GridCentric Inc., a Toronto-based software company, today announced
the availability of Copper, a cluster management system for
high-performance computing workloads. Copper combines virtualization
and grid computing technologies to enable simple, efficient and
flexible cluster deployment, management, and use.
The GridCentric Copper platform enables real-time,
on-demand sharing of high-performance computing resources and makes
cluster administration a one-click task. With Copper, organizations
reduce IT expenditures through significantly lower installation and
management costs, higher utilization of their physical infrastructure,
and improved sharing of their data assets.
Operators of large clusters face enormous challenges due to
system complexity – compute clusters are typically composed of hundreds
or even thousands of individual computers, each requiring separate
software components for hardware provisioning and management, resource
allocation, job scheduling, and application support. Initial setup of a
compute cluster can take several months because of these challenges.
By combining technologies from cloud and grid computing,
GridCentric’s Copper platform provides server provisioning, resource
management, job control, and high-level application support in a single
integrated software package. With Copper, the time required to set
up and configure a compute cluster goes from months to days.
Additionally, Copper has built-in support for operating hundreds of
"virtual clusters" on the same set of physical resources, scaling their
compute footprints on-demand in real time – the industry’s first true
high-performance cloud computing platform. Copper gives cluster
users the power of a supercomputer with the ease-of-use of a PC.
"GridCentric’s approach to cluster management will enable many
organizations to service users in ways that would have otherwise been
impractical or impossible. Our experiences with it to date have been
very positive. Copper(TM) is the way of the future for many
organizations," said Professor Michael Bauer of the University of
Western Ontario, and Associate Director of the SHARCNET academic
supercomputing consortium.
Copper has been in limited trial on a SHARCNET compute
cluster located at York University in Toronto, Canada since late 2009,
and is now open to all researchers from SHARCNET’s 17 academic member
organizations.
"GridCentric’s Copper product represents a new class of
cluster management software," said Tim Smith, co-founder and CEO of
GridCentric Inc. "Systems integrators, cluster operators, and end-users
will all benefit from Copper’s unprecedented ease of installation,
management, and use."
