Making HPC Adoption Easier

SUSE is entering the third decade of supporting HPC by releasing the HPC module – now part of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for HPC 12 SP2. 

The High Performance Computing market has grown and evolved around the globe – in supercomputing centers and beyond for banking and finance, medical research, energy, and much more. 

At SUSE we are proud of our success in helping customers establish powerful HPC systems, with more than half of the top 25 from the Top500 supercomputing sites running some form of SUSE Linux Enterprise. It’s always been SUSE’s desire to make it easier and smoother for customers to set up, run, and operate Linux systems, and that’s exactly what the HPC module is designed for.

SUSE is a founding member of the OpenHPC community, supporting its mission to have an HPC stack ready in a single repository, without needing to pick up HPC stack components from a variety of other sources. An example of our investment is the new Intel HPC Orchestrator, now delivered with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for HPC included and recently announced being generally available, during SC16 just a few weeks ago.

A SUSE “module” is a set of software packages within SUSE Linux Enterprise Server which

1. focus on a certain use case
2. can be activated free of charge
3. run on a different lifecycle than the base server.

In summary, the HPC module allows us to keep the content closer to what’s happening in the HPC community upstream, providing more leading-edge tools in a more manageable fashion, leveraging a different lifecycle than the base SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.

The new HPC module contains packages to optimize and manage HPC systems, and build HPC applications – building a bridge between the base server and an HPC stack (such as the stack provided by OpenHPC). This journey has started – some packages have already been made public and we have much more in the works and in our release queue.

As the product manager for SUSE HPC, I welcome your input! What functionality would you need to make it easier to use SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for HPC? As we constantly consider how to improve, we want to make HPC adoption as smooth and easy as we possibly can. We are open to any feedback you might have.

And learn more about SUSE HPC at https://www.suse.com/promo/sle/high-performance-computing/

Have a lot of fun!
Kai Dupke
Senior Product Manager, HPC
kdupke@suse.com