will allow companies to access processing power through the Internet according to changing needs - without entering into a permanent investment in the purchase of servers
Avi Blizovsky
Direct link to this page: https://www.hayadan.org.il/ibmsuper200504.html
IBM is opening the first center in Europe to provide on-demand supercomputing services.
The new facility, located in Montpellier in the south of France, is the second of its kind in the world.
IBM now offers its customers to call via the Internet, as part of an advanced security system - to the supercomputers installed on site, in order to use the highest computing power available today in the civilian sector, and harness it for commercial and scientific applications.
IBM's "on-demand" concept in combination with Grid technology will make it possible to oblige the entities that use the supercomputing services to pay only for the processing power actually consumed - without entering into the expenses involved in purchasing such supercomputers for each organization independently.
The center in Montpellier joins a previous center that IBM established in Poughkeepsie, New York, in order to serve companies and organizations in the fields of oil exploration, energy, life sciences, digital animation and financial services.
One of the first customers of the IBM supercomputer center is Mentor Graphics, which develops tools for automating electronic design processes. Mentor will use the processing power of the pSeries 690 servers running in Montpellier together with the xSeries servers in Poughkeepsie in an integrated way. At the same time, the company is testing the Caliber electronic design software produced by it on xSeries servers based on AMD Opteron processors.
David Turk, IBM's vice president of supercomputing, said that "supercomputing centers are expected to be an attractive solution for a wide range of companies operating under conditions of changing demand for supercomputing capacity: demand peaks in certain periods - and low seasons in between".
The center in Montpellier offers IBM customers pSeries supercomputer infrastructures operating in the Unix AIX and Linux environment, as well as xSeries computers under Linux or in the Microsoft Windows environment - all in combination with the storage volumes required in advanced disk systems. In order to meet the ever-increasing demand for this type of computing capacity, IBM recently expanded the computing center in Poughkeepsie, which now includes over 2,300 Cassion and Opteron processors in an xSeries environment, as well as IBM BladeCenter series blade servers.
IBM intends to implement Grid computing technology in order to enable the sharing of resources between two supercomputer centers on demand. Lattice systems are expected to allow another alternative of payment on demand, which complements the billing model that exists today, of ordering such processing capacity in advance - while introducing a new level of flexibility to the customer.
https://www.hayadan.org.il/BuildaGate4/general2/data_card.php?Cat=~~~849909315~~~80&SiteName=hayadan
