IBM Offers HPC Bundles for SUSE Linux

Published: August 26, 2008

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

While Linux has certainly taken off in the high-performance supercomputing labs of academic institutions, commercial enterprises, and government facilities around the world, many of the supercomputers out there are using home-grown Linuxes and are self-supported by fleets of nerds who, in many cases, know as much or more about Linux than the commercial Linux suppliers. That said, this is a cost and both Red Hat and Novell and their server partners want to get more installations among HPC shops.

To help its customers along to commercial-supported rather than self-supported Linux, IBM has introduced what it calls an HPCC 8 Pack for Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 operating system that allows customers to buy SLES 10 in eight-node bundles--presumably at a hefty discount considering that HPC shops hate paying a lot for support. The bundle includes a typical mix of management nodes and a larger number of calculation nodes. The way the licensing works, no more than one-quarter of all nodes can be designated as a management node using these bundles. (Typical HPC shops will deploy tens to hundreds to maybe even thousands of these bundles.) The HPCC 8 Pack is preconfigured to run on IBM's e1350 X64-based clusters of System x rack servers and can also be deployed on selected System x and BladeCenter servers for customers who want to build their own configurations.

The HPCC 8 Pack bundle is available starting August 22. IBM did not announce pricing, but it should be considerably less per node than the cost of a basic SLES 10 license, which costs $349 list from Novell for a basic subscription with one year of Web and telephone support. The IBM HPCC 8 Pack has Big Blue offering Level 1 tech support and does not have telephone support, but does include patches for the Linux stack and for security updates as well as online delivery of those patches and any ancillary software.

While SLES 10 is the Linux of choice for many HPC sites that do choose commercial rather than homegrown Linux, Big Blue does have a reseller agreement with Red Hat and distributes Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 and 5 to System x and BladeCenter customers and backs it up with support as well, just as it does for SLES 10 in general and the HPCC 8 Pack in particular.

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