Mandrake Goes For High Performance Clustering

By Timothy R. Butler | Jun 24, 2003 at 15:33:25

At the International Supercomputer Conference 2003 today, MandrakeSoft announced its latest entry to the company’s growing portfolio of middle-to-high end server products. MandrakeClustering is a high performance clustering distribution for IA-32 and AMD64 (Opteron) architectures. IA-64 support should come in September, the company reported.The new distribution is based on the Free Software clustering project MandrakeSoft has been working on with partners known as CLIC (announcement here). According to today's release, the project offers "both high calculation performance plus unequaled comfort of use."

An interesting highlight of the announcement notes that the IA-32 version (known as the "Pentium version") includes Intel's own GNU/Linux compiler intended for the Xeon processor to enhance performance. This is the first announcement we are aware of related to usage of Intel's compiler in a distribution.

The announcement also claims that MandrakeClustering will install in a matter of only a few minutes across the cluster. The included version of Mandrake's URPMI package management and dependency resolution tool is "parallelized" to support updating the packages on the entire cluster at the same time.

Like other Mandrake products, MandrakeClustering will also include GUI tools to administer the system, including graphical monitoring software and an interface to add and remove nodes. It supports clustering management transition layers MP Mpich, Mpich, Lam, and PVM.

According to the announcement, pricing for the system starts at $2,960 including support. The "base version" of the product will be available in MandrakeStore soon, but purchasing by e-mail is available now. More information on pricing and support options is available on MandrakeSoft's clustering web site.

At press time, information on the product's licensing was not yet available.