Platform Computing in HPC Play With HP’s Help

Platform Computing today announced that it has acquired the HP-MPI (Message Passing Interface) technology from HP (NYSE:HPQ), boosting its portfolio of grid management technologies.

“The acquisition of HP-MPI enables Platform to continue its leadership in HPC by offering customers an industry-leading tool to improve application performance through parallel processing,” said Songnian Zhou, Platform Computing CEO, in a statement.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed. The deal has already closed.

“The HP-MPI product is a market leader,” Tripp Purvis, Platform Computing vice president of business development, told InternetNews.com. “HP has 32 ISV partnerships that we will leverage. We will provide the technical support and the R&D moving forward.”

HP-MPI provides support for Linux, UNIX, and Windows, according to Purvis, while Platform Computing’s existing technology, obtained through the acquisition of Scali, supports Linux only.

The company is boosting its portfolio in other key HPC areas as well.

Last week, Platform Computing released a toolkit for NVIDIA-based grid computers. NVIDIA’s CUDA technology allows scientists to use the massive numbers of cores in graphics-based processors to deliver HPC capabilities.
Outside the laboratory, the technology is used in graphics-intensive applications such as mapping.

“The GPU market is a high growth area within HPC,” said Purvis. “NVIDIA is also a Platform Computing customer. Their CUDA software ties into our Platform Cluster Manager product to make it easy to manage GPU-based clusters.”

Another NVIDIA partner is Cray.

“Cray’s CX1 deskside supercomputers use NVIDIA card and Platform HPC Workgroup Manager so that scientists can get their clusters up and running faster,” said Purvis.

HPC has promised for some time to be able to handle anticipated demand for more bandwidth and more computing power. Today, Purvis said, the key verticals using HPC — and using HP-MPI — are oil and gas, manufacturing, government research, education, and the life sciences.

In the long term, Platform Computing aims to bring HPC to the cloud as a fundamental private could platform. The company describes itself as “the leader in grid and cloud computing software that dynamically connects IT resources to workload demand according to business policies.”

Purvis said that pricing for HP-MPI will not change, and HP-MPI will become an option available to existing Platform Computing customers.