ACADEMIA

NewServers today announced a strategic partnership with high performance computing (HPC) provider Scalable Informatics that will provide cloud storage solutions capable of supporting HPC.

NewServers will integrate Scalable Informatics' JackRabbit high-performance server storage solution into the company's service. Customers, particularly those with high performance or high volume storage requirements (in petabytes), will benefit from the design, maintenance, and support of this system by Scalable Informatics.

Additionally, Scalable Informatics will develop new hosted HPC solutions using NewServers' cloud of "bare metal devices."

"We're working with Scalable Informatics to deliver exceptional storage solutions for our cloud server customers," said J.P. Gagne, CEO, NewServers. "Our cloud of bare metal devices provides a vastly superior solution for high performance computing compared to virtual server clouds. Scalable Informatics' HPC storage solutions make an ideal complement to NewServers' dedicated server service."

Under the partnership, Scalable Informatics and NewServers will team up to design a new line of servers-on-demand for high performance computing environments that includes Infiniband and 10 GbE connected storage.

“Scalable Informatics is excited to be working with NewServers, to provide high performance storage on demand, and build and enable customers to use 'instant-on' HPC environments, and easily create specialized environments,” said Dr. Joseph Landman, CEO of Scalable Informatics.

For many prospective users of HPC systems and storage, initial startup costs for clusters and support may be a significant barrier to entry.

“NewServers enables end users to purchase the processing and storage they need, when they need it, and scale these systems up or down very quickly, as their needs evolve,” Dr. Landman noted.

Scalable Informatics' JackRabbit high performance storage systems provide high speed data service to the users of these 'instant-on' environments, providing in excess of 1GB/s bandwidth.

The bare metal devices allow end users to install and use precisely the same operating system images as they would normally use on their own systems. There is no virtualization vendor lock-in which, in light of the shutdown of Virtual Iron, could potentially leave users unable to access or control their own data. This is a significant concern for end users of mission critical computing as a service. Moreover, as these are bare metal units, direct access to low latency Infiniband devices is possible using various MPI stacks. This is not possible using virtualized computing nodes, which renders most of the virtualized stacks inappropriate for low latency computations.