Cluster Resources, Inc. announces support and maintenance services for Gold Accounting and Allocation Manager

Provo, Utah – Cluster Resources, Inc.™ today announced the addition of Gold Accounting and Allocation Manager to its open source library. With the addition of Gold, Cluster Resources now maintains and supports three open source tools including TORQUE Resource Manager and Maui Cluster Scheduler. In addition, two of Cluster Resources' commercial suites, Moab Cluster Suite® and Moab Grid Suite®, are both compatible with Gold.

Cluster Resources has hired the original developer of Gold, Scott Jackson, to assist with the ongoing Gold enhancements and support. While working at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Jackson created Gold in conjunction with the Department of Energy's (DOE) Scalable Systems Software (SSS) Project. The five-year program, launched in 2001, aimed to develop the software and hardware needed to support terascale computing for the DOE.

“Gold represents a significant step in furthering the manageability and usability of supercomputers and computational grids.” said Jackson, Director of Software Engineering. “I created Gold to scale to clusters with tens of thousands of nodes and to manage the usage of hundreds of projects and users, while at the same time being reliable, secure and easy to use.”

Gold is an accounting system that tracks resource usage on high performance computers. Similar to a bank, accounts are established to pre-allocate available resources to specific users and projects within specified time frames to prevent overuse. Gold, now featuring a Web GUI, supports common banking functions such as deposits, withdrawals, transfers and refunds. Gold is reservation based, meaning it determines – prior to a job's execution – available “funds” in the user's account. It then places a hold against the account until the job is completed – at which time the account is immediately charged.

As the DOE's five year SSS project concludes, Cluster Resources has adopted Gold – becoming a primary maintainer. Cluster Resources will provide a user list where Gold users can share tips and ask questions about the software. Cluster Resources will also provide periodic updates and patches for Gold. An expanded user's guide is now hosted on Cluster Resources' Web site as well. Users can purchase full Gold support provided by Cluster Resources' experienced support staff.

“Cluster Resources is committed to providing Gold users with knowledgeable and helpful support, something that our customers have come to expect from experience with our Moab, Maui, and TORQUE support services,” said Jackson. “We are determined to make the Gold support experience positive for everyone who chooses to implement it in their systems.”

As with TORQUE, Gold is fully compatible with Cluster Resources' Moab Cluster Suite® and Moab Grid Suite®, interacting together to track and charge job resources usage, create billing statements and generate usage reports. Gold works seamlessly with Moab's workload management, scheduling and advanced reservation functions. When fully implemented with Moab, Gold can increase the utilization of an organization's supercomputing resources.

To find out more about Gold Accounting and Allocation Manager, visit www.clusterresources.com/pages/products/gold-allocation-manager.php. Gold is freely available to download from our website and users are welcome to subscribe to Gold's mailing list. To inquire about support for Gold, please either email Cluster Resources at info@clusterresources.com or call +1 (801) 873-3400.

About Cluster Resources:

Cluster Resources, Inc.™ is a leading provider of workload and resource management software and services for cluster, grid, hosting center and utility-based computing environments. Cluster Resources' high-performance computing solutions enable administrators to control and optimize parallel and serial computing resources. Its professional Moab product line provides HPC sites with the most advanced workload management, scheduling and policy control (e.g., advanced reservations, backfill, checkpoint, preemption, fairshare, prioritization, etc.). Moab is compatible with batch resource managers such as Platform's LSF, Altair's PBS Pro, and IBM's LoadLeveler, and open source tools including TORQUE, OpenPBS and others. Moab runs on Linux, Unix, and Mac OS X environments, and is also accessible from Windows.

For more information call (801) 873-3400 or (888) 221-2008 or visit http://www.clusterresources.com

Press Contact: Bethany Hyatt
Phone: +1 (801) 873-3400
+1 (888) 221-2008 (Toll Free U.S.)
Email: communications@clusterresources.com

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Moab Cluster Suite®, Moab Workload Manager®, Moab Cluster Manager® , and Moab Access Portal® are trademarks or registered trademarks of Cluster Resources Inc.™. All third-party trademarks are the property of their respective owners. Statements concerning Cluster Resources' future development plans and schedules are made for planning purposes only, and are subject to change or withdrawal without notice.

TORQUE Resource Manager includes software developed by NASA Ames Research Center, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and Veridian Information Solutions, Inc. Visit www.OpenPBS.org for OpenPBS software support, products, and information. TORQUE is neither endorsed by nor affiliated with Altair Grid Solutions, Inc.