Copper 1.0 on its way

The months are flying by! As always, we've been busy here preparing to rock the world of virtualization and High Performance Computing with Copper. But as Copper 1.0 nears, I thought that I'd provide a bit of background on what exactly it is.

GridCentric's platform has been named Copper in light of the fact that it really is the first true "Cluster Operating System". That means that it lets you do on your cluster all the things that we're used to doing with a modern multi-tasking operating system. Let me provide a table with a few simple analogies:

Feature	Desktop OS (e.g. Windows, Linux)	Cluster OS (Copper)
Multi-tasking	Run multiple programs simultaneously.	Run different cluster applications simultaneously (which include operating system stacks, libraries, across hundreds of machines); these are virtual clusters.
Resource accounting	See memory and CPU usage of different processes.	Account for memory, CPU, disk and network usage of every virtual cluster.
Job control	The ability to kill misbehaving processes (some of the time).	The ability to pause, suspend, limit or kill any virtual cluster.
Developer API	An API for performing system-related functions, such as creating processes, reading and writing files.	An API for growing the size of your virtual cluster instantaneously, killing machines within it, accessing data sets, reserving resources, etc.

Simple, eh? Now for some Copper eye candy. Some of those following Copper may know that the fundamental primitive that enables all this amazing stuff is blazingly fast virtual machine cloning. Just for fun: here's a video of me growing my virtual cluster from one machine to a few, then back to one, then to eleven and back to one, then to over twenty and back to one. Each clone is fully-functional and independent -- waiting for ssh is actually slower than creating the machine itself.

Copper deployment at York open to researchers

We're proud to open up the deployment at York University to researchers there who need a bit more computing power and want to experiment with the next generation of High Performance Computing.

You will be able to harness the power of your own personal easy-to-use cluster - without any of the hassles of keeping compute nodes consistent with your binaries, worrying about cross compilers, restrictions installing packages on the headnode. Copper gives everyone the simplicity of one machine with the power of hundreds.

This hardware for this trial is generously provided by SHARCNET and we expect that we will be able to open up this deployment to all SHARCNET users in the near future. For now, York researchers can request a Copper virtual cluster.