Supercomputer clusters are getting larger and larger, and that is Platform Computing has to revamp its Load Sharing Facility to version 8 and double up the capacity of the workload scheduling software for grids and clusters. The updated LSF also supports GPU co-processors as full citizens of the cluster.

With LSF 7, Platform Computing could manage a cluster that had 24,000 cores and on the order of 100,000 pending jobs, according to Ken Hertzler, vice president of product management at the grid computing pioneer. With LSF 8, which will start shipping in January 2011, a single instance of the cluster management tool will be able to span a cluster comprised of 48,000 cores and 200,000 pending jobs. And if you need to span larger cluster sizes, you can gang up multiple LSF 8 instances to control grids that have 100,000 cores and up to 1.5 million pending jobs.

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