Novell News

by Meike Chabowski, product marketing manager, SUSE Linux Enterprise

In June and November of each year the Top500 list of supercomputers is released. Each year, based on the list, the key operating system for supercomputing is Linux. Linux is cheaper to run and its excellent scalability features, along with its robust security and performance, make it an ideal choice for high performance computing (HPC) systems.

The recently released November Top500 list once again demonstrates that Linux dominates HPC – nearly 90 percent of the Top500 systems run on Linux. Three hundred and ninety-one of these systems are running an unspecified version of Linux. Sixty-two of the supercomputers are proven to run some version (including such variants as UNICOS/lc and CNL) of SUSE Linux Enterprise from Novell. Red Hat and its derivatives, including CentOS, comes in a distant second with 16 supercomputers.

The world’s fastest supercomputer, the Jaguar XT5, built by Seattle-based Cray Inc., runs on a version of SUSE Linux Enterprise. Jaguar, which is located at the Department of Energy’s Leadership Computing Facility at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, is used by the National Center for Computational Sciences (NCCS) for simulation and computations for environmental, chemical and material science, nuclear energy, astrophysics and particle physics. Jaguar literally has “blown away” its competitors by bringing the theoretical peak of performance speed to 2.3 petaflops: one petaflop/s refers to quadrillion calculations per second — second place Roadrunner from IBM in comparison just reaches 1.3 Petaflops. All the Jaguar computer nodes somewhere run a version of  SUSE Linux Enterprise Server — lightly-customized SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 on the service nodes, and Compute Node Linux (CNL) which is Cray’s version of the SUSE Linux Enterprise operating system with a tuned Linux kernel.

Why is SUSE Linux Enterprise Server the operating system of choice on most of the world’s top HPC supercomputers in use today? Since 1993, SUSE engineers have made significant contributions to the advancement and tuning of the Linux kernel and key kernel-related performance technologies. Moreover, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server was the first Linux OS in the market to support 64-bit chip sets and is synonymous with high-performance Linux running on 64-bit and mainframe systems. Because of its continuous early support of newer chip sets, including 64-bit, this drove and still drives the success of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server on HPC technologies.

The HPC market is maturing from high performance to high productivity. While the world’s fastest supercomputer Jaguar is devoted to solving scientific questions, there have been significant changes in the high performance computing landscape during the last few years. Many businesses today are adopting HPC for financial analysis, portfolio management, digital security, surveillance, data warehousing, line-of-business applications and transaction processing. And while HPC has been primarily limited to large enterprises, R&D firms, and academic institutions in the past, that is changing. Mid-market companies are also adopting HPC, due to the availability of affordable and open solutions, which supplant the costly proprietary solutions of the past.

This week Novell launched Mono Tools for Visual Studio, a revolutionary add-in module for Microsoft Visual Studio. Mono Tools lets .NET developers build Linux, UNIX and Mac OS X applications without leaving their familiar Visual Studio environment. By allowing .NET-trained developers to leverage their existing expertise and ecosystem of .NET code, libraries and tools, Mono Tools slashes the time and costs of developing multi-platform applications. But don’t just take our word for it – check out Mono Tools for yourself. Download a free 30-day trial here. Try it and let us know what you think.

In this recently posted NetworkWorld podcast Joe ‘Zonker’ Brockmeier speaks with openSUSE booster and GNOME board member Vincent Untz, about the upcoming enhancements to openSUSE 11.2 as well as some of the cool work that the GNOME team is doing to improve functionality and increase usability. Also, get highlights from the Boston Summit 2009, the three-day GNOME developer hackfest, and find out how to get involved in improving GNOME regardless of your level of technical expertise. (12:40)

In this latest OpenMic podcast, Joe ‘Zonker’ Brockmeier talks with Mono founder, Miguel de Icaza, about what’s new with the Mono Project and what’s coming soon. The two also discuss the many iPhone apps brought to you by Mono, what’s next for Moonlight (the Linux implementation of Microsoft’s Silverlight), and why Windows developers should really check out Mono. Listen here (20:20)

Go here to get more information on Mono.

Did you know that Oktoberfest begins in September? The start of the world’s largest fair just happens to coincide with the first-ever openSUSE conference happening just “down the road” in Nuremberg, Sept. 17 – 20.

The openSUSE conference is free and open to anyone. The interactive event aims to bring the openSUSE contributor community together to share ideas, experience, learn, hack and help to guide the direction of the project. Presentations, tutorials, birds of a feather and panel sessions will focus on four main areas: System and Toolchain, Desktop, Server, and Community – there will even be a chance to work on the openSUSE 11.2 release and the openSUSE KDE team will be holding a full program of contributor workshops during the conference.

Check out the full schedule here and make sure to leave time for some beer.

At VMworld this week, HP announced innovative management and service solutions that extend the benefits of virtualization beyond servers to the entire infrastructure. The announcement included the HP Solution Builder program, which is being supported by Novell.

Holger Dyroff, vice president of business development, Open Platform Solutions, “HP and VMware are critical virtualization partners for Novell, and we are excited by our ongoing collaboration to jointly develop solutions that enable customers to maximize the value of their virtualization investments. We offer SUSE Linux Enterprise Server as part of the HP Solution Builder program to provide users with the benefits of our operating system’s full optimization for VMware ESX on HP BladeSystems — a combination with all the necessary components to deliver a cost-effective, high performance virtualization environment for enterprise data centers.”

Yesterday VMware announced significant advancements to its vCloud Initiative, designed to help customers safely tap compute capacity for internal and external clouds. As a long time partner, Novell is supporting VMware’s vCloud Initiative with a new pricing model for OEMs.

Susan Heystee, vice president and general manager of Global Alliances at Novell, said, “Novell is excited to provide support for VMware’s vCloud Initiative and plans to make SUSE Linux Enterprise available to provide the flexibility VMware’s customers and cloud service providers are looking for. Cloud-centric pricing for SUSE Linux Enterprise coupled with a VMware vSphere-based cloud infrastructure will help service providers deliver the scalability and reliability needed to respond to customers’ changing business needs. With SUSE Studio, our appliance creation tool, we enable enterprises to build customized SUSE Linux Enterprise-based virtual appliances, which can easily be deployed to internal or external clouds.”

For more information on Novell’s vCloud pricing, contact Marcin Kurc, mkurc@novell.com.

Novell has contributed to the second edition of Emulex Corporation’s comprehensive introductory guide to network convergence. Announced yesterday, Convergenomics – The Guide to Network Convergence Solutions (registration required) offers IT managers a resource to help them craft their next-generation network strategy and explains how to converge protocols, such as Fibre Channel and iSCSI, onto a 10Gb/s Enhanced Ethernet backbone.

Robert Wipfel, distinguished engineer at Novell, said, “We are pleased to be a part of The Guide to Convergenomics. A next-generation virtual infrastructure requires a converged network that can satisfy the demands of fail-over, live migration and fault tolerance for virtual machines and virtual storage, and be integrated by a common management of network access and quality of service. Novell and Emulex are committed to meeting the demands of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server customers and providing seamless interoperability as they begin this migration to a fully converged data center.”

In this podcast, Novell’s Community Manager, Joe “Zonker” Brockmeier, talks with Andreas Jaeger, about his responsibilities as the openSUSE program manager, the history of the project, the challenges and opportunity of cultivating the community as well as what’s coming up in the future releases for openSUSE. Take a listen.

 

 Andreas Jaeger on openSUSE : Play Now | Play in Popup | Download
 Andreas Jaeger on openSUSE (ogg): Download