A High Performance Computing (HPC) management software stack developed by a Singapore research and development team has found its way to the heart of HPC offerings announced recently by Red Hat (www.redhat.com) and Dell (www.dell.com). Kusu Project, named after Kusu island, forms the foundation of Platform Computing's Open Cluster Stack (OCS), a commercial offering adopted by the two companies.

In October this year, Red Hat announced the global availability of its HPC Solution, an all-in-one stack which allows customers to deploy, run and manage their HPC clusters. The same month, Platform Computing announced the release of the Platform OCS - Dell Edition, a pre-integrated vendor-certified stack optimised to run on Dell hardware.

The Singapore team behind Project Kusu.

Both the Red Hat HCS Solution and Platform OCS - Dell Edition are based on Project Kusu, the open source core of Platform OCS 5 which was developed at Platform Computing's Open Source Grid Development Centre in Singapore.

Project Kusu provides a standardised approach to building, managing and using Linux clusters. Pre-configured, compatible clusters help reduce the entry barrier for new enterprise users, enabling them to administer the clusters without significant training. It also comes with diagnostic tools which help in configuring and deploying applications.

"Project Kusu is built with the objective of being a simplified cluster management, operation and deployment source kit that supports a range of different linux distributions such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux, CentOS, Fedora, SuSE Linux Enterprise Server, OpenSuSE, and Ubuntu Linux," said Mr Laurence Liew, Director of the Open Source Grid Development Centre, Platform Computing Singapore.

Kusu also transparently integrates both open source and commercial software under a single consistent cluster operating environment.

"We have shown that Singapore has the local talent to develop leading-edge HPC software that is in use worldwide today by the biggest corporations in the world," added Mr Liew.

The genesis of Kusu can be traced back to July 2006, when Platform Computing hired the principles of Singapore startup Scalable Systems - including Mr Liew, one of its founders - and set up its Open Source Grid Development Centre here. Scalable Systems had been co-developing Rocks - a cluster computing environment - with the San Diego Supercomputing Centre since 2001, contributing the Parallel Virtual File system, Grid Engine and various drivers and mathematical libraries for integration into Rocks.

Due to customer and partner requirements such as support for multiple operating systems, the development team decided that rather than retrofit Rocks, a new project was required to better meet the needs of Platform's customers, partners and the community. Hence, Project Kusu was started in January 2007.

Since then, the R&D team at the Open Source Grid Development Centre has grown from three to 12, and there are plans to increase this to 22 by early 2009.

The Singapore R&D team is currently working on the next generation of Kusu (Version 2.0). While Version 1.0 delivered a strong foundation for HPC system management, Version 2.0 of Kusu will build on that to deliver major enterprise-class enhancements and features, said Mr Liew.