ScaleMP, a leading provider of virtualization solutions for high-end computing, today announced that the University of Florida’s (UF) Interdisciplinary Center for Biotechnology Research (ICBR), a world-class research support center that provides biotech research services to the UF community and its research partners, has deployed ScaleMP’s vSMP Foundation for SMP. With vSMP Foundation, the ICBR is able to harness existing infrastructure to continue to leverage both legacy and proprietary software packages, provide scientists and researchers the ability to submit larger interactive jobs to a virtual symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) system with large shared memory pools and increase application performance speeds – all at the same level of cost-effectiveness as the center’s previous open source virtualization deployments.
ICBR’s IT team supports research at UF and abroad in various biotechnology fields such as proteomics, genomics, bioinformatics and cellomics. ICBR needed to be able to run legacy software as well as proprietary software packages requiring large shared memory systems. Because of the high price point of traditional SMP systems, the team tried to find other ways to perform these jobs. They ended up stretching their virtual infrastructure to accommodate these large shared memory workloads, resulting in a loss of virtualization benefits. ICBR ultimately chose ScaleMP’s vSMP Foundation for SMP because it was the only solution that could take commodity hardware and aggregate it into one operating environment with a large amount of shared memory, while also allowing multiple threads in a process to address the entire shared memory pool – something other solutions could not offer. Additionally, ICBR liked that they were able to create a true virtual SMP for a single system image in which a user can do anything on that system image that can be done on a traditional Linux-based SMP.
“Many organizations have a sufficient amount of computational power and enough CPUs, but they are simply unable to leverage their existing infrastructure for larger compute intensive workloads,” said Shai Fultheim, founder and CEO of ScaleMP. “vSMP Foundation for SMP enables biotechnology organizations like ICBR to aggregate existing hardware and to create a virtual SMP for next generation sequence processing and other biotechnology computing needs that need large amounts of processing power as well as shared memory.”