Jun 24, 2003
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.