The Intel Cluster Ready certification is a marketing program from

Intel Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California. It is the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue, and is one of the developers of the x86 seri ...

. It is aimed at hardware and

software Software is a set of computer programs and associated documentation and data. This is in contrast to hardware, from which the system is built and which actually performs the work. At the lowest programming level, executable code consists ...

vendors in the low-end and mid-range

cluster may refer to: Science and technology Astronomy * Cluster (spacecraft), constellation of four European Space Agency spacecraft * Asteroid cluster, a small asteroid family * Cluster II (spacecraft), a European Space Agency mission to study t ...

market. To get certified, systems have to fulfill a minimum set of cluster-specific requirements. This way, vendors of parallel software can build their applications on a basic cluster platform, trusting certain components to be present. Other drivers, libraries and tools will have to be provided by the software vendor or its partners, or by a

system integrator A systems integrator (or system integrator) is a person or company that specializes in bringing together component subsystems into a whole and ensuring that those subsystems function together, a practice known as system integration. They also sol ...

Description

The program was announced in June 2007. The nodes of an Intel Cluster Ready compliant cluster are based on

Xeon Xeon ( ) is a brand of x86 microprocessors designed, manufactured, and marketed by Intel, targeted at the non-consumer workstation, server, and embedded system markets. It was introduced in June 1998. Xeon processors are based on the same arc ...

server processors and PC hardware, interconnected through

Ethernet Ethernet () is a family of wired computer networking technologies commonly used in local area networks (LAN), metropolitan area networks (MAN) and wide area networks (WAN). It was commercially introduced in 1980 and first standardized in 198 ...

InfiniBand InfiniBand (IB) is a computer networking communications standard used in high-performance computing that features very high throughput and very low latency. It is used for data interconnect both among and within computers. InfiniBand is also used ...

. The operating system is a

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which ...

distribution conforming to a specific file system layout. Also included are Intel's closed source but publicly available parallel libraries: the Message Passing Interface,

Threading Building Blocks oneAPI Threading Building Blocks (oneTBB; formerly Threading Building Blocks or TBB), is a C++ template library developed by Intel for parallel programming on multi-core processors. Using TBB, a computation is broken down into tasks that can ru ...

, and

Math Kernel Library Intel oneAPI Math Kernel Library (Intel oneMKL; formerly Intel Math Kernel Library or Intel MKL) is a library of optimized math routines for science, engineering, and financial applications. Core math functions include BLAS, LAPACK, ScaLAPACK, ...

. Intel only specifies the requirements a cluster has to fulfill to get certified. The specific implementation is the responsibility of the platform vendor. Intel's Cluster Checker checks the system's compliance. It is not only deployed by the vendor, the integrator and the end user to verify the system, it can also be used to troubleshoot an operational cluster. While cluster hardware gets certified, software can be registered as well. Intel provides a minimal cluster infrastructure where software vendors can run their package, test scripts and test data. After successful completion, the application gets registered as being Intel Cluster Ready compliant. The Cluster Ready program is free for both hardware and software vendors. The Intel Cluster Ready program does not primarily include the high-end clusters used for scientific calculations at universities and

research institute A research institute, research centre, research center or research organization, is an establishment founded for doing research. Research institutes may specialize in basic research or may be oriented to applied research. Although the term often i ...

s. It aims to commoditize the parallel systems used for industrial and commercial applications. According to IDC, more than half of the servers currently sold for technical applications is deployed as part of a cluster. For example, these systems are used for industrial computations, financial analyses, and modelling in engineering. IDC expects clustered systems to responsible for more than three-quarters of the

high-performance technical computing High-performance technical computing (HPTC) is the application of high performance computing (HPC) to technical, as opposed to business or scientific, problems (although the lines between the various disciplines are necessarily vague). HPTC often re ...

market.

AMD-based clusters

Although the Cluster Ready program is aimed at systems built on Intel's Xeon processors, the Cluster Checker can also be used to verify an

Advanced Micro Devices Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD) is an American multinational semiconductor company based in Santa Clara, California, that develops computer processors and related technologies for business and consumer markets. While it initially manufact ...

-based system. Intel's parallel libraries run on AMD hardware with the same performance and are fully supported by Intel. According to Werner Krotz-Vogel, Technical Marketing Engineer at Intel's Cluster Ready team, the Math Kernel Library (MKL) runs even faster than the open source library

Automatically Tuned Linear Algebra Software Automatically Tuned Linear Algebra Software (ATLAS) is a software library for linear algebra. It provides a mature open source implementation of BLAS APIs for C and Fortran77. ATLAS is often recommended as a way to automatically generate an ...

(ATLAS) on an

AMD Opteron Opteron is AMD's x86 former server and workstation processor line, and was the first processor which supported the AMD64 instruction set architecture (known generically as x86-64 or AMD64). It was released on April 22, 2003, with the ''SledgeHa ...

system.

References

External links

*http://www.intel.com/go/cluster {{Intel Intel