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PSSC Labs Announces CBeST Cluster Management Toolkit Software Update Version 6.0

By marketing@site-a.com

LAKE FOREST, CALIF., March 2, 2022  — PSSC Labs, a developer of high performance computing (HPC) and big data computing solutions, announced today an updated release CBeST Cluster Management Toolkit®.  Software Version 6.0 update includes kernel optimizations, custom scripts and open source tools integrated, optimized and customized for your specific PowerWulf® ZXR1+ HPC Cluster hardware and applications.

Version 6.0 includes:

Updated OS Support
  • Ubuntu® 20.04 LTS
  • Red Hat® 8.0
  • CentOS Linux 7.0.
Support for Containers Using Singularity Software

Includes PSSC Labs’ new SimpleAI Framework. Singularity, a cross-platform, open-source computer program that performs operating-system-level virtualization also known as containerization. With Singularity containers, developers can work in reproducible environments of their choosing and design, and these complete environments can easily be copied and executed on other platforms – helping bring the HPC and Enterprise computing worlds together.

SimpleAI Framework

SimpleAI Framework enables users to speed up their Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning workloads. SimpleAI includes the following tools:

  • Tensorflow
  • PyTorch
  • Caffe
  • Keras, CUDA
  • cuDNN
  • Rapids AI
Refinements to Existing Features

Improvements to these popular features include:

  • Message Passing Interface
  • Portable Batch Schedulers (including Slurm)
  • Compilers (including Basic GNU development tools and Intel OneAPI Toolkit)
  • Ganglia Hardware Monitoring Utilities
  • Clonezilla Node Imaging and Replication Utility
  • Remote Management (via Intel Platform Management Interface)

“With the addition of Singularity and SimpleAI Framework, maintaining OS compatibility and continuing to finetune our existing features, CBeST 6.0 is our best version yet” said Alex Lesser, President, PSSC Labs.

Availability

CBeST Cluster Management Toolkit Version 6.0 is included with all outgoing PSSC HPC systems and available for existing systems in the field. PSSC Labs also addresses distinct customer requirements by offering customized refinements of this software toolkit.  Go here [link] to learn more.

About PSSC Labs

For over 25 years PSSC Labs has provided custom, on-premise high performance computing (HPC) systems designed to meet unique enterprise computing challenges. PSSC Labs offers HPC AI deep learning solutions and other big data solutions and delivers relentless performance with the absolute lowest total cost of ownership – all backed with industry-leading US-based support.

All products are designed and built at the company’s headquarters in Lake Forest, California.

PSSC Labs Announces New CBeST Cluster Management Software Stack v5 Release

By marketing@site-a.com

LAKE FOREST, CALIF., October 13, 2020 — PSSC Labs, a developer of high performance computing (HPC) and big data computing solutions, announces today that a new release of CBeST Cluster Management v 5.0 Software Stack will be available. The newest version of CBeST will add support for the latest Red Hat® Enterprise Linux® / CentOS Linux® 8.0 operating system and provide enhanced support for advanced technologies from Intel®, AMD® and NVIDIA®. CBeST will support bursting to cloud environments including Microsoft® Azure, Amazon® AWS and Google® Compute.

PSSC Labs continues to develop the most full featured cluster management software in the industry. CBeST is a complete cluster management package comprised of kernel optimizations, custom scripts and open source tools that are elegantly integrated, optimized and customized for your specific PowerWulf HPC Cluster hardware and applications. PSSC Labs provides support for CBeST at no additional cost. Below are the components included with CBeST.

Key features:

  • Support for Red Hat® Enterprise Linux® / CentOS Linux® 8.0
  • Operating System and BIOS performance optimizations tailored by CPU type (AMD®/Intel®)
  • Support for both Intel®, AMD®, NVIDIA® GPUs
  • NVIDIA® CUDA SDK software preinstalled
  • Multiple MPI platforms and versions installed by default
  • Environment Modules configuration. This will allow user environment customization to switch between different default MPI/application/compiler versions/environments.
  • Support for Cloud Bursting to Microsoft® Azure, Amazon® AWS and Google® Compute
  • Support for connecting to different parallel file systems including Gluster, Lustre, and Ceph
  • Support for Mellanox® InfiniBand up to 200 Gb/s and Intel® Omni-Path up to 100 Gb/s
  • Support for high speed ethernet standards 10/25/40/100 Gb/s.
  • Enhanced usability and management
  • Continued improvements on the build and use of slurm batch scheduler
  • Slurm customization, including support for GPUs and Quality of Service prioritizing
  • Slurm will allow support for bursting cloud deployment

PSSC Labs clusters are powering a whole new generation of research and business innovation. Their cluster management software stack is designed to automate the process of building and managing high performance clusters, so customers can eliminate the complexity of cluster management and attain ultimate flexibility. Learn more at www.site-a.com.

About PSSC Labs

For technology powered visionaries with a passion for challenging the status quo, PSSC Labs is the answer for hand-crafted HPC and Big Data computing solutions that deliver relentless performance with the absolute lowest total cost of ownership. We are true innovators offering high performance computing solutions to solve the world’s most demanding problems. For 25+ years, organizations of all sizes and from a variety of industries rely on PSSC Labs’ computing systems. We are proud to support many departments within the United States government, Fortune 500 companies, and small and medium-sized businesses.

All products are designed and built at the company’s headquarters in Lake Forest, California.

AMD EPYC Rome Processor: An Emerging Alternative for HPC

By marketing@site-a.com

The AMD second generation of EPYC processors, code-named “Rome” and based on the Zen 2 microarchitecture, are emerging as an alternative processor for high-performance computing (HPC) server applications.

The processor, which was released last August, features up to 64 cores per socket with 128 PCIe 4.0 lanes and 8-channel memory. AMD touts it as offering a very high performance per dollar in the marketplace. For organizations familiar with AMD desktop technology, EPYC Rome is to the server what AMD Ryzen 3000 was to the desktop. Namely, the second-generation AMD EPYC Rome processor offers significantly improved instructions per cycle over the first-generation processor, as well as more cores and better thermal efficiency. Additionally, the processor features a higher base frequency and a higher boost frequency than the previous AMD top-of-the-line processor.

Workloads That Will Benefit from AMD EPYC

When launched, AMD noted that Rome offers far more CPU threads per socket than Intel’s Xeon Scalable CPUs do. The processor also supports a higher DDR4 clockrate (up to 3200 MHz). Most important for demanding data center applications, the 128 PCIe 4.0 lanes each have twice the bandwidth of a PCIe 3.0 lane. Such performance is critical in HPC and large data center applications because data ingestion by CPUs is often a bottleneck. The higher performance capacity means workloads will not be degraded, and jobs will run faster. Most Host Bus Adapters may not be able to immediately take advantage of this larger pipe, but we don’t expect that to be the case for very long. Over time, more and more network adapters, controllers, etc. will be able to fully take advantage of PCI Express® 4.0.  That’s not to say that right now there are no benefits. In fact, the immediate impact is significantly more lanes for PCI devices, such as NVMe devices.  This will dramatically improve IO performance and increase the number of devices connected to the server. 

Another very basic advantage for HPC use cases is that since AMD EPYC processors have more cores than their comparable competitive processors, they deliver more computing power. Processors with more cores are ideal for advanced modeling and simulation algorithms, such as a finite element simulation. For these workloads, a job needs to use a very large number of cores at a given time. And the workloads often require large amounts of shared memory. This changes the game for HPC environments (ie. Design & Engineering, Weather Modeling, Life Science, and Artificial Intelligence), where total core count directly relates to program success. AMD® is realizing their investment in the 7 nm technology is finally paying off.

AMD EPYC processors deliver other benefits for HPC workloads and environments. By virtue of having more cores, the processors can run more virtual machines (VMs). As a result, a company gets more efficient compute resource use out of a single system.  This is ideal for virtual desktop environments (VDI) as well as converged / hyper-converged applications.

Selecting the Right Technology Platform

AMD use for HPC server workloads has had a mixed track record over the years. However, the introduction of AMD EPYC processors seems to have caught the attention of the marketplace.

Noting this interest in the user community, PSSC Labs is rolling out solutions based on the processor this year. PSSC Labs has a more than 30 years history of delivering systems that meet the most demanding workloads across industries, government, and academia.

Its offerings include the PowerServe Uniti Servers line that leverages the latest components from Intel® and Nvidia®. These servers are ideal for a wide range of applications, including AI and deep learning, as well as for computational and data analysis.

PSSC Labs also offers CloudOOP Big Data Servers that deliver the highest level of performance one would expect in an enterprise server combined with the cost-effectiveness of direct attach storage for Big Data applications. The servers deliver 200+ MB/sec sustained IO speeds per hard drive (which is 30%+ faster than other OEMs.)

Due to the increase in the number of PCI Express lanes, PSSC Labs is upgrading their CloudSeek Database Servers as well. The products we plan to bring to market in the near future will be built to support up to 36 x NVMe devices

PSSC Labs plans to have an AMD EPYC version of all its platforms for HPC and Big Data by the second half of the year. User interest is sparking this move. The company has not sold an AMD-based server in more than ten years. The impression PSSC gets from the end-user community and its own evaluation of the new processors is that AMD is a viable choice for the most demanding HPC workloads.

Infrastructure Considerations for Containers and Kubernetes

By marketing@site-a.com

Containers and Kubernetes are at the heart of a broad industry shift where applications and services are based on a microservices architecture. Specifically, microservices are being rapidly adopted as a means of building and modernizing distributed applications allowing them to be more scalable, flexible, resilient, and easier to build.

Instead of building self-contained, monolithic applications, a microservices approach breaks applications into modular, independent components that can be dynamically integrated with one another using application programming interfaces (APIs).

Increasingly, companies are using containers to power their microservices application architectures. Containers encapsulate a lightweight runtime environment for an application. Specifically, containers enable finer-grained execution environments, permit application isolation, and are lightweight.

Furthermore, containers include everything needed to run, such as code, dependencies, libraries, binaries, and other elements. Today, Docker is the most popular choice for building and running containers.

Compared to Virtual Machines, containers share the OS kernel instead of having a full copy of it and take up less space. Because they do not require OS spin-up time associated with a VM, containers initialize faster. In general, containers start in seconds or even milliseconds, which is much faster than VMs. As such, containers deliver performance characteristics that match the needs of a microservices architecture. In particular, the quick instantiation maps better to the unpredictable workload characteristics associated with microservices. 

The growing embracement of containers was validated in a 2019 industry container usage survey that found the median number of containers per host doubled (to 30) between 2018 and 2019. And the maximum per-node density was 250 containers, which was a 38% increase from 2018.

Managing Your Containers

With such explosive growth in the use of containers, companies need a way to oversee and manage their efforts. That’s where Kubernetes comes in.

Kubernetes is an open-source container orchestrator system for automating deployment, scaling, and management of application containers across clusters of hosts. It was originally designed by Google and is now maintained by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. Kubernetes works with a range of container tools, including Docker. It groups containers that make up an application into logical units for easy management and discovery.

Kubernetes provides a framework to run distributed systems resiliently. It takes care of scaling and failover for an application. For example, in a production environment, Kubernetes can start a new container if one goes down. Thus, helping to ensure there is no application downtime. Additionally, Kubernetes provides service discovery and load balancing, storage orchestration, automated rollout and rollbacks, self-healing features, configuration management, and more.

While there are a handful of container orchestrators available today, Kubernetes dominates the market. In addition to the widely used open-source variant, some commercial offerings such as Red Hat OpenShift are built on Kubernetes. (The commercial offers add enterprise features and support.)

Kubernetes can be deployed on a bare-metal cluster or on a cluster of virtual machines. Kubernetes, in turn, can orchestrate the containers it manages directly on bare metal or on virtual machines. Most instances of Kubernetes today are run on VMs running on-premises or in the cloud.

Bare-metal instances are not as common. However, there are use cases where they offer advantages. For example, a network edge application might be too latency-sensitive to tolerate the overhead created by a VM. Or an application (such as machine learning) might need to run on GPUs or other hardware accelerators, which do not lend themselves to VMs.

Optimized, Integrated Solutions

Running container workloads comes down to hardware. Businesses need physical machines, with CPUs, memory, and local persistent storage. In addition, they need some shared persistent storage and networking element to hook up all the machines.

A suitable system must be able to be dynamically provisioned by the users to handle different data workflows. Many companies are looking for turnkey solutions that combine the needed processing, storage, memory, and interconnect technologies to provide either the bare metal or VM foundation for their container and microservices efforts. Delivering such a solution requires expertise and real-world best practices across both HPC and container/Kubernetes domains, plus deep industry knowledge about the specific applications.

PSSC Labs has a more than 30 years history of delivering systems that meet the most demanding workloads across industries, government, and academia. Its offerings include the PowerServe Uniti Servers line that leverages the latest components from Intel® and Nvidia®. These servers are ideal for a wide range of applications, including AI and deep learning, as well as for computational and data analysis.

PSSC Labs also offers CloudOOP Big Data Servers that deliver the highest level of performance one would expect in an enterprise server combined with the cost-effectiveness of direct attach storage for Big Data applications. The servers deliver 200+ MB/sec sustained IO speeds per hard drive (which is 30%+ faster than other OEMs.)

As the number of containers per host grows and Kubernetes use grows, these solutions and other PSSC Labs systems are designed to meet the requirements of enterprises today. Such systems will increasingly become more important as companies explore new ways to make use of the containers, Kubernetes, and microservices to serve their users better and quickly react to new business opportunities.

Top Tips to Improving Your System Administration Skills

By marketing@site-a.com

You Envision the Future

LAKE FOREST, CALIF., SEPT 12, 2019 — PSSC Labs, a developer of custom High Performance Computing and Big Data computing solutions today shares their top tips for improving your system administration skills.

At PSSC Labs, our mission is to deliver reliable, high performance turnkey platforms that help organizations like yours perform necessary data tasks without giving up control of your data.  That means keeping your system administration skills up-to-date is more important than ever! Of course, we’re always here to help you should you ever encounter any issues. In fact, you can contact our Support line at any time and we will be happy to assist you. But just to give you a little boost, we’ve outlined the top five support issues that on-premise model users encounter, and what to do if it happens to you.

Machine Not Powering On

PSSC Labs produces turnkey platforms, so they’re ready to be plugged in and get going upon delivery. Should you ever notice that one of your machines isn’t powering on, the first thing you should check is power supply. Verify that the power supply is receiving power from the source by verifying that the power connectors are securly plugged in on both ends.

If this doesn’t work, try a new power port on the PDF and then move on to a new power cable. If your machine still does not power on you can try using a power supply from your spare parts kit (if a spare parts kit was provided with your order) or from another working machine.  Machines with faulty memory can also exhibit this type of behavior, so shuffling or re-seating the memory is also worth trying. 

Machine Has Crashed or Rebooted

On-premise models can crash or reboot for various reasons. They’re often accompanied by BMC System Event Log messages.  Start by checking the output of the command ‘ipmitool sel list’ and check “/var/log/messages” for errors correlating to the date / time of the crash.

Updating your machine’s BIOS to the latest version is recommended as well, as it can fix crashing systems as well as improve the machine’s overall performance.  Verify that the CPUs are not overheating by checking the “sensors” command while the machine is under load.  Faulty memory can also cause crashes, so re-seating or shuffling memory can help to resolve these issues as well.  The causes of system crashes are sometimes hard to pin down, so do not hesitate to contact the PSSC Labs support team for troubleshooting assistance.

Software Support

PSSC Labs solutions often come pre-installed with multiple software applications, ranging from job submission software to parallel computing platforms, from weather modeling to data analysis.

Many of these packages are third party applications and not created by PSSC Labs, so if you ever have an issue with pre-loaded software, it’s recommended to first contact the software developers. If you still need assistance afterwards, contact the PSSC Labs support staff who can promptly assist you further.

Machine is Reporting Hard Drive/RAID Errors

This error is sometimes challenging for even those with years of experience and expert administration skills. Whenever your hard drive fails, your server’s data is at risk.  If you see errors indicating a possible issue with one of your hard drives, a PSSC Labs support technician can assist you with checking the drive’s built in SMART (Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology) data, which will show the drive’s health and indicate whether or not it needs to be replaced.  It’s possible that the drive is healthy and there is another underlying issue which needs to be remedied, so please contact PSSC Labs should you encounter this error.

Machine is Reporting Memory/CPU Errors

PSSC Labs servers come equipped with large amounts of memory and speedy CPUs. When issues occur with these components, users will often see slow / degraded system performance accompanied by MCE (Machine Check Error) messages.  You can contact PSSC Labs and provide these messages to a PSSC Labs support technician who can assist you with determining which memory DIMM or CPU the error is coming from.  Memory can be easily replaced, whereas handling CPUs is an extremely delicate process — one that we recommend avoiding unless absolutely necessary. Often times MCE messages can be resolved by simply reseating or shuffling the memory around.

About PSSC Labs 

For technology powered visionaries with a passion for challenging the status quo, PSSC Labs is the answer for hand-crafted HPC and Big Data computing solutions that deliver relentless performance with the absolute lowest total cost of ownership.  

 We are true innovators offering high performance computing solutions to solve the world’s most demanding problems. For 25+ years, organizations of all sizes and from a variety of sectors rely on PSSC Labs’ computing systems. We are proud to support many departments within the United States government, Fortune 500 companies, as well as small and medium-sized businesses.  

All products are designed and built at the company’s headquarters in Lake Forest, California.

Government Agencies Leverage New Technology for Data Flow

By marketing@site-a.com

LAKE FOREST, CALIF., AUGUST 20, 2019 — PSSC Labs, a developer of custom High Performance Computing and Big Data computing solutions today shares how the CyberRax Data Flow Pipleline is helping various DOD organizations achieve their goals.

The Federal Government has spent decades collecting and storing huge data sets, covering everything from census and population records to crime reports and infrastructure data. The analytics retrieved from this data has assisted our government agencies in commissioning greater responsiveness and efficiencies at every level, making it truly invaluable to our society. Federal agencies simply can’t afford to suffer from computational roadblocks. Government servers need to be able to perform streaming analytics while also providing full control over their own data, especially when it comes to governance, security and performance.   

PSSC Labs, in partnership with Cloudera, is deploying the CyberRax Data Flow Pipeline as a truly turnkey system engineered specifically to meet the data transport needs and security requirements of Federal Agencies. The CyberRax Data Flow Pipeline comes complete with all necessary storage, network, operating system and application software including Cloudera Data Flow (CDF). CDF is built on top of Apache Nifi, a powerful and user-friendly data routing application originally developed by the National Security Agency (NSA). With CDF, users have the ability to create simple graphical models that direct data across multiple networks with all necessary data provenance required for the most secure environments.  

A Truly Turn-key Platform 

According to Alex Lesser, PSSC Labs Vice President, the real value of CyberRax Data Flow Pipeline is a production-ready platform out of the box. “What we see happening with the delivery of CyberRax Data Flow Pipeline is a significant reduction in time and cost, allowing federal agencies to see true value much sooner,” says Lesser. With 48 processor cores, 4 GB memory per core, 264TB RAW storage capacity and dual 10GigE network backplane, CyberRax Data Flow Pipeline can fulfill the most demanding environments. Federal agencies can leverage the engineering expertise of PSSC Labs high performance and high reliability platform. That’s why it only makes sense that government agencies including NASA, NIH, DOD and many more have partnered with PSSC Labs in an effort to quickly process, store, analyze and protect their massive amounts of data. 

The U.S. Air Force recently deployed several CyberRax Data Flow Pipelines for both their NIPR and SIPR networks. The goal of these deployments is to collect, transport, and distribute cybersecurity data from every Air Force installation worldwide on both NIPR and SIPR. This solution allows for data to be sent to multiple core locations and fed downstream to multiple cybersecurity tools for analysis. 

American Made

As an American manufacturer, PSSC Labs provides a level of security and trust that other foreign manufacturers simply lack. The CyberRax Data Flow Pipeline can be purchased via several contract vehicles including GSA, CHESS and NETCENTS. PSSC Labs is already working closely with Department of Defense agencies to help them achieve their operational mandate to ingest and direct data from disparate sources all with the required security provisions out of the box. We know that government servers need to be 100% operational at all time, without sacrificing speed, analytics, or security, which is why our team of engineers is available for support for the lifetime of your system.

About PSSC Labs 

For technology powered visionaries with a passion for challenging the status quo, PSSC Labs is the answer for hand-crafted HPC and Big Data computing solutions that deliver relentless performance with the absolute lowest total cost of ownership.  

 We are true innovators offering high performance computing solutions to solve the world’s most demanding problems. For 25+ years, organizations of all sizes and from a variety of sectors rely on PSSC Labs’ computing systems. We are proud to support many departments within the United States government, Fortune 500 companies, as well as small and medium-sized businesses.  

All products are designed and built at the company’s headquarters in Lake Forest, California.