High-performance computing (HPC), workload management, big data analytics, and cluster management apply to several industries, with different solutions for each industry.

This chapter includes the following sections:

IBM Platform Computing is a set of systems software that helps with HPC, including computationally and data-intensive design, manufacturing, financial analytics, business, and research applications. IBM Platform Computing solutions optimize complex application implementation and workloads in many of the world’s largest environments (with more than 100,000 cores). The core value of the product portfolio is to simplify and accelerate high-performance simulations and analysis to help discovery of insights into business, products, and science.

Many organizations have the constant challenge of increasing compute capacity to support massive amounts of data that drive business value and competitive advantage. IBM Platform Computing solutions simplify the setup, integration, and management of your heterogeneous technical computing infrastructure and drive up server utilization to increase application throughput and to help greatly improve time to results. IBM Platform Computing software also helps integrate servers, storage, parallel execution environments, and applications. Together, they enable the delivery of complete solutions that simplify and accelerate implementation and management of high-performance clusters, grids, and HPC clouds. Business value is delivered in days versus weeks or months.

IBM Platform Computing solutions have the following benefits:

Table 4-1 shows a list of IBM Platform Computing solutions for HPC Cloud, workload management, big data analytics, and cluster management versus products available.

IBM Platform Computing solutions complement IBM systems and technology portfolio, helping to provide simplified management software to eliminate the complexity of optimizing cluster, grid, and HPC cloud environments. The following products are used with IBM Platform Computing solutions:

This product is a powerful workload management platform for demanding, distributed HPC environments. It provides a comprehensive set of intelligent, policy-driven scheduling features so that you can use all of your compute infrastructure resources and ensure optimal application performance.

This product offers a complete HPC, easy-to-use management software solution. It includes a range of features that are ready for immediate use, such as cluster management, workload management, reporting, Message Passing Interface (MPI).

This product offers a high-performance grid middleware and management solution that runs on your choice of hardware and operating environments.

This product provides a single pane to monitor and manage the entire infrastructure. By using the management portal, with workload and resource monitoring, alerting and troubleshooting, administrators can manage more machines through a single point of administration.

For more information about IBM Platform Computing portfolio, current versions, and the software roadmap of products, see Chapter 1, “Products and portfolio for IBM Platform Computing solutions” on page 1. See also IBM Platform Computing Solutions, SG24-8073.

Growth in specialized computing programs often leads the number of infrastructure deployments. This approach has restricted cooperation and source optimization across divisions and workflows. IBM HPC Cloud solutions provide easy-to-use resource management techniques to effectively and separately (systems, groups, or grids) run the resources in an infrastructure that is enhanced for highly effective and specialized processing.

Technological innovation, medical, financial, and research workloads have placed outstanding performance requirements on specialized and powerful processing (HPC) infrastructures. Traditionally such workload requirements were not feasible for the available infrastructure deployments, even though those workloads could use virtualization technology. However, the performance gap between physical and exclusive deployments is now ending. HPC and specialized processing users can now benefit from the versatility, cost effectiveness, and enhanced resource that reasoning provides.

Cloud technology, when carefully and flexibly used, increases the advantages and reduces the disadvantages for HPC. The emerging cloud technology and, in particular, IBM Platform Computing solutions for HPC Cloud provide clients with an infrastructure value proposition for HPC workloads.

IBM Platform Computing solutions for HPC Cloud convert static computing resources into a versatile high performance cloud. This cloud can be shared, remotely managed, and easily provisioned to support the requirements of compute-and data-intensive workloads and changing individual requirements. This way, your organization can set up an efficient, consolidated infrastructure that meets time-variant business, supports research demands, and offers the performance that your users demand.

These cloud offerings are based on proven cluster, grid, and HPC cloud technology from IBM Platform Computing. They have the following features to help ensure retail, enterprise, or community resources are optimally allocated and easy to manage:

By using these tools, you can position resources with main concerns of a project. You can also realize enhanced functional effectiveness and cost effectiveness, while accomplishing business goals that are difficult to achieve with other management systems.

By applying cloud technology and requirements to established technical computing and HPC infrastructures, you can remove costly, rigid silos. You can use distributed computing resources to help you achieve the following objectives:

IBM Platform Computing offers a range of workload management abilities for demanding, allocated HPC environments. With an extensive set of intelligent, policy-driven scheduling features, you can gain the most from your estimate resources and data control infrastructure to improve application performance.

Companies in nearly every industry are working with growing data volumes and development of application demands. These challenges drive the need for more compute capacity. Even in HPC environments, having several compute silos, irregular processing, design cycle issues, and late results are common. Today, you need ways to improve IT performance, reduce infrastructure costs, and bring your products to market quicker.

The IBM Platform Computing family offers a range of workload management capabilities. The IBM Platform LSF product family is a powerful workload management platform for demanding, distributed, and mission-critical HPC environments. It provides a comprehensive set of intelligent, policy-driven scheduling features so that you can take full advantage of your compute infrastructure resources and ensure optimal program performance. By having a highly scalable and available structure, you can schedule complex workloads and manage up to petaflop-scale resources.

IBM Platform Symphony software can deliver faster, better quality results, even when using less infrastructure. With the versatility to adapt when main concerns change, IBM Platform Symphony can reallocate over 1,000 compute engines per second to different workloads, based on policies and main concerns that you determine. The result is better program application, better usage, and an ability to respond quickly to business-critical demands. IBM Platform Symphony Advanced Edition contains a MapReduce implementation that is compatible with Apache Hadoop and optimized for low latency, reliability, and resource sharing.

IBM Platform HPC provides easy-to-use cluster provisioning and management and has a solid workload scheduling capability, which is based on IBM Platform LSF. By scheduling workloads intelligently according to plan, IBM Platform HPC improves user efficiency with minimal system management effort. In addition, HPC user groups can interact with application-centric interfaces, easily share computing resources and data, and reduce time between simulator iterations.

Workload management solutions for IBM Platform Computing can help you achieve the most from your HPC investment. By using these solutions, you can take full advantage of all specialized computing resources, from application software licenses to available network bandwidth. IBM Platform Computing solutions can help in the following ways:

With information that is growing at outstanding rates and users who demand quick, effective research of this information, your programs need a powerful base. IBM Platform Computing software improves the performance of your computing infrastructure for your most demanding programs.

With more intelligent and connected devices and systems, the amount of information that you are collecting is increasing at alarming rates. In some sectors, as much as 90% of that information is unstructured and increasing at rates as high as 50% per year. To keep your business competitive, to innovate, and to get products and solutions to market quickly, you must be able to evaluate that information and extract insight from it easily and economically. For big data analytics, current alternatives do not offer the response time for statistical tasks, reducing user efficiency and delaying decision making.

IBM Platform Computing software improves the performance of your most demanding applications with a low latency solution for heterogeneous application integration on a shared multitenant architecture. IBM Platform Symphony Advanced Edition provides a high-performance distributed runtime engine for Hadoop MapReduce programs. The software provides great resource availability and predictability. It also supports several programs and file systems, operational maturity, SLA policy control, and high resource utilization for MapReduce and applications that are not MapReduce.

IBM Platform Symphony software uses marketing methods that allow sub-nanosecond response and quick provisioning for a wide range of workloads. Short running jobs have a smaller percentage of time that is spent in the provisioning and deprovisioning actions, providing a higher ratio of useful work to overhead. It also has a high job throughput rate, where the system allows more than 17,000 tasks/second to be submitted.

IBM Platform Symphony provides the following advantages for your big data analytics applications:

Separated clusters can create major issues in an HPC environment and prevent companies that require significant compute and data processing capabilities from competing. IBM can help relieve this complexity with tools for the self-service creation and management of flexible clusters.

Competitive organizations that require increasing amounts of compute and data processing capabilities face difficulties in maintaining complex, diverse HPC components with different software and hardware. Data processing capabilities increases compute-intensive HPC data processing capabilities infrastructures and make administration and control easier through one central interface.

IBM Platform Cluster Manager Advanced Edition enables self-assistance creation and management of flexible clusters to deliver the performance that is required by the compute-intensive workloads in HPC environments. Automated, self-service setup of multiple HPC environments means more timely provisioning.

IBM Platform Cluster Manager consolidates different cluster infrastructures of technical computing and statistics workloads. It also provides a single management pane to simplify management and maintenance of running the infrastructure. The dynamic capabilities of Platform Cluster Manager Advanced Edition are the foundation for building an HPC cloud.

IBM Platform Cluster Manager Advanced Edition consolidates clusters into a more efficient infrastructure. The result is the creation of an agile environment for computing and analytics workloads to help in the following ways:

With over 2,000 customers globally, experience with single site to large international grid solution and programs that span a range of capabilities for high performance and technical computing, IBM Platform Computing can support key solutions in your industry.

IBM Platform Computing offers a full range of solutions to address challenges that are specific to the aerospace and defense industry to improve the implementation and management of HPC environments. By using various software and services, the aerospace and defense industry can develop powerful, versatile HPC clusters and HPC cloud environments for fast product development to remain competitive.

The aerospace and defense sectors are increasing technical computing demands. As a result, they are driving high expectations in technological innovations. This industry must do more with less to continue to create cutting-edge ideas and items while adapting to new economic realities. Product design and development require a complex and highly scientific process. Simulation of real-world conditions that products face, including atmospheric pressure, temperature, and structural load, is critical for success. The aerospace and defense industry needs precise, hyper-efficient data processing and research.

IBM Platform Computing solutions include items for workload and process management, HPC application integration, job submission and management, license scheduling, analytics and visualization, and MPI implementation. Several IBM Platform Computing solutions are ideal for application in every aspect of the aerospace and defense industry. For example, these products provide structural mechanics, finite element analysis, computational fluid dynamics, explicit dynamics, multiphysics, and computer-aided design. They also facilitate various in-house developed applications.

IBM Platform Computing solutions are quick and easy to set up, with simple HPC cluster installation and control and offer preintegration of ISV applications. They accelerate engineering simulations and offer users transparent access to distributed computing resources.

IBM Platform Computing solutions have been developed in cooperation with leading aerospace and defense manufacturers. They are supported by thousands of IBM professionals with worldwide aerospace and defense industry experience. In addition, they offer a complete set of product capabilities for long-term solutions with massive scalability.

In the current fast moving design anywhere, build anywhere environment, automobile organizations need speed, agility, control, and visibility across the design ecosystem and lifecycle to meet time-to-market requirements and maximize productivity. IBM Platform Computing solutions can help automotive companies transform the design chain to develop designs better, faster, and cheaper.

Many of the improvements in fuel efficiency in today’s automobiles are tied directly to innovative ways to integrate, for example, electronically controlled engines, braking systems, and battery power for increased efficiency and waste elimination. These connected systems need to operate effectively and in balance with safety systems, diagnostic tests, and drivers.

Companies in the automotive industry need a structured procedure and the IT infrastructure to support such a process to convert research and ideas into reality, in a fast, efficient, and cohesive manner.

IBM Platform Computing solutions include products for workload and process management, HPC application integration, job submission and management, license scheduling, analytics and visualization, and MPI implementation. Several IBM Platform Computing solutions are ideal for application in every aspect of the automotive industry. For example, these products provide architectural mechanics, limited element analysis, computational fluid dynamics, explicit dynamics, and multiphysics. They also facilitate various in-house developed applications.

IBM Platform Computing solutions help create dynamic, versatile clusters and HPC cloud environments to help the aerospace, defense, and automotive industries achieve a range of advantages:

Financial services companies are facing increasingly limited economic demands and growing regulating requirements. As a result, they are looking for better ways to meet market needs. They are looking for ways to improve IT performance to meet these requirements and to reduce managing costs. IBM Platform Computing solutions can help.

The biggest challenge for organizations in the financial and insurance industries is risk management. Rules, such as Basel III and Solvency II, are forcing these organizations to evaluate risk in near real time. In particular, they must examine the areas of credit and liquidity by using statistics to understand large amounts of information almost immediately. The applications that meet these difficulties place a large strain on computing resources.

IBM Platform Computing solutions can help you improve the performance of financial and insurance programs to support faster, more precise, and more reliable decision-making in markets. By using private HPC clusters, grids, and clouds, multiple applications and lines of business can effectively use a single heterogeneous, shared infrastructure to support the following areas:

The application software solutions from IBM Platform Computing help manage and accelerate workload processing and realize workloads across a distributed, shared IT environment, while fully using all HPC resources, regardless of operating system or architecture. The result is improved application performance for a reduced total cost of ownership.

Financial and insurance companies need to get the most from their IT investment, with a particular focus on infrastructure capacity, utilization, and performance. IBM Platform Computing solutions can help perform more rigorous research with more information to properly simulate market and credit risk and to meet regulating requirements. IBM Platform Computing solutions offer the following support:

Life sciences companies face huge difficulties in direction and efficiency. To increase development efficiency, innovate in research and growth, and contend more effectively, companies must identify an enhanced, versatile, and resilient infrastructure foundation to improve clinical development processes. IBM Platform Computing solutions can help address these challenges.

With shifting regulatory burdens and the need to compress the timeline from discovery to approval, research teams need comprehensive, high performance technical computing infrastructure solutions. These solutions must have the versatility to process massive amounts of data and support progressively innovative studies.

IBM Platform Computing solutions provide cluster, grid, and HPC cloud management software to support HPC components and specialized computing application. These offerings speed up time to results for compute-intensive and data-intensive applications that run on distributed technical and statistics computing environments. They help to manage workloads as different as genome sequencing, drug design, simulations, product design analysis, and risk management.

The IBM Platform Computing product family helps to improve the confidence of IT professionals in life sciences, ensuring them that all available resources are used, from application software licenses to available network bandwidth. Application software solutions help manage and accelerate workload processing and guarantee their achievement across a distributed, shared IT environment, while completely using all HPC resources, regardless of operating system or architecture. Scheduling capabilities help spend resources on users, groups, and jobs in a way that is consistent with SLAs. With extended SLA-based scheduling policies, these application solutions simplify administration and ensure optimal alignment of business SLAs with available infrastructure resources.

By enhancing usage, resources are more available so that scientists can complete more work in a smaller period. This advantage can enhance cooperation across the clinical development value chain for better insights and excellent outcomes. IBM Platform Computing solutions help in the following ways: