Common hardware setup for HPC is not suitable for providing private cloud environments or container-centric clusters.
Traditional HPC cluster managers are not able to manage cloud solutions or container-centric clusters. In addition to that, common deployment solutions for cloud and containers are not able to work at the scale required for HPC and also not able to re-provision the nodes dynamically in a reasonable timeframe.
Traditional tools require supercomputing facilities to procure different hardware for each activity (HPC, containers, cloud) and adopt different technologies for provisioning each solution. This approach is obviously expensive and it usually involves a lot of overhead for the administration of the services.
HPCNow! has redefined this approach in order to provide a response to the long tail of research and engineering needs.
sNow! cluster manager allows to dynamically re-architect/re-purpose the HPC solution to provision Singularity containers, Docker Swarm clusters, and OpenNebula private clouds. This new approach allows accommodating those needs with zero investment in hardware capability.
Thanks to the improvements in the cluster provisioning, sNow! is able to redefine baremetal in less than one minute at any scale. This is not only key for HPC. Environments that rely on container-centric solutions based on Docker Swarm or private clouds based OpenNebula solutions can take advantage of this new technology and achieve the velocity and resilience provided by sNow! cluster manager.
