Univa Extends UniCluster to Amazon EC2

LISLE, Ill. -- Univa UD, a pioneer in HPC systems management products for the complete distributed computing lifecycle, today announced the publication of a white paper and supporting tools that documents the process of implementing its open source UniCluster product in Amazons Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2) web service.

Univa UD sponsored BioTeam Inc., a leading life sciences informatics consultancy and systems integrator, to document the process and publish the tools. The paper titled How to: UniCluster and Amazon EC2, presents step by step instructions for setting up UniCluster within EC2.

UniCluster is the leading open source cluster software stack, integrating widely used open source components including Sun Grid Engine, into a free, downloadable product that simplifies cluster deployment, configuration and management. UniCluster is currently available for download from Grid.org (www.grid.org), the online community for open source cluster and grid software users, administrators and developers. Optional Annual Care cluster enterprise-level support is also available.

Amazon EC2 is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in order to make web-scale computing easier for developers. EC2 presents a true virtual computing environment, providing users with web service interfaces to requisition machines for use, load them with a custom application environment, manage network access permissions, and run an image using as many or few systems as desired.

“This approach matches how we have seen some of our more advanced clients and partners handle WAN-scale computing needs,” said Chris Dagdigian, Principal Consultant of BioTeam Inc., and author of the paper. “Often there are core, company operated systems handling authentication, data staging and workflow while the remote systems operating across Metro or WAN-scale networking distances are merely used as engines for computation.”Univa Corp.