Clustermatic: Supercomputing made easy – almost
Posted July 2, 2007
The day when setting up a supercomputer is as easy as programming a VCR
may never arrive, but Clustermatic has brought it closer.
A project of scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory, a Department of Energy facility, Clustermatic is a software suite that greatly simplifies the construction and control of clusters – personal computers joined to work as one large, parallel-processing machine.
Parallel processing breaks tasks into pieces and distributes them to multiple processors that work simultaneously for a faster result. For many applications, clusters are appropriate and also far cheaper than monolithic high-performance computers because they use standard, off-the-shelf components.
Clustermatic has pushed clusters’ popularity; all or part of the suite runs on millions of computers. Now researchers are designing an all-new version that could move clusters further toward VCR simplicity, says Ron Minnich, a computer scientist who led Clustermatic’s creation.
Labs and universities worldwide have created clusters, giving them high-performance computer power for a fraction of the cost. Yet, Minnich says, most clusters run with something like mob rule instead of orchestra-like coordination.
“You have this room full of PCs and the first problem is they’re not designed to be clustered,” says Minnich, who worked on the project at Los Alamos before moving to DOE’s Sandia National Laboratory at its Livermore, California location.
