systems and OS versions to a cluster simultaneously including Red Hat Enterprise Linux, CentOS and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server as well as Microsoft operating systems as described earlier. This provides administrators with greater flexibility in how they serve their user communities, and means that HPC clusters can grow and evolve incrementally as requirements change.

Simplified software distribution, upgrade and reconfiguration – Software distribution in Platform HPC Workgroup Edition is built upon the “kit”. Kits understand their own software dependencies and pre-requisites, and can install, configure, and uninstall themselves. Many kits employ “plug-ins” that allow included software components to re-configure themselves automatically in response to external events such as a change in the configuration of the cluster or the personality of a node. Tedious tasks such as upgrades and patches can be automated using standard facilities such as Yum and Platform HPC Workgroup Edition integrates with the Red Hat Network (RHN) service for those with RHN subscriptions.

For more information on Platform Cluster Manager, click here.