HPC at SUSE - What Happens Next? New Levels of Cooperation! | SUSE Communities

HPC at SUSE – What Happens Next? New Levels of Cooperation!

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High Performance Computing (HPC) has made its way into the mainstream data center. There has been increased HPC adoption among industrial customers. Commercial HPC usage has encompassed automotive engineering/computer aided design, pharmaceutical design, oil exploration, and of course financial analytics. All these industries, plus some newer and quickly maturing application areas, such as online gaming and movies, but also super-scalable business computing or data warehousing (which all use HPC technologies to be successful), for us at SUSE represent the new paradigm of High Productivity Computing.

The operating system is a crucial component of the High Performance Computing Stack. Not only does it affect the performance, security and reliability of the systems, but it also has a major influence on the type of applications or hardware platform that is chosen. In an HPC environment, the operating system must have features that enable efficient high performance computing. The operating system must be scalable and cluster friendly, and it must support a wide range of hardware platforms and devices. It must also provide robust security features. This is where Linux enters the game. Linux has quickly become the key operating system in the HPC market. The total cost of ownership of a Linux system is significantly lower than the TCO of other popular and proprietary operating systems. The excellent scalability features of Linux, along with robust security and performance, make it an excellent choice for server systems, especially in the HPC areas.

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server is kind of synonymous with high-performance Linux running on 64-bit systems. SUSE has always provided Linux code to the HPC market. Since 1993, SUSE engineers have made significant contributions to the advancement and tuning of the Linux kernel and key kernel-related performance technologies. Already back in the late 1990s, SUSE started its close cooperation with the big HPC technology leaders in the hardware space, such as Intel, SGI, IBM, Cray, NEC, HP, Dell, Fujitsu, and many others. Today, virtually every HPC manufacturer uses SUSE Linux Enterprise or reviews it as a product option, which is also reflected with every new Top500 list of the most powerful supercomputers in the world.

One of the reasons why SUSE Linux Enterprise Server became the Linux of choice for many different HPC customers was its continuous early support of the newer chip sets. In this contexts, SUSE and Intel today announced a new level of cooperation in the area of HPC: SUSE Linux Enterprise Server is the first commercially supported Linux to be included as an operating system option with Intel HPC Orchestrator system software stack, and the companies will offer joint support for the combined solution. Intel HPC Orchestrator with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server will be available from Intel in the fourth quarter 2016. In addition, Intel uses open source Open Build Service from SUSE to build and release the Intel HPC Orchestrator system software.

HPC-intel

Kudos go to Kai Dupke, Naji Almahmoud, and all the other talented colleagues at SUSE who during the past years put so much effort into our HPC development and the cooperation with our partner Intel. For me, with today’s announcement, the tireless work and exceptional efforts of this marvelous team really hit a peak. I am very proud that, for many years, I could be part of the SUSE team working on this highly exciting and pulsing domain of technology. And I am sure that this is just one of many more upcoming highlights we will hear about in future from SUSE in the High Performance – or High Productivity – Computing  area.

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Meike Chabowski Meike Chabowski works as Documentation Strategist at SUSE. Before joining the SUSE Documentation team, she was Product Marketing Manager for Enterprise Linux Servers at SUSE, with a focus on Linux for Mainframes, Linux in Retail, and High Performance Computing. Prior to joining SUSE more than 20 years ago, Meike held marketing positions with several IT companies like defacto and Siemens, and was working as Assistant Professor for Mass Media. Meike holds a Master of Arts in Science of Mass Media and Theatre, as well as a Master of Arts in Education from University of Erlangen-Nuremberg/ Germany, and in Italian Literature and Language from University of Parma/Italy.