Platform Computing
Encyclopedia
Platform Computing is a privately held software company that is primarily known for its job scheduling product, Load Sharing Facility (LSF)
. It was founded in 1992 in Toronto, Ontario, Canada and is currently headquartered in Markham, Ontario
with 11 branch offices across the United States, Europe and Asia.
In Oct 2011, Platform Computing was acquired by IBM
.
. The LSF software was developed partially with funding from CANARIE
(Canadian Advanced Network and Research for Industry and Education).
Platform's revenue was approximately $300,000 in 1993, and reached $12 million in 1997. Revenue grew by 34% (YoY) to US$46.2 million in 2001, US$50 million in 2003.
On October 29, 2007, Platform Computing acquired the Scali Manage business from Norway-based Scali AS. This acquisition added a more complex cluster management solution to Platform's software offerings. On August 1, 2008, Platform acquired the rest of the Scali business, taking on the industry-standard Message Passing Interface
(MPI), Scali MPI, and rebranding it Platform MPI.
On June 22, 2009, Platform Computing announced its first piece of software to serve the cloud computing
space. Platform ISF is software that enables organizations to set up and manage private clouds, controlling both physical and virtual resources, and supporting a wide variety of hardware and OS configurations..
In August 2009, Platform acquired HP-MPI from Hewlett-Packard
.
On Oct. 11, 2011, IBM
announced their intention to buy Platform Computing.
.
Load Sharing Facility
Load Sharing Facility is a commercial computer software job scheduler sold by Platform Computing. It can be used to execute batch jobs on networked Unix and Windows systems on many different architectures....
. It was founded in 1992 in Toronto, Ontario, Canada and is currently headquartered in Markham, Ontario
Markham, Ontario
Markham is a town in the Regional Municipality of York, located within the Greater Toronto Area of Southern Ontario, Canada. The population was 261,573 at the 2006 Canadian census...
with 11 branch offices across the United States, Europe and Asia.
In Oct 2011, Platform Computing was acquired by IBM
IBM
International Business Machines Corporation or IBM is an American multinational technology and consulting corporation headquartered in Armonk, New York, United States. IBM manufactures and sells computer hardware and software, and it offers infrastructure, hosting and consulting services in areas...
.
History
Platform Computing was founded by Songnian Zhou, Jingwen Wang, and Bing Wu in 1992 . Its first product, LSF, was based on the Utopia research project at the University of TorontoUniversity of Toronto
The University of Toronto is a public research university in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, situated on the grounds that surround Queen's Park. It was founded by royal charter in 1827 as King's College, the first institution of higher learning in Upper Canada...
. The LSF software was developed partially with funding from CANARIE
CANARIE
CANARIE is a Canadian government-supported non-profit corporation, founded in 1993, which maintains a set of leased wide area network links for the transfer of very large data files. The core network consists of 19000 km of fibre optic cable capable of speeds as high as 100 Gbps but...
(Canadian Advanced Network and Research for Industry and Education).
Platform's revenue was approximately $300,000 in 1993, and reached $12 million in 1997. Revenue grew by 34% (YoY) to US$46.2 million in 2001, US$50 million in 2003.
On October 29, 2007, Platform Computing acquired the Scali Manage business from Norway-based Scali AS. This acquisition added a more complex cluster management solution to Platform's software offerings. On August 1, 2008, Platform acquired the rest of the Scali business, taking on the industry-standard Message Passing Interface
Message Passing Interface
Message Passing Interface is a standardized and portable message-passing system designed by a group of researchers from academia and industry to function on a wide variety of parallel computers...
(MPI), Scali MPI, and rebranding it Platform MPI.
On June 22, 2009, Platform Computing announced its first piece of software to serve the cloud computing
Cloud computing
Cloud computing is the delivery of computing as a service rather than a product, whereby shared resources, software, and information are provided to computers and other devices as a utility over a network ....
space. Platform ISF is software that enables organizations to set up and manage private clouds, controlling both physical and virtual resources, and supporting a wide variety of hardware and OS configurations..
In August 2009, Platform acquired HP-MPI from Hewlett-Packard
Hewlett-Packard
Hewlett-Packard Company or HP is an American multinational information technology corporation headquartered in Palo Alto, California, USA that provides products, technologies, softwares, solutions and services to consumers, small- and medium-sized businesses and large enterprises, including...
.
On Oct. 11, 2011, IBM
IBM
International Business Machines Corporation or IBM is an American multinational technology and consulting corporation headquartered in Armonk, New York, United States. IBM manufactures and sells computer hardware and software, and it offers infrastructure, hosting and consulting services in areas...
announced their intention to buy Platform Computing.
Products
Platform Computing has a wide range of software products and solutions including.
- Platform ISF (Infrastructure Sharing Facility) - Management software for building private IaaS clouds
- Platform LSF (Load Sharing Facility) - Platform's workload management software for clusters and supercomputers
- Platform SymphonySymphony (software)Platform Symphony is a High-performance computing software system developed by Platform Computing, the company that developed Load Sharing Facility . Focusing on the Financial Services Industry , Symphony is designed to deliver scalability and enhances performance for compute-intensive risk and...
- Platform Process Manager - workflow management
- Platform LSF License Scheduler
- Platform LSF Session Scheduler
- Platform LSF MultiCluster
- Platform Cluster Manager
- Platform MPI - Message Passing Interface library
- Platform Manager
- Platform RTM
- Platform Analytics
- Platform VM Orchestrator
- Platform Enterprise Grid Orchestrator
- Platform MapReduce (uses Platform's job scheduler with rest of the Apache Hadoop stack)
Partnerships
Platform Computing has partnerships with over 100 companies and industry leaders, including:- CrayCrayCray Inc. is an American supercomputer manufacturer based in Seattle, Washington. The company's predecessor, Cray Research, Inc. , was founded in 1972 by computer designer Seymour Cray. Seymour Cray went on to form the spin-off Cray Computer Corporation , in 1989, which went bankrupt in 1995,...
- DellDellDell, Inc. is an American multinational information technology corporation based in 1 Dell Way, Round Rock, Texas, United States, that develops, sells and supports computers and related products and services. Bearing the name of its founder, Michael Dell, the company is one of the largest...
- HP
- IBMIBMInternational Business Machines Corporation or IBM is an American multinational technology and consulting corporation headquartered in Armonk, New York, United States. IBM manufactures and sells computer hardware and software, and it offers infrastructure, hosting and consulting services in areas...
- Intel
- MicrosoftMicrosoftMicrosoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...
- Red HatRed HatRed Hat, Inc. is an S&P 500 company in the free and open source software sector, and a major Linux distribution vendor. Founded in 1993, Red Hat has its corporate headquarters in Raleigh, North Carolina with satellite offices worldwide....
- SASSAS InstituteSAS Institute Inc. , headquartered in Cary, North Carolina, USA, has been a major producer of software since it was founded in 1976 by Anthony Barr, James Goodnight, John Sall and Jane Helwig...
Open-source participation
- HadoopHadoopApache Hadoop is a software framework that supports data-intensive distributed applications under a free license. It enables applications to work with thousands of nodes and petabytes of data...
- Platform joined the Hadoop project in 2011, and is focused on enhancing the Hadoop Distributed File System - Platform Lava - based on Platform LSF, licensed under GPLv2. The Lava scheduler is part of Red Hat HPC.
- Platform FTA - File Transfer Agent for HPC clusters
- NagiosNagiosNagios is a popular open source computer system and network monitoring software application. It watches hosts and services, alerting users when things go wrong and again when they get better....
Plug-ins - Community Scheduler Framework - a meta-scheduling framework
Memberships
Platform Computing is a member of the following organizations:- The Green GridThe Green GridThe Green Grid is a non-profit, open industry consortium of end-users, policy-makers, technology providers, facility architects, and utility companies collaborating to improve the resource efficiency of data centers and business computing ecosystems...
- Open Grid ForumOpen Grid ForumThe Open Grid Forum is a community of users, developers, and vendors for standardization of grid computing. It was formed in 2006 in a merger of the Global Grid Forum and the Enterprise Grid Alliance. The OGSA, OGSI, and JSDL standards were created by the OGF...
Standards
Platform products have adopted the following standards:- DRMAADRMAADRMAA or Distributed Resource Management Application API is a high-level Open Grid Forum API specification for the submission and control of jobs to a Distributed Resource Management system, such as a Cluster or Grid computing infrastructure...
- Intel Cluster ReadyIntel Cluster ReadyThe Intel Cluster Ready program was introduced two years ago. It is aimed at hardware and software vendorsin the low-end and mid-range cluster market. To get certified, systems have to fulfill a minimum set of cluster-specific requirements. This way, vendors of parallel software can build their...
- HPC Profile
- JSDL
- Open MPIOpen MPIOpen MPI is a Message Passing Interface library project combining technologies and resources from several other projects . It is used by many TOP500 supercomputers including Roadrunner, which was the world's fastest supercomputer from June 2008 to November 2009, and K computer, the fastest...
- Project KusuProject KusuProject Kusu is the open source base that was designed from ground up for the basis of Platform Computing's Open Cluster Stack 5.Project Kusu is built with the objective of being a simplified cluster management, operation and deployment source kit, that supports a range of different linux...
, the basis for the Platform Cluster Manager
See also
- High Performance Computing
- Distributed computingDistributed computingDistributed computing is a field of computer science that studies distributed systems. A distributed system consists of multiple autonomous computers that communicate through a computer network. The computers interact with each other in order to achieve a common goal...
- Cloud computingCloud computingCloud computing is the delivery of computing as a service rather than a product, whereby shared resources, software, and information are provided to computers and other devices as a utility over a network ....
- Computational grid
- CPU scavenging
- Grid computingGrid computingGrid computing is a term referring to the combination of computer resources from multiple administrative domains to reach a common goal. The grid can be thought of as a distributed system with non-interactive workloads that involve a large number of files...
- Beowulf (computing)Beowulf (computing)A Beowulf cluster is a computer cluster of what are normally identical, commodity-grade computers networked into a small local area network with libraries and programs installed which allow processing to be shared among them...
- Job schedulerJob schedulerA job scheduler is a software application that is in charge of unattended background executions, commonly known for historical reasons as batch processing....
s
External links
- Platform.com The Official Website for Platform Computing HPC Management Software
- User forum
- Platform Computing user portal for downloads and commercial support