Univa UD UniCluster Express (and Amazon EC2)
Univa is a company that I became familiar with when Steve Tuecke gave a talk at the 2007 Grid Engine workshop in Regensberg, Germany. Steve's talk was called "Univa Open Source HPC Cluster and Grid Software" and you can download the PDF version here.
Steve's talk and his company were pretty interesting and he specifically hit on some areas I had mentioned in my talk on "LSF vs. SGE" where we discussed the lack of ISV and commercial entities capable of supporting the Grid Engine community with service, support, consulting, training and other "value added" activities. I came home from Germany thinking that Univa would be worth watching (also Steve had dropped some hints informally about 'some news may be happening soon...') -- and sure enough a short time later Univa became "Univa UD" as Univa and United Devices became a single company.
If you point a web browser over at http://grid.org or the corporate site at http://www.univaud.com you'll quickly see that they have a product out called "UniCluster Express".
Cluster stacks are normally not all that exciting to me but Univa is doing something different that makes it worth checking out ...
Click on through for the full article ...
The UniCluster Express stack is free, 100% open-source and contains the following core components: Grid Engine, Grid Engine Analysis & Reporting Console (ARCo), Ganglia, Globus and a custom Java based central monitoring console application.
But that is not the really interesting part. The eye catching bit is that Univa UD is offering free support for this integrated stack.
Yep.
Free support for an integrated stack including some really complex bits like SGE ARCo and the impossible-for-most-mortals Globus stack (heck, I attended a GGF meeting and actually sat through the Globus tutorial and still could barely get it functioning in my lab environment...)
Univa UD has taken already popular open-source compute farming technologies, added in a new Java based monitoring console and bundled everything up into a installable tarball. Free support comes through grid.org and I'm guessing that they plan to actually make money by offering customization, commercial support and other services to people willing to pay.
I recently took the software for a spin myself and got it integrated into the Amazon Web Services EC2 elastic compute cloud framework. My work was written up as a HOWTO whitepaper and was documented in a series of recorded screencasts.
One of the screencasts is linked to at the top of the article, all of the others are available by following this URL:
http://www.screencast.com/users/BioTeam/folders/UniCluster-in-Amazon-EC2
If you want the PDF Whitepaper you'll have to get it via a web form over at http://www.univaud.com/hpc/wp-unicluster-amazon-ec2.php.
- Disclaimer/Disclosure: In my role as part-owner/employee of BioTeam, my company earned money on this project. Univa UD basically challenged us to get their stuff working in EC2 and offered to pay for a few days of consulting time. A more detailed disclaimer can be found within the whitepaper.
XML Feeds