Penguin puts Linux supercomputer in sky
The San Francisco-based outfit announced the debut of what it calls Penguin on Demand – POD, for short – a service that offers remote access to high-performance computing (HPC) Linux clusters. The idea is to provide researchers, engineers, and simulation scientists with the sort of number-crunching power they can’t get from the typical so-called infrastructure cloud.
None to surprisingly, Penguin paints its new service as something that goes above and beyond Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). Amazon does offer high-end number crunching through its Elastic MapReduce service – which runs the open-source Hadoop grid platform atop EC2 – but Penguin CEO Charles Wuischpard paints POD as something altogether different, choosing to compare it with the basic EC2 service.
“We’ve taken our expertise as HPC specialists and applied it to an on-demand model,” says Charles Wuischpard, the CEO of Penguin Computing, which has spent the last decade selling HPC Linux clusters. “We were finding that engineers and scientists were going to Amazon and trying to run their code, but Amazon wasn’t really designed to support engineering, scientific workloads. Everything we’ve done is designed to try to support those workloads in a very efficient way.”
Source: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/08/11/penguin_on_demand/