Platform Computing was a privately held software company primarily known for its job scheduling product,

Load Sharing Facility IBM Spectrum LSF (LSF, originally Platform Load Sharing Facility) is a workload management platform, job scheduler, for distributed high performance computing (HPC) by IBM. Details It can be used to execute batch jobs on networked Unix and Windo ...

(LSF). It was founded in 1992 in

Toronto Toronto ( ; or ) is the capital city of the Canadian province of Ontario. With a recorded population of 2,794,356 in 2021, it is the most populous city in Canada and the fourth most populous city in North America. The city is the ancho ...

, Ontario, Canada and headquartered in

Markham, Ontario Markham () is a city in the Regional Municipality of York, Ontario, Canada. It is approximately northeast of Downtown Toronto. In the 2021 Census, Markham had a population of 338,503, which ranked it the largest in York Region, fourth largest ...

with 11 branch offices across the United States, Europe and Asia. In January 2012, Platform Computing was acquired by IBM.

History

Platform Computing was founded by Songnian Zhou, Jingwen Wang, and Bing Wu in 1992. Its first product, LSF, was based on the ''Utopia'' research project at the

University of Toronto The University of Toronto (UToronto or U of T) is a public research university in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, located on the grounds that surround Queen's Park. It was founded by royal charter in 1827 as King's College, the first institution ...

. The LSF software was developed partially with funding from

CANARIE CANARIE (formerly the Canadian Network for the Advancement of Research, Industry and Education) is the not-for-profit organisation which operates the national backbone network of Canada's national research and education network (NREN). The orga ...

(Canadian Advanced Network and Research for Industry and Education). Platform's revenue was approximately $300,000 in 1993, and reached $12 million in 1997. Revenue grew by 34% (YoY) to US$46.2 million in 2001, US$50 million in 2003. In 1999, the ''SiteAssure'' suite was announced by Platform to address website availability and monitoring market. On October 29, 2007, Platform Computing acquired the Scali Manage business from Norway-based Scali AS. Scali was cluster management software. On August 1, 2008, Platform acquired the rest of the Scali business, taking on the industry-standard Message Passing Interface (MPI), Scali MPI, and rebranding it Platform MPI. On June 22, 2009, Platform Computing announced its first software to serve the

cloud computing Cloud computing is the on-demand availability of computer system resources, especially data storage ( cloud storage) and computing power, without direct active management by the user. Large clouds often have functions distributed over mul ...

space. Platform ISF (Infrastructure Sharing Facility) enables organizations to set up and manage private clouds, controlling both physical and virtual resources. In August 2009, Platform acquired HP-MPI from

Hewlett-Packard The Hewlett-Packard Company, commonly shortened to Hewlett-Packard ( ) or HP, was an American multinational information technology company headquartered in Palo Alto, California. HP developed and provided a wide variety of hardware components ...

. In January 2012, Platform Computing was acquired by IBM.

Open-source participation

* Platform joined the

Hadoop Apache Hadoop () is a collection of open-source software utilities that facilitates using a network of many computers to solve problems involving massive amounts of data and computation. It provides a software framework for distributed storage an ...

project in 2011, and is focused on enhancing the Hadoop Distributed File System * Platform Lava - based on Platform LSF, licensed under

GPLv2 The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end users the four freedoms to run, study, share, and modify the software. The license was the first copyleft for general us ...

. The Lava scheduler is part of ''Red Hat HPC''. Discontinued in 2011. *

OpenLava OpenLava is a workload job scheduler for a cluster of computers. OpenLava was pirated from an early version of Platform LSF. Its configuration file syntax, application program interface (API), and command-line interface (CLI) have been kept unchan ...

- successor to Platform Lava. * Platform FTA - File Transfer Agent for HPC clusters *

Nagios Nagios Core , formerly known as Nagios, is a free and open-source computer-software application that monitors systems, networks and infrastructure. Nagios offers monitoring and alerting services for servers, switches, applications and services. ...

Plug-ins * Community Scheduler Framework - a meta-scheduling framework http://grid1.jlu.edu.cn/csf

Memberships

Platform Computing is a member of the following organizations: *

The Green Grid The Green Grid is a nonprofit, industry consortium of end-users, policy-makers, technology providers, facility architects, and utility companies collaborating to improve the resource efficiency of data centers. At one time it had more than 175 ...

Open Grid Forum The Open Grid Forum (OGF) is a community of users, developers, and vendors for standardization of grid computing. It was formed in 2006 in a merger of the Global Grid Forum and the Enterprise Grid Alliance. The OGF models its process on the In ...

Standards

Platform products adopted the following standards: *

DRMAA Distributed Resource Management Application API (DRMAA) is a high-level Open Grid Forum (OGF) API specification for the submission and control of jobs to a distributed resource management (DRM) system, such as a cluster or grid computing infrastr ...

* Intel Cluster Ready *HPC Profile *

JSDL Job Submission Description Language is an extensible XML specification from the Global Grid Forum for the description of simple tasks to non-interactive computer execution systems. Currently at version 1.0 (released November 7, 2005), the specificat ...

Open MPI Open MPI is a Message Passing Interface (MPI) library project combining technologies and resources from several other projects (FT-MPI, LA-MPI, LAM/MPI, and PACX-MPI). It is used by many TOP500 supercomputers including Roadrunner, which was th ...

* Project Kusu, the basis for the Platform Cluster Manager

References

{{reflist

External links