ScaleMP is ramping up the capabilities of its vSMP Foundation
virtual server aggregation and management solution, leveraging Intel’s
latest processors to increase the scale and performance of the offering.
ScaleMP officials announced May 25 that vSMP
Foundation 3.0, which is aimed at the HPC (high-performance computing)
space, will support Intel’s Xeon 7500 series “Nehalem EX” processors
and Xeon 5600 series “Westmere EP” chips. Doing so means that vSMP
Foundation enables the creation of virtual SMP systems that have two to
128 physical nodes.
With the new capabilities, users will be able to run
larger workloads, according to ScaleMP officials. Now they will be able
to create virtual SMPs with up to 128 physical servers, with each node
capable of handling up to 128 CPUs, for a total of 16,384 CPUs.
In addition, vSMP Foundation 3.0 also supports virtual machines with up to 64 TB of shared memory.
In the networking realm, it enables users to run
multiple InfiniBand HCAs (host channel adaptors) in parallel—using
advanced algorithms to balance the traffic between the connections—and
supports a larger number of HBAs (host bus adaptors) from LSI and
Emulex, as well as Broadcom’s 10 Gigabit Ethernet cards.
“We are focused on expanding support for the most
cutting-edge hardware and networking technologies available so that our
customers can optimize their resource utilization, simplify system and
cluster management, and achieve the highest virtual SMP performance
possible,” ScaleMP founder and CTO Shai Fultheim said in a statement.
With the new version of vSMP, users with very large
workloads will get greater flexibility in creating the kinds of virtual
SMP systems they need, but without having to pay the same high prices
that traditional physical SMPs catch, according to Fultheim.
Intel’s Xeon 7500 series processors, aimed at servers
with four or more sockets, offer up to eight cores per chip. The chips,
released in March, are targeted at high-end workloads normally run on RISC-based systems or mainframes.
The six-core Xeon 5600 series chips are designed for servers with two processors.
ScaleMP officials said vSMP Foundation 3.0 is available now in limited distribution with general availability coming June 14.
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