ScaleMP, a leading provider of virtualization solutions for high-end computing, today announced that R Systems NA, Inc, a service provider of flexible, on-demand high-performance computing resources to the commercial and academic research community, has deployed ScaleMP’s vSMP Foundation in its data centers. With vSMP Foundation, R Systems is able to isolate customer systems for security purposes, help customers avoid recoding of applications, eliminate the underutilization of systems, lower costs for symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) systems and ensure that customers only pay for the resources they use within the R Systems cloud, improve data center flexibility and reduce system complexity. 

“vSMP Foundation for SMP and vSMP Foundation for Cloud were definitely tools I wanted in my arsenal,” said Greg Keller, principal of R Systems. “We have two data centers filled with computers and at any given point in time some subset of them will be partitioned for different researchers of different companies. When a customer shows up needing an SMP system immediately, it’s very hard for me to predict which systems will be available on that day. vSMP Foundation for Cloud enables me to deal with those circumstances requiring unforeseen compute resources. I can easily grab whatever nodes are available and provision a virtual SMP on the fly. Additionally, it’s been great to work with ScaleMP. They are truly technology visionaries who see where our pain points are and can make them disappear gracefully.”

R Systems provides its commercial and academic research community customers with dedicated hosting, shared systems, virtual private clusters and/or support for off-site/remote facilities. A typical researcher requests a hosted SMP system and R Systems provides them with access to the hardware, OS or applications at whatever level they want to take over responsibility. R Systems’ goal was to be able to easily provision SMP systems to meet customer requirements and lower SMP costs. Additionally, the company wanted to help researchers avoid recoding applications and be able to easily isolate customers to offer them complete security and autonomy. In July 2008 R Systems adopted vSMP Foundation for SMP because it was the only solution that gave them full access to all of the RAM and any processor in a given system. The company has also adopted vSMP Foundation for Cloud for its dynamic virtual SMP provisioning needs. Since deployment, the company has been able to eliminate the extra months it would generally take customers to recode their applications for a distributed memory system and can provide isolated and secure virtual SMP systems that are tailored to specific customer needs so customers only pay for compute power they use. R Systems has also reduced file system complexity using vSMP Foundation’s ability to pull everything into one operating system. Overall, vSMP Foundation has increased R Systems’ resource flexibility and enabled the company to deliver better customer service. 

“Although organizations can easily meet today’s resource requirements, it becomes much harder, if not impossible, to predict future resource specifications – especially if those needs are not internal, but coming from external customer demands,” said Shai Fultheim, founder and CTO of ScaleMP. “vSMP Foundation for Cloud enables service providers like R Systems to dynamically provision virtual SMP systems depending on what resources are available at the time – enabling them to better manage their customer service-level expectations.”