U Florida Sets Up Virtual SMP System for Research
- By Dian Schaffhauser
- 08/12/10
The University of Florida in Gainesville has purchased software that will enable a major research center on its campus to aggregate hardware for creating a symmetric multiprocessing system. The university's Interdisciplinary Center for Biotechnology Research has turned to ScaleMP's vSMP Foundation for SMP for this virtualization setup. The program allows the customer to aggregate up to 16 servers into a single virtual machine, with up to 8,192 cores and 64 TB of main memory.
The center provides biotech research services to the university's community and its research partners. The IT team at the center wanted to run legacy and proprietary software that requires large shared memory systems. According to a company statement, the ScaleMP technology was chosen because it was the only solution that could aggregate commodity hardware 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.
In February 2010 UK's Coventry University deployed the same software product in its Automotive Engineering Applied Research Group.
About the Author
Dian Schaffhauser is a former senior contributing editor for 1105 Media's education publications THE Journal, Campus Technology and Spaces4Learning.