Platform Computing Announces Support for Upcoming Intel® Many Integrated Core Architecture-Based Products

TORONTO, Nov. 8, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Platform Computing, the leader in cluster, grid and cloud management software, today announced it will support the Intel® Many Integrated Core (Intel® MIC) architecture in Intel's upcoming Knights Corner products targeting high performance computing applications. Customers using Platform HPC, Platform LSF and Platform Cluster Manager will be able take advantage of the forthcoming Intel MIC architecture to build Intel Cluster Ready (ICR) certified clusters for processing highly parallel workloads, leveraging exponentially faster and more powerful processing capabilities without needing to modify their applications, operating systems or HPC environments.  

"We have been extremely impressed with the performance and ease of use we've seen on the Intel MIC 'Knights Ferry' software development platform," said Dr. William Lu, Director of Product Management for Platform Computing. "We believe the Intel MIC architecture will be very attractive to Platform LSF, Platform HPC and Platform Cluster Manager users who want to get more performance out of their HPC clusters, without the need to rewrite their applications for a new architecture."

As a result of this technology partnership, Platform LSF and Platform HPC users will be able to intelligently allocate and manage jobs on Intel MIC based on a number of factors such as the number of available cores, memory, error conditions and environmental temperature. Effectively, Intel MIC will be treated as additional computational resources. Therefore, depending on management capabilities available on a set of given nodes, Platform LSF and Platform HPC can control the job resource usage to these nodes.

Platform HPC and Platform Cluster Manager will include integrated monitoring capability for Intel MIC architecture. Using the integrated operational dashboard, administrators will be able to monitor key metrics such as environmental temperature. In addition, both products can automate deployment of Intel MIC runtime libraries and device drivers to compute nodes in HPC clusters, making administration much easier in combined CPU and Intel MIC heterogeneous environments.

"Platform HPC and Platform Cluster Manager provide a faster and easier path to building Intel Cluster Ready certified clusters," said Bill Magro, Director of HPC Software Solutions for Intel Corporation. "By adding support for Intel MIC architecture, HPC users will have more power to enable computational thirsty applications and to get their jobs done even faster and easier than before."

Additional Resources:

• To see a demo of Platform products running on the Intel MIC architecture, please visit the Platform booth at SC'11, Booth 1117.
• For more on Platform LSF: http://www.platform.com/workload-management/high-performance-computing
• For more on Platform Cluster Manager: http://www.platform.com/cluster-computing/cluster-management
• For more on Platform HPC: http://www.platform.com/cluster-computing/platform-hpc
• For more on Intel MIC architecture: http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/architecture-and-technology/many-integrated-core/intel-many-integrated-core-architecture.html

About Platform Computing

Platform Computing is the leader in cluster, grid and cloud management software ― serving more than 2,000 of the world's most demanding organizations. For 19 years, our workload and resource management solutions have delivered IT responsiveness and lower costs for enterprise and HPC applications. Visit www.platform.com.

SOURCE Platform Computing