Platform Computing, a designer of cluster, grid and cloud management software, on Tuesday said it would support the Intel many integrated core (Intel MIC) architecture in Intel's upcoming Knights Corner products targeting high performance computing applications. Those, who will need the forthcoming MIC compute accelerators, will be able to simply install the cards into clusters powered the latest Platform Computing software.

"Platform HPC and Platform Cluster Manager provide a faster and easier path to building Intel Cluster Ready certified clusters," said Bill Magro, director of HPC software solutions for Intel.

Customers using Platform HPC, Platform LSF and Platform Cluster Manager will be able take advantage of the forthcoming Intel MIC architecture to build Intel Cluster Ready (ICR) certified clusters for processing highly parallel workloads, leveraging exponentially faster and more powerful processing capabilities without needing to modify their applications, operating systems or HPC environments.

"We have been extremely impressed with the performance and ease of use we've seen on the Intel MIC 'Knights Ferry' software development platform. We believe the Intel MIC architecture will be very attractive to Platform [software] users who want to get more performance out of their HPC clusters, without the need to rewrite their applications for a new architecture," said William Lu, director of product management for Platform Computing.

As a result of this technology partnership, Platform LSF and Platform HPC users will be able to intelligently allocate and manage jobs on Intel MIC based on a number of factors such as the number of available cores, memory, error conditions and environmental temperature. Effectively, Intel MIC will be treated as additional computational resources. Therefore, depending on management capabilities available on a set of given nodes, Platform LSF and Platform HPC can control the job resource usage to these nodes.

Platform HPC and Platform Cluster Manager will include integrated monitoring capability for Intel MIC architecture. Using the integrated operational dashboard, administrators will be able to monitor key metrics such as environmental temperature. In addition, both products can automate deployment of Intel MIC runtime libraries and device drivers to compute nodes in HPC clusters, making administration much easier in combined CPU and Intel MIC heterogeneous environments.

Platform Computing is a leader in cluster, grid and cloud management software that serves more than 2000 of the world's most demanding organizations.

Tags: Intel, MIC, Larrabee, Knights Corner, Knights Ferry, GPGPU, Platform Computing, HPC