Clustermatic: Supercomputing made easy – almost

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In the Pink

Clustermatic proved itself quickly.  Minnich and fellow researchers Greg Watson, Matthew Sottile, Sung-Eun Choi, and Eric Hendriks used it to build Pink, a cluster with 1,024 two-processor nodes.  It took just 2.5 days to assemble and start operating.

Pink has a theoretical top speed of almost 10 trillion calculations per second and still runs after five years.  It has a reputation as one of the most reliable machines at Los Alamos, Minnich says.

Clustermatic earned an R&D 100 Award as one of the most promising new inventions of 2004.  Now it’s on thousands of systems, Minnich says – although no one has kept track, since it’s free software distributed via download and CD.

“We keep finding users of it that are … we don’t know where,” Minnich says.  He does know that users include financial and pharmaceutical companies.

LinuxBIOS alone has gained huge acceptance.  Besides high-performance clusters, it’s loaded onto millions of other computers, Minnich says.  It’s especially popular for “embedded” processors – computer chips in kiosks, digital televisions, TV signal converters and other devices.

Clustermatic’s last version came out in 2005.  “We had a certain set of goals we put in the (research) proposal in 2000 and in surprisingly short order we actually hit all the goals around 2003 or 2004,” Minnich says.

Now Minnich and his fellow researchers are molding an as-yet unnamed program that builds on Clustermatic, but is entirely new.  Scientists from Los Alamos and Sandia’s California and New Mexico locations are involved.

The group’s success proves “our ideas about how to build these systems and make them work well and stand up quickly were fundamentally correct,” Minnich says.  “You end up with a very fast and very useful system.”

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