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NASA to Acquire Huge SGI Altix Linux Cluster

Every major IT vendor has one or two big sites that are on the cutting edge of their specific technologies. For workstation and server maker Silicon Graphics, the primary place where new SGI technologies are tested under load is NASA's Ames Research Center, in Moffett Field, California. So it is not surprising that after years of pushing the limits on single system image scalability on the Unix-based Origin 3000 supercomputers and recently on the Altix 3000 Linux-Itanium clusters, NASA Ames is the first organization to buy 20 of the 512-way Altix 3000 servers and create a 10,240-processor supercluster with 1.3 petabytes of disk storage to run its simulations. The servers and storage will be linked to each other through an InfiniBand switch fabric; the nodes inside each Altix machine are connected using SGI's own NUMAflex clustering.

The server, known as Project Columbia, will power the Space Exploration Simulator, which will give NASA Ames a factor of ten improvement in the amount of supercomputing it can bring to bear on its simulations. In terms of raw aggregate performance, the Altix supercluster would be rated at about 61 teraflops peak and 49 teraflops sustained on the Linpack Fortran benchmarks, making it the most powerful supercomputer in the world. The machine probably cost somewhere in the range of $50 million.

HP Finally Supports Linux on Superdome Itanium Servers

Hewlett-Packard has been talking about its triumvirate of operating systems platforms on the Itanium-based Integrity line of servers for so long that it is easy to forget sometimes that only HP-UX Unix and Windows have been supported on the big Superdome servers, which span to 64 or 128 Itaniums. Until last week, Linux support was relegated (alongside HP-UX and Windows) to Integrity machines with two or four Itaniums; that's the rx2600 (two-way) and rx5670 and rx4640 (four-way) servers. But now HP has announced that it can run Linux inside hard partitions on the rx7620 (8-way), rx8620 (16-way) and Superdome (64-way and 128-way, depending on if customers use the mx2 dual Madison modules). All of these latter machines are based on the Superdome architecture and chipset, even if they do not carry the Superdome name.

HP says it will support Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 Update 3 within a hard partition with eight processors today, and that it will support Novell's new SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 inside Superdome partitions within about three months. HP is not yet supporting larger partitions on the Superdome machines, although Linux 2.6 can span to 32 or 64 processors. However, customers can cluster Linux partitions inside a Superdome box for failover or parallel database processing using Oracle 9i or 10g, for instance, if they desire. Customers can also use HP's own MCServiceGuard clustering software to cluster the Linux partitions on Superdome machines.

Red Hat Taps Black Duck for Software IP Management

Commercial Linux distributor Red Hat announced last week that it has partnered with Black Duck Software to allow vendors and programmers participating in the Linux community to police the intellectual property in their software.

Black Duck was founded in late 2003 after the SCO-IBM suit was well under way, and it offers a tool called protexIP that can detect proprietary and open source code in a solution stack and tell programmers and managers the potential intellectual property risks they face as they mix such code. If you use an open source program as part of your application, Black Duck will, for example, tell you if your licensing terms to your customers violates the GNU General Public License. The partnership complements the open source assurance fund and intellectual property warranty that Red Hat offers its Enterprise Linux customers. With Black Duck's software, companies can mix and match software and know the IP issues they face in their whole stack, including parts not covered by Red Hat's indemnifications.

Veritas to Enthusiastically Support Linux

A very large portion of the enterprise Unix market uses one or another of the file systems, storage management, and clustering software from Veritas. Last week at LinuxWorld, Veritas announced a new feature of its eponymous file system called Portable Data Containers that will allow a data set running on the Veritas file system to be instantly switch from a Unix server to a Linux server without having to physically move or in any way reformat the data. This can, as you imagine, significantly speed up the job of porting from Unix to Linux, and this is exactly what Veritas intends to help customers do.

Veritas also announced that its Storage Foundation suite of software now supports Linux clusters running Oracle 9i RAC and, presumably, Oracle 10g, too. (Oracle 10g is really nothing more than a dot release on Oracle 9i RAC.) Oracle RAC takes care of the clustering at the database level, making Linux machines running multiple copies of the Oracle database look like they are one giant, virtual database. The Veritas storage software virtualizes the storage arrays underneath those servers, making any number of physical disk arrays and drives inside the machines appear as a single set of logical drives that are much easier to manage. Veritas is now supporting its Cluster Server (for system and database clustering), and Volume Replicator (for copying datasets for disaster recovery), OpForce (for server provisioning), and i3 v7.0 performance tuning software on Linux now, too. The company has been offering its NetBackup archiving software on Linux since 1999 and put out a subset of its storage suite for Linux in 2001.

Arkeia Gets $4 Million Funding from European Banks

Privately held network backup solution specialist Arkeia announced at LinuxWorld last week that it had secured $4 million in venture funding from two European banks, Banque Populaire and Credit Lyonnais. This is Arkeia's first round of venture funding, and the company says that it has been profitable since it was founded in Paris, France in 1996. The company, which also has offices in Carlsbad, California, has 4,000 corporate customers worldwide using its Network Backup, Server backup, and Arkeia Light products. Arkeia Server Backup is only supported on Linux distributions, while Network Backup is supported on Unix, Linux, Windows, and NetWare platforms.

Novell Expects Rapid Uptake of SLES 9

Novell vice chairman Chris Stone, speaking at the launch of SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 last week at LinuxWorld, was undaunted by the prospect that customers might hesitate to jump from SLES 8 and its Linux 2.4 kernel to SLES 9 and its new Linux 2.6 kernel. "Our installed based has been anticipating Linux 2.6," he said, "and I expect a pretty rapid adoption of SLES 9." A representative from Hewlett-Packard, which pushes a lot of Linux servers and which sells and supports SuSE Linux, said that companies pushing up against the performance limits of Linux 2.4 would jump immediately to Linux 2.6, but conceded that those customers who were happy with Linux 2.4 would probably sit out an upgrade until it was time to renew their support contracts.

MySQL, Information Builders Support Power Linux

IBM was gung-ho earlier this year about trying to pump up Linux on its Power architecture as it was readying its "Squadron" eServer i5 and p5 servers. Last week, the company got two small but important partners to agree to support Linux on these Power boxes: open-source database maker MySQL and business-intelligence software maker Information Builders. MySQL has already completed the port of its database to Linux on Power, and has it immediately available for free download from its Web site. The software can run on older Power-based servers, too, and even the BladeCenter JS20 blade server, which is based on the PowerPC 970 (also known as the G5 at Apple). MySQL has also joined IBM's PartnerWorld program to get hooked into the reseller machine. Information Builders announced that its WebFOCUS business intelligence tools have been certified to run on Red Hat and Novell SuSE Linuxes on the Power-based server platforms. The software was already certified on the Intel-based servers and on IBM's zSeries mainframes running Linux.