2003
|
|
November 18, 2003 | PHOENIX, AZ – SUPERCOMPUTING 2003
Platform Computing Extends Grid Leadership with Powerful New Products, Upgrades and Major Customer Win
Platform Computing Inc. today at Supercomputing 2003, announced the next generation of its Platform LSF Family of products which delivers enhanced performance, new functionality and new complementary offerings. The Platform LSF Family will provide increased customer value for business-critical grid computing applications in demanding industries such as electronics, government, industrial manufacturing and life sciences.
Platform Computing has significantly enhanced its best-of-breed Platform LSF and LSF HPC grid-enabling products with several key features and performance upgrades, and has extended their market-leading capabilities by fully integrating complementary Platform products.
Platform LSF Version 6.0 now includes goal-oriented SLA (Service Level Agreement) scheduling for guaranteed, on-time project execution and new Self-Management diagnostics which enables enterprises to automatically detect errors and take corrective action, thereby increasing job reliability and run time predictability. In addition, this new version delivers a ‘single-source, single responsibility’ solution, beyond core workload management. Now, customers can enhance workload management functionality with IT visibility via workload analytics, enhanced reports for improved manageability and license optimization for increased efficiency, higher performance and cost reduction.
Platform LSF HPC Version 6.0 now includes high performance scheduling plug-ins for optimized scheduling and adaptive interconnect performance that enhances application performance.
“The addition of integrated management and visibility capabilities across an enterprise grid environment enables a much closer linkage between IT planning and business performance. Enterprises that are preparing for the future should be looking to standardize on grid technology that gives them workload management, workload analytics, and enterprise-wide scaling capabilities across their heterogeneous architectures and application environments, ” said Nick Gall, Principal Analyst, META Group.
The expanded Platform LSF Family includes the following new offerings, further building on Platform LSF solution capabilities, standards compliance and third-party heterogeneity:
Platform LSF MultiCluster: Extends an organization’s reach to share resources beyond a single Platform LSF cluster to span geographical locations, providing computing power ‘as needed, when needed’ for faster time to results and enhanced productivity.
Platform LSF License Scheduler: Optimizes the tracking and usage of all application licenses across Platform LSF clusters delivering dramatic license cost reduction and better overall access to existing license resources.
Platform LSF Analytics: Increases operational visibility of Platform LSF clusters to deliver more accurate and timely information for improved project planning and decision making.
Platform LSF Reports: Provides a number of key Platform LSF cluster performance metrics in a series of reports which provide visibility into cluster utilization and enables administrators to improve overall cluster performance and troubleshoot configuration problems.
Underpinning Platform LSF family performance improvements, seamless integration and new capabilities is the production-proven Virtual Execution Machine (VEM)™ architecture, standard on all current and future Platform products.
"The Virtual Execution Machine (VEM)™ provides incremental customer value by establishing a standards-based common architecture, enabling our customers to more effectively accelerate and manage workloads, gain visibility into cluster operations and ultimately reduce their IT costs and increase profitability," said Ed Ryan, Vice President of Products, Platform Computing.
Demonstrating market momentum around adoption of its products, today, in a separate announcement, Platform Computing announced a new contract win with the US Department of Defense (DoD). The DoD will utilize Platform LSF HPC to further its high performance computing program.
Please see http://www.platform.com/newsevents/presskits/sc2003.asp for an online press kit with all Supercomputing 2003 announcements and product information.
"The DoD High Performance Computing Modernization Program (HPCMP) is committed to using proven, commercially supported, highly scalable grid computing technology in its computing centers," explains Cray Henry, Director, U.S. DoD HPCMP. "We are working closely with Platform Computing to implement their standards-based software to manage and share our HPC resources across our centers."
Other customers, like Diversa and Adaptec, look forward to benefiting from new Platform LSF family products:
"Diversa is excited about the SLA (Service Level Agreement) Scheduling in Platform LSF 6.0, which provides us with the ability to guarantee cluster access and project completion and to accurately forecast cluster availability. LSF Reports will also provide us concise reporting on individual and departmental use of our HPC resources," said Ryan Ulaszek, Bioinformatics Software Eng. II, Diversa. "Together, these synergistic offerings are enabling us to exceed project deadlines that rely on heavy use of our bioinformatics and computational proteomics tools with superior workload management and enhanced cluster operation."
"By implementing Platform solutions, we better understand our engineering compute and license resource usage, and were able to consolidate, share and optimize licenses across our different engineering teams around the world,” said Systems Administration and Engineering Support Manager, Kelly Overgaard, Adaptec. “With a unique combination of Platform products, we have around-the-clock access to a unified, global pool of fully utilized resources, and, we’ve been able to shorten our design cycle making us a more efficient organization, while keeping our costs down."
Platform Computing provides distributed and grid computing solutions that help enterprises accelerate key business applications, reduce operational and capital costs, guarantee service levels and optimize their IT resources. Platform's integrated desktop to grid software solutions are used by over 1,600 customers worldwide in the financial services, government, industrial manufacturing, electronics and life science industries to deliver higher quality products and services, improve business performance and maximize the return on it investments. Founded in 1992, platform has strategic relationships with Dell, HP, IBM, Apple, SAS and SGI, and the Industry’s broadest application integration support. For more information visit www.platform.com.
|
|
|
|