Page 1 case study With the rising popularity of

Open Source on Intel
case study
As a leading provider
of turnkey computing
clusters for bioinformatics,
PSSC Labs delivers the
computing power and
storage needed to analyze
the enormous data sets in
today’s next-generation
sequencing environments.
Managing Complex
Computing Environments:
Open Source on Intel®
Architecture Makes
Supercomputing Accessible
for All
With the rising popularity of open-source-based solutions, highperformance computing (HPC) has infiltrated research labs, data
centers, financial institutions, and engineering suites. Given these
increasingly complex environments, IT professionals face an
ongoing challenge: finding suitable tools to effectively monitor,
manage, and configure complex cloud-computing installations and
HPC clusters. To tackle this challenge, PSSC Labs combines highperformance, open-source components with proven Intel® Xeon®
processor-based platforms to create competitive solutions for the
top tiers of computing requirements.
put ing
m
o
c
r
e
p
u
s
y
t
i
d
o
Comm
. I think the
ed the industry
“
sform
has really tran
u want
e point where yo
th
to
ed
v
ol
ev
world has
t
s and you wan
ce
oi
ch
t
an
w
u
variety and yo
rcomput ing.
inexpensive supe
g, PSSC Labs
“
les and Marketin
President of Sa
ice
V
,
er
ss
Le
– Alex
Challenge
PSSC Labs’ objective
was to expand the
capabilities of highperformance cluster computing to a wider range of
customers. As part of this goal, its development team
set out to enhance the manageability of complex
compute environments and to customize individual
deployments to meet the requirements of high-end
customers in scientific, financial, and educational
markets.
Solution
The team sought to integrate the latest, most reliable,
open-source components into solutions to increase
performance and enhance stability. The adoption of
Intel® software drivers enabled PSSC Labs to handle
Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI)
operations in a consistent, predictable way. Validation
of PSSC solutions through the Intel® Cluster Ready
program strengthens their credibility.
ResultS
By leveraging open-source components on Intel®
architecture, PSSC Labs has been able to bring
exceptional, cost-effective solutions to market faster.
With CBeST* and PowerWulf* Clusters, PSSC Labs’
customers are better able to manage and monitor their
cloud-computing or supercomputing infrastructures.
Customers of PSSC Labs have a single
point of contact for deployment,
support, and maintenance.
C=70 M=94 Y=38 K=38
invent
The Shift to Open Source in Supercomputing
The technology acceleration spurred by open-source development has propelled
Linux* to the top of the charts in the supercomputing realm. The vast majority
of the world’s supercomputers are running some variant of Linux, with estimates
ranging from 91 to 95 percent. Of the supercomputers on the TOP5001 list,
compiled by Hans Meuer of the University of Mannheim, Germany, over 70 percent
feature Intel® processors.
The prevalence of Linux at these high levels creates a strong need for management
tools and open-source expertise to harness supercomputing capabilities effectively
and make it easier to monitor, administer, and customize HPC installations.
With more than 10 years of experience in open source, PSSC Labs relies on the
flexibility of Linux to tailor its flagship products, CBeST and PowerWulf Cluster, for
production environments, including life science facilities, data centers, and design
and engineering installations.
unitym
m
o
c
g
in
g
a
r
e
v
By le
mponent s on
rce software co
“
ou
developed, open-s
our highe able to bring
ar
e
w
,
re
tu
ec
t
i
Intel arch
s to market
mputing solution
performance co
signif icantly
h less cost. This
faster and wit
r solutions.
hase price of ou
reduces the purc
nt of
As one of the most prolific contributors
to the Linux* kernel, Intel has helped
establish Linux as a leading commercial
operating system for the most demanding
environments, such as high-performance
computing. These contributions help
improve the performance, scalability,
security, and power-efficiency of Linux
for systems of every size and application.
Taming the Complexities of
High-Performance Computing
PSSC Labs has built its business around the fact that to the uninitiated the price
of entry to supercomputing—both financially and technologically—can be steep.
To address this challenge, the company packages its CBeST and PowerWulf Cluster
solutions as a comprehensive offering, complete with setup, support, and training
at an attractive price point. Alex Lesser, vice president of Sales and Marketing at
PSSC Labs commented, “As intimidating as supercomputing can be, the fact that
customers receive a turnkey solution with the software, the hardware, and the
networking already installed and configured makes life a lot easier for them.”
The heart of PSSC Labs’ flagship solution, CBeST (Complete Beowulf Software
Toolkit), includes utilities, custom scripts, and monitoring tools for comprehensive
cloud and cluster management. CBeST, based on CentOS Linux, also incorporates
a number of open-source components, including Ganglia Monitoring Suite, System
Imager (for replication and updating), TORQUE / Open PBS (for batch scheduling),
and Open MPI (for messaging passing). Intel® Compiler Suite is available as an add-on
and the IPMI driver provides monitoring and management at the hardware level.
Opening the Market to High-Performance Computing
One of the most dramatic breakthroughs in both open source and HPC is the
tremendous market potential that has been created. Lesser comments that opensource software on Intel® x86 architecture has opened up a whole new area of the
market to supercomputing applications. “People can now actually get into an HPC
solution for less than $50,000,” he said. “A lot of that is because the open-source
packages have become more and more accepted, and, in fact, they are more or less
expected when purchasing a system.” Lesser noted that historically, if you wanted
to buy a supercomputer, you could expect to spend tens and maybe hundreds of
millions of dollars. Today, with Intel architecture and open-source software, market
adoption of HPC has increased significantly.
Intel’s long-term commitment to the open-source community—including
development of drivers to unlock advanced hardware capabilities and optimization
work on open-source projects to improve scalability and performance—has been a
vital factor in democratizing supercomputing across the market.
2
“
Vice Preside
– Alex Lesser,
bs
eting, PSSC La
Sales and Mark
“
Intel® x86 techn
ology
has gotten so
powerful that
you can
do supercompute
r-level computat
ions
and solve compl
ex problems usin
g [Intelbased] x86 proc
essors, instead
of using
SPAR C or other
proprietary prod
uct s.
“
– Alex Lesser,
Vice President
of Sales
and Marketing,
PSSC Labs
Reducing Both Operating Costs and Capital Costs
Summary
PSSC Labs takes advantage of energy-efficiency features built into
the Intel® Xeon® processor E7 family and Intel® Xeon® processor E5
family. Intel® Intelligent Power Technology monitors how power is
being used in different operating states and maximizes performance
while conserving power. In turn, Intel’s contributions to open-source
projects make these capabilities more accessible to applications and
help deliver optimal levels of functionality.
PSSC Labs has channeled their expertise in Linux and opensource development into a product offering that delivers
genuine turnkey supercomputing capabilities at a fraction of
the cost of conventional solutions. Through kernel optimization,
comprehensive management tools, and performance
and reliability of Intel architecture, PSSC has produced a
competitive solution that has been embraced by NASA, the
United States Department of Defense, United States National
Labs, and over 100 prestigious universities.
For example, PSSC Labs uses the GNU* Compiler Collection (GCC)
in its solutions. The porting of Intel® Cilk™ Plus into GCC enhances
parallel programming constructs so that PSSC Labs delivers
improved performance on multicore processors to its customers.
PSSC Labs solutions also benefit from the extensive work that Intel
has done to improve the performance, scalability, and reliability
of the Linux kernel (upon which CentOS Linux is based). These
improvements are manifested as enhanced capabilities in PSSC
Labs solutions.
According to Lesser, PSSC Labs customers are primarily concerned
with two things: capital costs and operating costs. The costeffective Intel®-based server components help lower initial capital
costs of the hardware. And ongoing IT operating costs, which
are substantially tied to energy usage, can be lowered through
intelligent engineering.
“We optimize the BIOS to work with the capabilities of the Intel
Xeon processors and to manage how the power is being used in
different states,” Lesser said. “The latest Intel Xeon processors let
us deliver energy efficiency to customers to reduce their overall
operating costs.”
Power efficiency gains are also realized in the data center from
the availability of Intel® Intelligent Power Node Manager, which
optimizes power and cooling resources.
Focusing on Performance and Manageability
PSSC Labs has established itself in a competitive market by carving
out a niche where performance is the driver. “Our only focus is
high-performance computing,” Lesser said, “and 95 percent of the
products that ship out of our facility use Linux and open source.”
Recognizing that its customer base requires highly reliable, highly
scalable, and highly supportable technology, PSSC Labs has turned
to open source on Intel architecture to deliver exactly what
customers want.
World-Record Technical Computing
and High-Performance Computing
PSSC Labs delivers a substantial advantage to its customers
by optimizing its solutions for Intel® platforms. The Intel®
Xeon® processor E5 and Intel® Xeon® processor E7 families
have achieved an impressive array of world records and other
top results on technical computing and high-performance
computing benchmarks, and these results give PSSC an
outstanding foundation on which to build. As each generation
of Intel® Xeon® processors continues to deliver new
breakthrough performance, and Intel contributions to the Linux
kernel unlock these capabilities, PSSC’s customers can be
confident that their solutions will benefit even further.
> See platform performance highlights at
intel.com/performance
Clusters Made Simpler through Intel® Cluster Ready
Intel Cluster Ready is both a program and an architecture
that simplifies the implementation of high-performance
computing (HPC) clusters. Developed in concert with
hardware and software vendors, Intel Cluster Ready
lets you match your HPC applications to today’s leading
platforms and components. Pre-configured cluster
solutions are delivered ready to run, so you can unleash
more parallel performance faster.
> Visit the Intel Cluster Ready site at
software.intel.com/en-us/cluster-ready
Manageability is also a key customer concern. The use of Intel
IPMI software drivers in each PowerWulf Cluster provides
comprehensive hardware monitoring and management to
meet customer requirements more effectively.
collaborate
3
Intel takes pride
in being a long-standing
member of the open-source community.
We believe in open source development as a
means to create rich business opportunities,
advance promising technologies, and bring
together top talent from diverse fields to
solve computing challenges. Our contributions
to the community include reliable hardware
architectures, professional development tools,
work on essential open-source components,
collaboration and co-engineering with leading
companies, investment in academic research
and commercial businesses, and helping to
build a thriving ecosystem around open source.
k
r
spa
Linux
contributions
customer
solutions
building
blocks
OPEN
tools and
resources
industry
standards
SOURCE
on Intel
academic
research
commercial
ecosystem
www.intel.com/opensource
1
http://www.top500.org/lists/2012/11/
Intel may make changes to specifications and product descriptions at any time, without notice. Designers must not rely on the absence or characteristics of any features or instructions marked “reserved” or “undefined.” Intel reserves these for future
definition and shall have no responsibility whatsoever for conflicts or incompatibilities arising from future changes to them. The information here is subject to change without notice. Do not finalize a design with this information. The products described in
this document may contain design defects or errors known as errata which may cause the product to deviate from published specifications. Current characterized errata are available on request. Contact your local Intel sales office or your distributor to
obtain the latest specifications and before placing your product order. Copies of documents which have an order number and are referenced in this document, or other Intel literature, may be obtained by calling 1-800-548-4725, or by visiting Intel’s Web
Site www.intel.com.
Software and workloads used in performance tests may have been optimized for performance only on Intel microprocessors. Performance tests, such as SYSmark* and MobileMark*, are measured using specific computer systems, components,
software, operations and functions. Any change to any of those factors may cause the results to vary. You should consult other information and performance tests to assist you in fully evaluating your contemplated purchases, including the performance
of that product when combined with other products. For more information go to www.intel.com/performance.
Information in this document is provided in connection with Intel® products. No license, express or implied, by estoppel or otherwise, to any intellectual property rights is granted by this document. Except as provided in Intel‘s terms and conditions of sale
for such products, Intel assumes no liability whatsoever, and Intel disclaims any express or implied warranty, relating to sale and/or use of Intel products including liability or warranties relating to fitness for a particular purpose, merchantability,
or infringement of any patent, copyright or other intellectual property right.
*Other names and brands may be claimed as the property of others.
Copyright © 2013 Intel Corporation. All rights reserved. Intel, the Intel logo, and Xeon are trademarks of Intel Corporation in the U.S. and other countries.
0113/NKR/MESH/PDF
328327-001US