Penguin Computing Tweaks Scyld, Rebrands to ClusterWare

Published: April 25, 2006

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Penguin Computing is one of the few Linux-only server vendors on the market, and it has a specific niche in selling Linux-based supercomputer clusters. And while we all love the classics of literature, having a product name like Scyld for cluster software might make sense in a European market, but it is baffling to those not steeped in the classics. So as Penguin Computing is making some enhancements to its Linux clustering software, the company also changed the name of the software to ClusterWare.

Up until now, the Scyld implementation of the open source Beowulf Linux clustering software has been based on its own implementation of Linux. Supporting a Linux variant gives a software vendor flexibility, but application ports become an issue. (If you don't know about Beowulf, it was created by NASA researcher Donald Becker to cluster together garbage PCs running Linux to make a parallel supercomputer; Becker has also written many of the Ethernet drivers in Linux. Beowulf is arguably the application that pushed Linux through the tipping point from academic oddity to potentially huge commercial product.) And that is why, according to Pauline Nist, senior vice president of product development and management at Penguin, the company has decided to port its Scyld software to a more mainstream Red Hat Enterprise Linux ES implementation. The CentOS Linux, which is itself a variant of the Red Hat distro that Red Hat hates to admit even exists.

By shifting to a Red Hat distribution, it also means that Penguin can sell the newly christened ClusterWare software for creating and managing Linux-based HPC clusters on other vendor's iron. If Red Hat is certified, now ClusterWare is certified.

So, what about Novell's SUSE Linux distro? "We are looking at SUSE Linux right now," explains Nist. "The just did the first implementation of ClusterWare based on market share, which is why Red Hat was first." She says that getting ClusterWare running on SUSE Linux will be done when the market demands it.

As for the brand names, Nist says that Beowulf and Scyld are well known in high performance computing, especially in academic and government research institutions, the names mean nothing to emerging companies in the life sciences and biotech fields.