Grid.org, Univa UD’s open source community site, announced launch of the Open HPC Management Interoperability Project (OHMI), with the aim of simplifying the management of high performance computing systems and reducing associated costs.

 

The Open HPC Management Interoperability Project was created in collaboration with Sun Microsystems, BioTeam, Grid Gateway (News - Alert), and Runtime Design Automation.

 

Univa UD is a provider of HPC systems management and data center automation software. The company’s products help its customers by saving their time and resources, by providing them with simple solutions for - the complex natured deployments and operating HPC and data center virtualization environments.

 

Univa UD is mainly concerned with building and operating production infrastructures for clients, from workgroup clusters to enterprise grids to dynamic data center application provisioning, thereby advancing the vision and practice of HPC and data center virtualization.

 

Grid.org is an open source community where cluster and grid users, developers, and administrators come to connect and communicate, exchange information and ideas, and participate in development projects. The community aims to provide an comprehensive destination for people with similar cluster and grid interests.

 

"Many interoperability initiatives have been designed to enable applications to run out of the box, but there are several aspects of HPC systems that have yet to standardize," said Gary Tyreman, vice president and general manager of HPC for Univa UD, in a statement.

 

Tyreman added: "These non-standard aspects impact how effectively a system administrator integrates and manages the system. With this project, Univa UD continues its leadership by working with industry partners to drive standards intended to remove business costs associated with vendor lock-in."

New Open HPC Management Interoperability Project (OHMI) builds a reference implementation that unifies existing standards, best practice recipes and migration tools, thereby distinguishing between job submission, operations management and resource management environments. This simplifies the complexity involved in HPC environments and even cut costs.

 

Organizations experience increased overhead and complexity in their HPC environments when the HPC system elements such as Distributed Resource Management (DRM) systems are not standardized. This results in reduced flexibility in migration with increased costs and even barriers that are associated with maintaining code and wrappers written around a DRM.

Thanks to the OHMI project, organizations can experience HPC management interoperability with minimal pain and expenses by providing a consistent management experience regardless of which DRM system is being used.

 

Organizations also gain the ability to reduce non-essential development and management costs and even experience more flexibility and independence. This even more facilitates organizations to focus more on solutions that solve important business problems.

"Sun is a significant contributor and supporter of standardization," said Fritz Ferstl, Director of Grid and High Performance Computing engineering at Sun Microsystems (News - Alert), in the statement, "This project, with increased industry support, will result in a great improvement in our customers' ease of implementing and managing their cluster environments."

Gartner (News - Alert) analyst Carl Claunch, said in statement: "The most pressing issue for implementations of HPC today is the need to moderate operating expenses without sacrificing capacity and growth.”

Univa UD's Tyreman further added: "Managers seeking to increase the effectiveness of HPC environments will benefit from solutions like OHMI that significantly reduce the amount of customized systems integration work."

Univa UD's officials told that the OHMI Project will be open to all organizations that are interested in participating in the development and standardization of basic HPC components and the codification of best practices into a repeatable and predictable product.

 

The project will be incorporated into Univa UD's UniCluster family later.

Jayashree Adkoli is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of Jayashree’s articles, please visit her columnist page.