14 DAY TRIAL // Intel has revealed its most recent takeover, one that will further enhance its HPC pedigree, increase it personnel and give its high performance data division a new general manager.
When the top 500 list was published, Intel revealed a new processor and PCI Express accelerator brand called Xeon Phi.
That essentially meant that the company is about as far along as it can be in terms of processor and many-core development.
As such, if it is to make its name even more relevant on the supercomputing front, it needs to tackle different aspects.
The latest acquisition shows which of those aspects it is currently holding under the proverbial microscope: storage.
The Santa Clara, California-based chip giant has bought Whamcloud, designer of the Lustre file system solution for supercomputers and clusters.
Lustre is a parallel distributed file system available under GNU GPL (v2 only). It can work on everything from small workgroup clusters to larger, multi-site arrays.
One of its advantages is open licensing, hence why it is so often used in supercomputers. Fifteen of the top 30 use it actually, including the current leader, IBM's Sequoia.
The second is scalability: it supports tens of thousands of client systems, tens of petabytes (PB) and aggregate I/O throughput of hundreds of gigabytes per second (GB/s).
All in all, Lustre is a significant accomplishment for a company that was only established two years ago (2010). Whamcloud is the brain child of HPC experts Brent Gorda and Eric Barton, which foresaw the reliance of supercomputing setups on parallel storage.
Speaking of whom, Brent Gorda, the former president and CEO of Whamcloud, will be the new general manager of Intel's high performance data division.
“As former president and CEO of Whamcloud and now General Manager of High Performance Data Division at Intel, I can assure you Intel is excited about this acquisition and values your business,” Gorda said.
“We look forward to working with you during this transition and in the future. Thank you in advance for your support.”