IBM Tackles HPC in Cloud with Deal To Acquire Platform Computing
In a move that will boost its portfolio of high-performance computing (HPC) and cloud management software, IBM on Tuesday said it has agreed to acquire Platform Computing for an undisclosed sum.
Founded 19 years ago, Toronto-based Platform is regarded as a leading provider of workload management software for distributed, clustered and grid computing environments. IBM boasts Platform has more than 2,000 customers, including 23 of the 30 the world's largest enterprises. Among them are the European Organization for Nuclear Research (better known as CERN), Citigroup and Pratt & Whitney.
"IBM considers the acquisition of Platform Computing to be a strategic element for the transformation of HPC into the high growth segment of technical computing and an important part of our smarter computing strategy," said Helene Armitage, general manager of Systems Software at IBM, in a statement.
That strategy includes allowing customers to move HPC workloads to public and private clouds. Among its offerings are Platform ISF, a private cloud management tool that manages workloads across various virtual machines, operating systems, cloud resources and physical and virtual servers.
Customers can also create new clusters to cloud and hosting providers with Platform LSF, a workload management platform, and Platform MultiCluster, a cluster consolidation tool, enabling them to create policy-based distribution of workloads between in-house HPC clusters and cloud-based resources.
The addition of Platform will augment IBM's existing efforts to bridge HPC-based applications to the cloud. Big Blue's HPC Management Suite for Cloud enables provisioning of different operating system images on bare metal hardware and virtual machines, provides access to the HPC infrastructure via a Web-based management interface and allows for the sharing of HPC resources.
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 10/11/2011 at 1:14 PM