Cluster Resources Announces New Moab Grid Suite

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Amber Webb writes “Spanish Fork, Utah – Cluster
Resources, Inc.TM today announced the release of Moab Grid
Suite 4.5, its new grid management solution that lets organizations
consolidate management of multiple clusters to create usable,
affordable grids while maintaining local cluster sovereignty

Many
large-scale grid sites trust Moab for their grid creation and
management, consolidating local clusters into grids and connecting
to remote resources throughout the world. Moab based grids allow
them to reduce management overhead, improve job responsiveness and
utilize the fine grained control and ease-of-use that Moab provides.

Moab
significantly reduces the barriers to enabling grid computing so
organizations can focus on getting the most out of their compute
resources. Moab gives organizations the capabilities they need to
create a useful, productive grid across the resources they already
own and scales to allow plenty of room to grow. Its flexible and
robust policy engine provides solutions to the political problems
that come with sharing resources. With its integrated design, Moab
is easy to use making it simple to go from independent multiple
clusters to a high-performance grid.

Create
a grid from your existing environment

While
many of the industry’s grid solutions are only compatible with
limited resources, Moab can unify multiple heterogeneous software and
hardware environments. Moab can work on top of multiple resource
managers (LSF, PBS Pro, TORQUE, LoadLeveler, SLURM, BProc, etc.),
operating systems (Linux, Unix, Mac, Windows, etc.) and hardware (SMP
machines, 32-bit, 64-bit, etc.). This flexibility allows
organizations with multiple clusters the freedom to move to a grid
while leveraging all of their existing infrastructure.

Moab
Grid Suite ensures that even completely heterogeneous systems are
highly utilized by intelligently assigning the best-suited hardware
to each job. With optimized job and data migration and integrated
user and file mapping facilities, users can take advantage of the
grid with virtually no change in submission habits. Moab also tracks
both network and storage limitations when making grid scheduling
decisions to better guarantee successful job execution and optimized
grid-level performance.

Moab
eliminates the need to change existing cluster policies, underlying
resource managers, job scripts and other cluster-specific
configurations. Moab’s broad compatibility make it a viable option
for organizations seeking to consolidate control over disparate
cluster resources into a single flexible resource that can continue
to apply previous usage controls while adding new, simplified grid
level management.

Make
political grid sharing a reality

Challenges
in creating a grid often stem from reluctance of individual cluster
management to give up control of resources. Moab Grid Suite makes
resource sharing easy between multiple organizations through two
methods. First, it allows administrators to maintain sovereignty over
their own resources, even in a grid environment. Second, grids can be
configured in different management styles, including traditional,
centralized grids where there is one central administrator who
controls all grid policies, and a new peer-to-peer grid model where
workload and resource status information can be exchanged and
jobs and data can be migrated between trusted peers with any local
applied policy. These Moab-unique capabilities let individual
clusters maintain independence while still collaborating with the
grid at their desired level.

Moab’s
advanced policy engine allows organizations to guarantee its users a
certain quality of service (QoS) and deliver it. Grid administrators
can use Moab to automate policies or set user and group priorities so
the highest priority jobs get done faster. Moab also provides
organizations with reporting and billing tools so administrators can
know exactly how much of the grid’s resources an organization used
and, if desired, bill against the resulting information to help share
costs fairly.

Moab’s
Virtual Private Cluster (VPC) feature lets administrators allocate a
section of a cluster or grid or a specific amount of resources to
users or groups. These users or groups can then only view, track and
allocate resources within their own VPC. The VPC can be used to give
political groups the resources they demand while administrators
maintain central control of all resources. Using this approach,
individual clusters can participate in multiple grids simultaneously
with distinct rules of engagement for each grid. With the political
sharing features Moab provides, grid organizations can assure local
contributing groups that their needs will be met, without
compromising the service delivered to other members of the grid.

Improve
ease-of-use on grids

“While
powerful, one of the highlights of Moab Grid Suite 4.5 is its
incredible simplicity,” said David Jackson, Cluster Resources’
Chief Technology Officer. “We have been doing grids for a
number of years and have found that one of the greatest barriers to
grid adoption is the fear associated with introducing an entirely new
layer of software and complexity. With Moab Grid Suite, these issues
are effectively eliminated. In many cases, a cluster can be rolled
into a grid in a matter of seconds with no new tools and no new
training.”

Moab
Grid Suite provides features to simplify adoption including a web
access portal that lets users remotely submit and manage jobs through
a graphical interface. Moab further simplifies grid computing by
translating resource manager commands and scripts, reducing training
for end-users and letting them work across multiple resource
management environments with scripts knowledge they already have.

Moab
makes management easier for administrators with its virtual view of
resources that provides information on downed, idle and active nodes,
eligible, running, on hold and blocked job status, as well as
resource consumption information by user, project, organization or
other groupings. Moab’s in-depth reporting tools also allow
administrators to view previous months’ grid activity letting them
create reports to see how a policy changed workload or to ensure
users are receiving their agreed QoS. Moab’s simplistic features
help organizations set up grids without lost productivity. It
benefits organizations by reducing training time and letting them see
what is really happening on their grid.

Evaluate
Moab Grid Suite Free

To
obtain a free evaluation copy of Moab Cluster Suite or for
information on pricing, contact a Cluster Resources representative at
1(801) 873-3400 or e-mail info@clusterresources.com.
For more information on Moab Grid Suite visit
http://www.clusterresources.com/pages/products/moa b-grid-suite.php.

About Cluster Resources, Inc.TM:

Cluster
Resources, Inc.™ is a leading provider of workload and resource
management software and services for cluster, grid, hosting center
and utility-based computing environments. Cluster Resources’
high-performance computing solutions enable administrators to control
and optimize parallel and serial computing resources. Its
professional Moab product line provides HPC sites with the most
advanced workload management, scheduling and policy control (e.g.,
advanced reservations, backfill, checkpoint, preemption, fairshare,
prioritization, etc.). Moab is compatible with batch resource
managers such as Platform Computing’s LSF, Altair Engineering’s PBS
Pro, and IBM’s LoadLeveler, and open source tools including TORQUE,
OpenPBS and others. Moab can manage Linux, Unix, Mac OS X and Windows
environments.

For
more information call (801) 873-3400 or (888) 221-2008 or visit
www.clusterresources.com.

Link: clusterresources.com