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Date: Thu, 25 Jan 2001 17:47:36 -0500
From: "Betsy A. Riley" <rileyba@ornl.gov>
To: lwn@lwn.net
Subject: Govt.-Industry team to release "supercomputer on a CD"

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contacts:

Karen Green 
National Center for Supercomputing Applications
217-265-0748 
kareng@ncsa.uiuc.edu

Ron Walli 
Oak Ridge National Laboratory
865-576-0226 
wallira@ornl.gov

 Developer's Release of Linux Cluster Software to Debut at Linux World
--ORNL, NCSA team with six industry leaders to create 'supercomputer on
a CD'

OAK RIDGE TN/CHAMPAIGN IL, January 25, 2001--Software that will make
configuring and maintaining a Linux cluster like installing commercial
software from a CD will be demonstrated by Intel at next week's Linux
World Conference in New York. In addition, IBM will discuss this
software,
called Open Source Cluster Applications Resources (OSCAR) in a
presentation at IBM's Linux World booth.

OSCAR is ready for distribution to experienced cluster computing
professionals as a developer's release. A full release of OSCAR for
the wider cluster computing community will be ready in the near
future.

OSCAR is being developed by the Open Cluster Group
(http://www.OpenClusterGroup.org), a collaboration among major
research centers and technology companies led by Oak Ridge National
Laboratory (ORNL), the University of Illinois' National Center for
Supercomputing Applications (NCSA),  IBM and Intel.  Other
collaborators in the Open Cluster Group are Dell, SGI, MSC.Software,
and Veridian. Members of NCSA's
cluster development team will assist with the demo at Linux World.
Dell will provide the equipment for the demo.

"This software is a big step in the process of making clusters a
simpler, more accessible computing technology for the user community,"
said Rob Pennington, director of computing and communications at NCSA
and head of the center's cluster development efforts. "When our first
public version of OSCAR is released in a few weeks, it will make it
possible to build clusters quickly and easily using commodity
hardware."

OSCAR is being developed as a complete Linux cluster infrastructure
that allows users to set up a parallel Linux supercomputing cluster in
a matter of hours. The tools included in OSCAR are all community
accepted, tested, and configured to work together. Without OSCAR, each
of these tools would need to be installed, tested, and configured
separately--a process that can take days.  Included in the package are
Portable Batch System (PBS), which queues computing jobs for running on
a cluster, Parallel Virtual Machine (PVM), which allows parallel
applications to run on clusters, MPICH, a tool that allows Message
Passing Interface (MPI) codes to run on many high-end computing
systems, and Cluster Command and Control (C3), a suite of tools to
simplify the use and administration of clusters.

"Commodity cluster computing is no longer just for technical experts;
the simplicity of OSCAR opens the doors to the general public," said Al
Geist, head of the heterogeneous distributed computing group at ORNL.
"Participation by IBM, Intel, and other vendors in the OSCAR cluster
software effort plays a key role in public acceptance."

The developer's version of OSCAR supports Linux clusters using  Intel
IA-32 processors. The subsequent full release of OSCAR will also
support the IA-32 processor with support for Intel's new Itanium (tm)
processor to follow in summer 2001.


Oak Ridge National Laboratory is a Department of Energy multiprogram
facility operated by UT-Battelle. Funding for ORNL is provided by the
Mathematical, Information, and Computational Sciences (MICS) Division
of the Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research (OASCR) of the
US Department of Energy (DOE). For more information, see
http://www.csm.ornl.gov.

The National Center for Supercomputing Applications is the leading-edge
site for the National Computational Science Alliance. NCSA is a leader
in the development and deployment of cutting-edge high-performance
computing, networking, and information technologies. The National
Science Foundation, the state of Illinois, the University of Illinois,
industrial partners, and other federal agencies fund NCSA. For more
information visit http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu.

The National Computational Science Alliance is a partnership to
prototype an advanced computational infrastructure for the 21st century
and includes more than 50 academic, government and industry research
partners from across the United States. The Alliance is one of two
partnerships funded by the National Science Foundation's Partnerships
for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (PACI) program, and receives
cost-sharing at partner institutions. NSF also supports the National
Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (NPACI), led by
the San Diego Supercomputer Center. For more information see
http://alliance.ncsa.uiuc.edu.

-- 
Betsy A. Riley				email:	rileyba@ornl.gov
ORNL Computer Science & Mathematics     phone:	(865) 574-5452 
P.O. Box 2008 MS 6359  		        FAX:	(865) 574-4839
Oak Ridge TN 37831			URL:    http://www.csm.ornl.gov