The HPC beat goes on

16 June, 2017
Gabor Samu
IBM

Earlier this year, we wrote about the silver anniversary of IBM Spectrum LSF, a milestone celebration of 25 years of innovation in HPC workload management.  And you’ve come a long way baby!  Over the years, IBM Spectrum LSF has grown from a workload scheduler to a full suite of products designed to give you a competitive advantage by:

  • Maximizing user productivity of users
  • Simplifying management
  • Optimizing utilization

As a prospective HPC user, why does all of this matter to you? HPC environments can become very complex; they contain lots of components and support varied workloads like MPI, GPUs and containers.

Adding to the complexity is the need to juggle different user requirements and projects, and to constantly respond to changing business demands.  As the saying goes, there are two sides to every story.  Administration of HPC environments can be complicated and you need tools for simplification.  At the same time, end use must be simple enough to allow users to focus on their results and not on HPC.  An efficient workload scheduler only fulfills a portion of these needs.

Both sides now

Spectrum LSF is industry proven and offers unparalleled reliability, performance and scalability.  Over the past 25 years, Spectrum LSF has grown to become the most comprehensive solution for HPC management available today.  Don’t just deploy a scheduler and be done with it. Spectrum LSF delivers capabilities focused on:

  • User productivity
  • Management simplification
  • License optimization
  • Data-aware scheduling

Look at your HPC environment from both sides, and make sure that user and administrator experiences are optimized.  Mobile clients allow users to keep an eye on their jobs while maintaining a good work-life balance.  Intuitive web-based interfaces simplify job and workflow management, and a client for Microsoft Windows makes submitting jobs as easy as printing a file.  Taking advantage of intelligent data movement between clusters and software license optimization can add up to big cost savings.  For administrators, Spectrum LSF provides comprehensive dashboards and reporting help to make it simpler to manage and understand the operation of the cluster.

Today, we are pleased to announce the immediate availability of IBM Spectrum LSF Explorer, a lightweight and powerful reporting solution for Spectrum LSF environments.  Based on Elasticsearch, it helps a diverse set of business and technical users rapidly create and view reports and dashboards to clearly understand how the compute environment is performing.

charts

And the updates don’t stop with IBM Spectrum LSF Explorer. Continuing with the long tradition of support in IBM Spectrum LSF for nearly all operating systems and architectures, IBM has formalized support in IBM Spectrum LSF 10 for the recently announced Intel Xeon Processor Scalable family.

Sprechen sie Deutsch?

It’s ISC High Performance 2017.  If you’re in Frankfurt, visit IBM at booth #1140 to learn more about the entire IBM HPC portfolio, including solutions from IBM Spectrum Computing and IBM Power Systems.  Interested in learning more about the IBM Spectrum LSF, visit our trials page here.

Auf Wiedersehen!

The post The HPC beat goes on appeared first on IBM Systems Blog: In the Making.