Is Office 2007 A Case Against Linux?

"Have you used Office 2007 yet? It's quite a bit different from Office 2000 and 2003, but, in my opinion, it's a pretty spectacular leap forward. This has been well-document elsewhere, but is quite a shift that the blogosphere can't quite capture as well as first-hand use. It is, in fact, enough of a leap forward that I don't believe OpenOffice, as an Office 200x clone, can compete. OpenOffice is a great product, is free, and seamlessly cross-platform. However, the biggest reason I'm continuing to use Vista right now instead of the latest Ubuntu distro I just installed is Office 2007..."

This is not to say that OpenOffice is inferior or in any way bad before the flames start flying. However, my users (mostly students with Office 2007) have very quickly adapted to the interface, feel that it is intuitive and flexible, and like the tight integration of all of the components. Here in public education, we get such substantial discounts on Microsoft licensing that cost is somewhat less of an issue than it might be as well. Full blown Office 2007 retail would be utterly unobtainable here, but educational pricing is such that the free factor of OpenOffice doesn't give it the win by default.

OpenOffice's greatest assett (aside from being free) is the easy compatibility between Linux, Windows, and Mac platforms (no conversion necessary). While such is not the case for Office, we're in a pretty homogeneous environment here, so the cross-platform usability is less of a selling point.



Tabs, pivot tables, and a slick new interface? Is it worth it? A lot of my students think so. A lot of my older teachers disagree and miss the OpenOffice/Office 2k interface.

So what's the verdict? I find myself still using Vista much more than Ubuntu (even though so far I find that I prefer Ubuntu and it's abundant free software, easy networking, and snappy performance) because I've become so enamored of Office 2007. I think I need to spend some more time with OpenOffice and see if I can end my illicit affair, for fear of being labeled a fanboy. Office 2007 is a hard habit to break, though. I'll keep you posted.

Red Hat buys data integration firm MetaMatrix

Red Hat has reached an agreement to acquire privately held data management firm MetaMatrix, the companies announced Tuesday.

Red Hat executives said MetaMatrix's software will be bundled in with its JBoss middleware as part of a services-oriented architecture package. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

MetaMatrix, based in Waltham, Mass., sells software for accessing disparate data sources. For example, its tools are used to help companies create a single "view" of a customer by pulling information from several different databases.

Red Hat said it plans to change MetaMatrix's business model to align it with the Linux seller's open-source structure. It will move pricing for MetaMatrix products to a subscription model, rather than an upfront one-time license.

Red Hat intends to make all the MetaMatrix software available under an open-source license within a year, said Tim Yeaton, senior vice president of enterprise solutions at Red Hat.

The company also detailed its initiatives to appeal to both software programmers and corporate customers.

Red Hat on Tuesday launched a revamped open-source Web site at JBoss.org that is aimed specifically at developers who participate in open-source projects.

The company also created integrated packages of different JBoss products aimed at corporate customers who want stable software distributions and multiyear support contracts, rather than rapidly updated products.

The first package will include the JBoss application server, Hibernate data-access software, clustering and its Seam Web development tools.

Later in the year, Red Hat will release a JBoss integration package that will include its JBoss ESB, said Shaun Connolly, vice president of product management.

Xandros Showcases New Linux Server at CA World Las Vegas

Xandros, the leading provider of intuitive end-to-end Linux solutions and cross-platform management tools, announces the preview of the all-new Xandros Server Standard Edition 2, a complete, enterprise-grade SMB Linux server package, at CA World Las Vegas booth #371 on April 22-26, 2007. Demonstrations at CA World will highlight the Xandros Virtual Machine Manager, which brings the benefits of server virtualization to small and medium businesses, without requiring Linux expertise. Xandros plans to release the server to manufacturing on May 1.

Building on the success of the first version of Xandros Server, awarded "Best Integrated Solution" soon after its release in 2006, Xandros has achieved a new milestone in functionality and ease of use in this latest server version. Based on the newly released Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 (Etch) and powered by Xandros' revolutionary Managed Community Model, the Xandros Server 2 provides performance and stability without any complexity. Using feedback from current customers and channel partners, Xandros engineered version 2 with a focus on reducing the ever-increasing costs of effectively managing server environments. With new features including virtualization, streamlined systems monitoring and management, and increased Windows network integration, Xandros Server enables SMBs to benefit from the cost savings in consolidation, resource management, and problem prevention, as opposed to problem resolution.

The core of Xandros Server's architecture is its managed community model of server management, where servers, services and applications are tightly coupled into a cohesive community. The managed community model makes every server in the community aware of all the other servers within the community. This unique approach enables administrators to manage a community of servers as an integrated whole, rather than individually, making it less likely to cause costly configuration errors. The Xandros Management Console, an all-graphical portal for administrators to view and manage every element of the community, includes workflow automation and intuitive wizards that eliminate the need for Linux expertise to configure and manage Xandros Servers. The Xandros Management console can run alongside the Microsoft Management Console on the administrator's Windows XP or Vista workstation.

In addition to demonstrations of the final release candidate of Server 2, Xandros is providing visitors to its booth at CA World with special 15% discount coupons for the Xandros Server.

About Xandros

Xandros, Inc. is the leading provider of award-winning, intuitive, end-to-end Linux solutions, including desktops, SMB and enterprise servers, and mixed-environment, cross-platform management tools. Xandros pioneered low-cost, graphical operating systems that leverage existing skill sets and provide seamless Windows-Linux interoperability. It has since extended its initial Debian-based consumer and business desktop line with SMB and enterprise servers and management software, featuring workflow automation and "single pane of glass" remote deployment and administration. The company is headquartered in New York with research and development facilities in Ottawa and Mumbai, and sales and support offices worldwide. For more information, please visit www.xandros.com.

Use Cygwin when you can't use Linux

Attached to those applications that run on Linux but forced to use Windows? Take Cygwin out for a spin.

Linux fans would love to use Linux all of the time, but sometimes it just isn't possible. Maybe a certain application requires that you use Windows, or perhaps you're forced to use Windows at work. Regardless of the reason, if you've become attached to your Linux and open source applications, rest assured that you can use Cygwin to run most of those applications on Windows.

Cygwin is an environment for Windows, similar to Linux, that provides a Linux API emulation layer and a collection of tools that are normally only available on systems that use open source tools, such as Linux, the *BSD's, and Mac OS X.

To begin using this environment, visit the Cygwin Web site at http://cygwin.com/ and download the installer -- the setup.exe file. Once this component is downloaded, double-click it and choose the Install From Internet option, which will download only the packages you want to install. You'll need to specify the root environment of the installation, where packages will be downloaded to, and a mirror site from which to download packages.

After you've picked a mirror, the installer will download some base files and allow you to select packages from various categories. Here you can choose what shells, text-processing tools, databases, desktop applications, and other programs that you'd like to install. Since Cygwin comes with an X server, you can even install GNOME and KDE programs. Better yet, you can compile your own programs to run under Cygwin by installing gcc and friends.

Cygwin will dutifully download and install all of the packages that you select. When the download process is complete, you can fire up Cygwin and an initial bash shell by clicking the Cygwin icon on your desktop.

Java Extend Global Distribution with Canonical's Ubuntu Linux Release

Sun Microsystems and Canonical Ltd announced yesterday the availability of a complete, production quality Java technology stack and developer tools with the latest release of Ubuntu v7.04.

According to a statement on Sun’s website, Ubuntu v7.04 is set to make it easier for GNU/Linux developers to leverage the Java platform in their applications.

This stack, which is comprised of key popular Java technologies such as GlassFish v1 (the open source Java Platform, Enterprise Edition 5 implementation), Java Platform, Standard Edition, Java DB 10.2 and NetBeans IDE 5.5 -- will be available in the Multiverse component of the Canonical sponsored Ubuntu repository effective April 19.

Ubuntu users can install the solution over the network with apt-get and other standard software management tools.

"Sun and Canonical are working together to bring the full power of the Java platform in a fully integrated and easy to install fashion to the free and open source software communities," said Ian Murdock, chief operating systems officer, Sun.

"Packaging NetBeans and Java for Ubuntu ensures that we are able to distribute it efficiently to the huge community of Ubuntu users," said Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Ubuntu.

"Developers who are interested in Sun's latest Java technology can install it instantly if they are running Ubuntu. As Java components are released under free software licenses, we will consider these components for inclusion in the core of Ubuntu."

The hard truth about installing Linux

Having had a go at a few more Linux installations than the average newbie, I can say that Ubuntu is probably about as easy an install as it's going to get. Sure you can run into hardware driver issues but Ubuntu advocates are right when they say it's probably just as easy and maybe easier than installing Windows. However, at this point in time it needs to be.

The hard fact is that most computer users don't want to go through the pain of installing an operating system. They just want to turn on their computer and start using it.

Probably the single most important factor in the success in Windows, aside from Microsoft's marketing muscle, is that you can walk into a shop and buy a working Windows computer. What's more, you can be reasonably confident that the computer will work with a wider range of software and hardware than either a Linux computer or Apple Mac.

Within its own walled garden, a Mac can beat the pants of a Windows computer for ease of use, reliability and overall design elegance. However, most users still opt for a Windows computer because it allows them a wider choice of hardware and software.

Ubuntu, being a Linux distribution, is a more stable and secure operating system than Windows, not to mention free to download. Yet Windows still reigns supreme in terms of market share. Why?

As far as the Linux market is concerned, Ubuntu, like it or not is being increasingly touted by many as the most likely candidate to prise disaffected Windows users off the Microsoft teat. However, despite being easy to install, Ubuntu, like all Linux distributions, is in most cases not plug and play.

I know many Ubuntu users are going to be jumping up and down right now ready to flame me and tell me how they got Ubuntu to work with their hardware, peripherals and wireless network the very first time. However, I've been to your forum and seen how many haven't. And these are computer users who take the time out to visit a forum.

I also have no doubt that many Windows XP users who have attempted to upgrade to Vista using the boxed software are having similar problems. The Wall Street Journal technology writer Walter Mossberg confessed to being amazed at how many makers of Windows software and hardware have failed to update their products to work smoothly, or to work at all, with Vista.

Where I am going with this is that the key to the success of Ubuntu or any other Linux distribution in the consumer market is getting mainstream hardware manufacturers to release pre-installed plug and play versions of the operating system. Dell has already committed to making this happen and other hardware makers will be watching to see how it goes.

Like many computer users, I want to be able to walk in to a computer store and walk out with a working Linux computer, whether it be a Dell, HP, Acer or a white box. I want to take that computer home and be able to connect it to my printer, scanner and digital camera and have them recognised. If it's a laptop, I want to take that computer into a wireless hotspot, click on a view available networks icon and, provided I have the WEP key, be able to connect to the Internet.

I know all of that is a lot to ask but to be honest if Linux and its most popular distributions, like Ubuntu and Suse, is to gain more than a couple of percent market share on the desktop then that is what is necessary. Perhaps in order to make it happen, the funders of the most popular distributions should be spending as much of their budgets on selling the benefits of Linux to consumers and hardware vendors as on development. Microsoft certainly does.

Homegrown high-performance computing

Once the domain of monolithic, multimillion-dollar supercomputers from Cray and IBM, HPC (high-performance computing) is now firmly within reach of today's enterprise, thanks to the affordable computing power of clustered standards-based Linux and Microsoft servers running commodity Intel Xeon and AMD Opteron processors. Many early movers are in fact already capitalizing on in-house HPC, assembling and managing small-scale clusters on their own.

Yet building the hardware and software for an HPC environment remains a complex, highly specialized undertaking. As such, few organizations outside university engineering and research departments and specialized vertical markets such as oil and gas exploration, bioscience, and financial research have heeded the call. No longer borrowing time on others' massive HPC architectures, these pioneers, however, are fast proving the potential of small-scale, do-it-yourself clustering in enterprise settings. And as the case is made for few-node clusters, expect organizations beyond these niches to begin tapping the competitive edge of in-house HPC.

The four case studies assembled here illustrate the pain and complexity of building a successful HPC environment, including the sensitive hardware and software dependencies that affect performance and reliability, as well as the painstaking work that goes into parallelizing serial apps to work successfully in a clustered environment.

Worth noting is that, although specialized high-performance, low-latency interconnects such as Myrinet, InfiniBand, and Quadric are often touted as de-facto solutions for interprocess HPC communications, three of the four organizations profiled found commodity Gigabit Ethernet adequate for their purposes -- and much less expensive. One in fact took every measure possible to avoid message passing and cutting-edge interconnects in order to enhance reliability.

New to the HPC market, Microsoft Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 proved appealing to two organizations looking to integrate their HPC cluster into an existing Microsoft environment. So far, results have been positive.

Finally, one organization found that delegating much of the hardware and software configuration to a specialized HPC hardware vendor/integrator made the whole process considerably easier.

BAE Systems tests and tests some more

When it comes to delivering advanced defense and aerospace systems, the argument in favor of developing an in-house HPC cluster is overwhelming. Perhaps it's not surprising then to find that the technology and engineering services group at BAE Systems already has a fair amount of experience constructing HPC clusters from HP Alpha and Opteron-based Linux servers. Integrating previous HPC systems into the , a U.K.-based global defense company's enterprise, however, has proved costly.

"We've found the TCO implications of maintaining two or more disparate systems -- such as Windows, Linux -- and Unix, to be too high, particularly in terms of support people," says Jamil Appa, group leader of technology at engineering services at BAE. "We're looking to provide a technical computing environment that integrates easily with the rest of our IT environment, including systems like Active Directory."

The group is currently assessing two Microsoft Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 clusters -- both of which have been in testing for several months now. Tools built from Microsoft .Net 3.0 Workflow Foundation and Communications Foundation have enabled BAE engineers to create an efficient workflow environment in which they can collaborate effectively during the design process and access relevant parts of the systems from their own customized views with tools relevant to their tasks. One test bed is a six-node cluster of HP ProLiant dual-core, dual-processor Opteron-based servers; the other is a 12-node mix of Opteron- and Woodcrest-based servers from Supermicro.

If there's anything that BAE has learned from its testing, it's that little changes can have big performance implications.

"We're running our clusters with a whole variety of interconnects, including Gigabit Ethernet, Quadric, and a Voltaire InfiniBand switch," Appa says. "We've also been running both Microsoft and HP versions of MPI [Message Passing Interface]. We've found that all these elements have different sweet spots and behave differently depending on the application." In the long run, this testing will enable the technology and engineering services group to provide other BAE business units looking to implement HPC with their own personal HPC "shopping lists."

As for interfaces, "depending on the application, the size of your cluster (preferably small), and the types of switches you use, Gigabit Ethernet really isn't that bad," Appa says. His group has been using Gigabit switches from HP, which "for our purposes, are very good."

Appa has also tested several compilers, and he cautions not to skimp on these tools: "A US$100 compiler might make your code run 20 percent slower than a top-end compiler, so you end up having to pay for a machine that is 20 percent larger. Which is more expensive?"

Each of Appa's configurations sits on three networks: one for message passing, one for accessing the file system, and one for management and submitting jobs. To access NAS, Appa uses iSCSI over Gigabit Ethernet, rather than FC (Fibre Channel), and has a high-performance parallel file system consisting of open source Lustre object storage technology. Why? "As clusters get larger and you have more cores running processes that are all reading one file on your file system, your file system really needs to scale or you'll be in trouble," Appa explains.

Meanwhile, Windows Compute Cluster has simplified both cluster management and user training -- which makes for additional benefits when it comes to freeing up staff for the more vital task of optimizing BAE apps. Although BAE's software is already set up for HPC, Appa believes the whole process of parallelizing existing apps is reaching a turning point. "Our algorithms date back to the '80s and do not make best use of multicore technologies," he says. "We're all going to have to reconsider how we write our algorithms or we'll all suffer."

Although each endeavor to bring HPC in-house will differ based on an enterprise's clustering needs, BAE's Appa has some sage advice for anyone considering the journey.

"You can't assume that somebody will come along with a magic wand and give you the perfect HPC solution," Appa says. "You really need to try everything out, especially if you have in-house code. There's so much variation and change in HPC technology, and so much is code-dependent. You really have to understand the interaction between the hardware and software."

Luckily, those attempting to bring HPC in-house will not be alone. "The HPC community itself is quite small and very open and willing to share valuable information," Appa says.

Appa points out that Fluent has an excellent benchmarking site that demonstrates performance variations among various hardware and software combinations. In his case, the Microsoft Institute for High Performance Computing at the University of Southampton provided sound advice on what hardware worked and what didn't, particularly during the beta phase.

Virginia Tech starts from scratch

At Virginia Tech's Advanced Research Institute (ARI), constructing an HPC cluster for cancer research has been an educational experience for the electrical and computer engineering grad students involved.

With little prior HPC experience, the students built a 16-node cluster and parallelized apps they had written in MATLAB, a numerical programming environment, over the course of several months. The project taps huge amounts of data acquired from biologists and physicians to perform molecular profiling of cancer patients. The students are also working on vehicle-related data for transportation projects.

Rather than make every aspect a learning experience, when it came to choose an HPC platform, the students and professors decided to stick with what they already knew: Microsoft Windows.

"Our students had already been running MATLAB and all their other programs on Windows," says Dr. Saifur Rahman, director of ARI. "We didn't want to have to retrain them on Linux." As was the case at BAE Systems, there were also obvious advantages to a cluster that could integrate easily with the rest of ARI's Windows infrastructure, including Active Directory.

Microsoft had already approached Virginia Tech to be an early adopter of Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003, so Dr. Rahman and his team said yes and started looking for the right hardware. They vetted several vendors, but when they found out Microsoft was performing its own testing on Hewlett-Packard servers, they decided to go with HP. "We knew we'd need help from Microsoft to fix various bugs," says Dr. Rahman, "and since all their experience was on HP servers, we felt we'd have the most success with HP."

So with help from Microsoft and HP, ARI installed 16 HP ProLiant DL 145 servers with dual-core 2.01GHz AMD Opteron 270 processors and 1GB of RAM each. On the same rack, ARI installed 1TB of HP FC storage. The rack also includes one head node, as well as an HP ProLiant DL385 G1 server with two dual-core 2.4GHZ AMD64 processors and 4GB of RAM.

As did BAE Systems, ARI decided to stick with Gigabit Ethernet for its cluster interconnect, mainly because it was what the team knew. "There are other interconnects that are faster, but we've found that Gigabit Ethernet is pretty robust and works fine for our purposes," Dr. Rahman says. And after some servers overheated, ARI placed the entire cluster in a 55-degree Fahrenheit chilled server room.

ARI found parallelizing MATLAB apps to be a significant challenge requiring a number of iterations. "The students would work on parallelizing the algorithms, then run case studies to verify the results they were getting with the clustered applications were similar to results they got when they ran one machine," Dr. Rahman says.

At first, the results weren't coinciding, and the students had to learn more about how to parallelize effectively and clean up what they had already coded. "We missed some important relationships at first," Dr. Rahman says. With some help from MATLAB, it took two graduate students about a month to get the app parallelization right.

Dr. Rahman feels that the team's diverse expertise was a large factor in the project's success. One of the grad students had deep knowledge of molecular-level data quality, biomarkers, and the relevance of different data types; another offered a lot of hardware expertise; and the IT person had much experience interacting with vendors effectively. MATLAB provided help in determining which toolboxes were relevant to the task.

"When we went to MATLAB, they were just getting started with HPC," Dr. Rahman says. "I hope they will start to pay more attention, as it would be nice if they were all ready so we didn't have to spend months on this."

There were also hardware communications glitches.

"At first we had some problems controlling the servers as they talked to each other and the head node," Dr. Rahman says. "Sometimes they wouldn't respond. In other cases we wouldn't see any data coming through." Solving the problem took a lot of reconfiguring and reconnecting. "Perhaps we were giving the wrong commands at first. We're not sure," he adds. There were also problems with incorrect server and software license manager configurations.

Dr. Rahman says that managing the cluster has been relatively trouble-free with Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 and adds that if he could do this all over again, he'd send his students to Microsoft for a longer time to learn more of what Microsoft itself has discovered about building clusters with HP servers. The use of HPC has enabled ARI researchers to dive much more deeply into molecular data, not only analyzing differences in relationships among disparate classes of subjects, but also revealing more subtle but important variations within each class.

Uptime counts for Merlin

Whereas most HPC implementations are the province of scientists and engineers hidden away in R&D departments, Merlin Securities' HPC solution interfaces directly with its hedge fund customers. That's why 24/7 uptime and security was a key HPC design requirement for Merlin, right alongside performance.

"We had to be extremely risk-averse in designing our cluster and choosing its components," says Mike Mettke, senior database administrator at Merlin.

A small prime brokerage firm serving the hedge fund industry, Merlin must contend with several larger competitors that benefit significantly from the economies of scale. Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, and Bear Stearns, for example, run large mainframes that analyze millions of trades at the end of the day and return reports via batch processing the next morning. Merlin stakes its competitive edge on using its HPC cluster to deliver trading information in real time and allowing customers to slice and dice data multiple ways to uncover valuable insights, such as daily analyst trading performance as compared with other analysts, other market securities, and numerous market benchmarks. "We focus on helping clients explain not only what happened but why it happened," says CTO Amr Mohamed.

To do this, Merlin built its own highly parallelizing analysis tools, which it runs on a high-performance Oracle RAC (Real Application Cluster) installed on a rack of Dell PowerEdge 1850 and 2850 dual-core Xeon servers. Data storage is provided by EMC CLARiiON 2Gbps and 4Gbps FC storage towers. Sitting on top of Oracle is Merlin's HPC task-scheduling software, also created in-house, and an Oracle data mart that serves as a temporary holding ground for frequently used data subsets, much like a cache. Most of the high-speed calculations run directly on the Oracle RAC, which is fronted by a series of BEA WebLogic app servers that take in requests from a set of redundant load balancers sitting behind the company's customer-facing Apache Web servers. Sitting in front of each of the three layers are sets of redundant firewalls.

Cluster performance is key to running complex calculations in real time, but for Merlin, performance could never come at the expense of enterprise-level reliability, scalability, and 24/7 uptime, requirements that led to several crucial design decisions.

First, tightly coupled parallel processing via message passing was simply out of the question. Instead Merlin's architects and programmers put tremendous effort into dividing processes in an "embarrassingly parallel" fashion without any interdependencies at all. This benefits scalability and reliability, as the high-speed, low-latency communications required for interprocess communications create scalability bottlenecks. They also require cutting-edge interconnects such as Myrinet and InfiniBand, which don't have the reliability track record of Gigabit Ethernet.

"We didn't want some new interconnect driver crashing the system," Mohamed says, adding that straight Gigabit has also helped Merlin achieve considerable cost savings.

Reliability and enterprise-grade support fueled Merlin's decision to stick with an Oracle RAC, which has high-quality fault-tolerant fail-over features; dual-processor Dell PowerEdge servers; high-end EMC CLARiiON FC storage; and F5 load balancers.

"There are lots of funky platforms for HPC out there and high-bandwidth data storage solutions that can pump data at amazing rates," Mettke says. "The problem is that you end up dealing with lots of different vendors, some of whom can't deliver the 24/7 enterprise-level support you need. That adds another element of risk."

Finally, all code was written using Java, C++, and SQL.

"I've been on the other end running code written in Assembler on thousands of nodes," Mettke says. "We want the speed, but not at the expense of system crashes in the middle of a trading day. You can claim you have the best cluster out there, but it doesn't matter if there's no show when it's showtime."

Mettke adds that the architecture of Merlin's HPC infrastructure is constantly evolving to accommodate new data and applications.

Aeriongets HPC help

For organizations looking to get a cluster up and running quickly, enlisting the help of specialized Linux HPC hardware vendors such as Linux Networx and Verari Systems can cut down development time significantly. Not only do these companies sell and configure standard hardware, but they often have the expertise to deliver turnkey configurations with apps installed, tuned, and tested. Such was the case for Aerion, a small aeronautical engineering company that tapped Linux Networx to bring the upside of in-house HPC to its business of developing business jets.

Aerion, which works on the preliminary jet design process, relies on larger aerospace partners for design completion, as well as manufacturing and service. One of the company's projects, an early-stage design for a supersonic business jet, required particularly demanding CFD (computational fluid dynamics) analysis.

"In many commercial subsonic transport projects, you can develop different parts of the jet independently, then put all the pieces together and refine the design," says Aerion research engineer Andres Garzon. "But with supersonic jets, everything is so integrated and interactive that it's really impractical to develop each element apart from the others."

At the time, Aerion had been running commercial CFD software from Fluent on two separate dual-processor 3.06GHz Xeon Linux workstations. This setup worked well for analyzing diverse configurations and components and running Euler equations, which model airflow but leave out some essential fluid properties such as viscosity. "To really be accurate, you need to run the more complex Navier-Stokes calculations, which have many more terms to solve," Garzon says. And achieving the computing performance necessary to tackle that level of complexity meant turning to HPC.

Of course, small organizations such as Aerion don't always have the resources on hand to fly solo on HPC -- not to mention the fact that Aerion was also in the process of switching from Fluent to a series of powerful, free tools developed by NASA. So, when Garzon stumbled on a Linux Networx booth at an American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics meeting three years ago and the Linux Networx reps he spoke with offered to provide the hardware and much of the integration and testing work for the NASA apps Aerion wanted to use, Garzon took them up on the opportunity to get HPC up and running quickly.

Working with Linux Networx, Aerion configured an 8-node Linux Networx LS-P cluster of dual-processor AMD Opteron 246-based servers with 4GB per node, plus a ninth server to act as a master node. The NASA code requires a significant amount of complex message passing among parallel processes using the MPI, which usually requires a very high-speed, low-latency interconnect, such as InfiniBand or Myrinet. Because Aerion's budget was limited, Linux Networx offered to benchmark the apps with Myrinet, InfiniBand, and Gigabit Ethernet. Although performance under Myrinet and InfiniBand was superior (and roughly equivalent between the two), the overall difference was not dramatic enough to justify the expense. So, Linux Networx delivered a Gigabit Ethernet configuration, saving around $10,000, Garzon estimates.

As for storage, it is all local -- rather than SAN-based -- and is managed by the master node, which mirrors the OS and file system to the compute nodes. Thus, data is stored both on the local drives and the master node.

Linux Networx recompiled the NASA code -- which was originally developed to run on SGI machines -- for the Linux cluster. It also set up appropriate flags for the system and fine-tuned the cluster so that Aerion would be operational in a few days. Management is provided by Linux Networx Clusterworx, which monitors availability on the nodes, creates the image and payload for each node, and reprovisions nodes as necessary.

In all, Garzon found the process of bringing HPC in-house with the aid of Linux Networx to be relatively trouble-free and plans to expand the system to run additional cases simultaneously and to reduce compute time on time-sensitive calculations.

IBM Makes Your Linux Run

All Linux x86 applications will now run on IBM's Power processor-based System p servers.

The new capability dramatically expands the application availability for IBM's Power by enabling x86 Linux apps to run without modification through a new technology IBM is calling System p Application Virtual Environment (System p AVE).

"We have a lot of Linux on Power apps -- some 2,800 native ones -- but a lot of times when customers do a server consolidation, it's not just the main applications that need to run," Scott Handy, vice president of worldwide marketing and strategy for System p, told internetnews.com.

"We expect the main workloads will all fit in the 2,800 apps we already have, but it's all the other apps that need to work, too."

The way that p AVE works, according to Handy, is entirely seamless to end users. The system will automatically determine what is native and what is virtual without user intervention or setup.

So you could have an Apache Web server running as native Linux on Power, and then if you run some other Linux x86 binary, the OS would realize it's not native Power and would then pass it to p AVE, which would then run it in the p AVE environment.

Not all Linux applications should necessarily be run on p AVE, though. Handy noted there is a performance trade off with p AVE as opposed to running an application natively on Power.

"The performance characteristics will depend on the types of workloads. We expect Java to perform well, but with certain applications, the performance hit could be in the range of 10 percent," Handy said. "If the application is a heavily performance-oriented application, it's probably not the best candidate for p AVE."

For those applications that are resource hungry, Handy suggests that they should just take advantage of IBM's Chiphopper program and port their apps to Power. In Handy's view, it's not too difficult, as all that is required is a recompile of code targeted for Power.

IBM currently works with Novell and Red Hat for its Linux on Power efforts. According to Handy the companies have agreed to include their x86 libraries as part of their Power versions once the p AVE technology become generally available.

Currently IBM has had a private beta, which is now expanding into an open beta for system p users. The final full release is not expected until later this year.

The p AVE technology will not be a direct-revenue generator for IBM. Handy explained that IBM will not charge system p users extra for the technology but will instead just consider it to be part of the overall value proposition.

"It's really nice to just tell customers that no matter what the app is it'll work."