Barcelona, January 17th, 2007.- The Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) selected Moab Cluster Suite and SLURM to optimize the scheduling, workload and resource management of all research projects running on MareNostrum — the most powerful supercomputer in Europe and the fifth in the world according to the November 2006 TOP500 list. The Moab-SLURM solution adds significant manageability and optimization to MareNostrum.

Moab Cluster Suite from Cluster Resources is an advanced workload manager and scheduler capable of optimizing scheduling and node allocation decisions. The software will allow BSC to gain extensive control over which jobs are considered eligible for scheduling, how the jobs are prioritized and where the jobs will run. Moab also simplifies and unifies management and acts as a flexible policy engine that guarantees service levels and speeds job processing. Moab will be used as an external scheduler for the SLURM resource manager. SLURM, developed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Hewlett-Packard, is an open-source resource manager utilized on some of the most powerful supercomputers, such as BlueGene/L and ASC Purple.

The combination of Moab and SLURM will optimize the system performance of MareNostrum, allowing BSC to more efficiently conduct all scientific projects. Both tools will be deployed and installed by February.

“One of the important characteristics of the Moab-SLURM solution is its ability to handle applications simultaneously running across very large number of MareNostrum’s processors and using a large number of processors is key to BSC’s users,” said Sergi Girona, Operations Director of BSC. “The BSC’s Computer Sciences Department has also a lot of expectations with Moab because it allows dynamic integration and evaluation of new scheduling and resource allocation algorithms.”

MareNostrum’s adoption of Moab continues the trend of the largest and most powerful supercomputers in the world adopting Moab, as currently 5 of the top 6 systems on TOP500 have Moab. Leading supercomputing centers currently using Moab include the Sweden National Supercomputer Center, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research).

Useful links

Barcelona Supercomputing Center: http://www.bsc.es

Moab Cluster Suite: http://www.clusterresources.com/

SLURM: http://www.llnl.gov/linux/slurm/

About BSC

In 2004 the Ministry of Education and Science, the Generalitat de Catalunya and the Technical University of Catalonia took the initiative of creating a National Supercomputing Center in Barcelona. The Barcelona Supercomputing Center - Centro Nacional de Supercomputación (BSC) is the Na cional Supercomputing Facility in Spain and was officially constituted in 2005. BSC manages MareNostrum, the most powerful supercomputer in Europe. BSC is a research center focused in Computer Sciences, Life Sciences and Earth Sciences. Following this multidisciplinary approach, BSC brings together a critical mass of researchers, high performance computing experts and cutting-edge supercomputing technologies in order to foster scientific progress.

For more information about the center, please visit www.bsc.es

About Cluster Resources

Cluster Resources, Inc.® is a leading provider of workload and resource management software and services for cluster, grid and utility -based computing environments. With over a decade of industry experience, Cluster Resources delivers software products and services that enable organizations to understand, control, and fully optimize their compute resources and related processes.