AIX is a series of proprietary Unix operating systems developed and sold by IBM for several of its computer platforms.
Red Hat, Inc. is an American software company that provides open source software products to enterprises and is a subsidiary of IBM. Founded in 1993, Red Hat has its corporate headquarters in Raleigh, North Carolina, with other offices worldwide.
A supercomputer is a computer with a high level of performance as compared to a general-purpose computer. The performance of a supercomputer is commonly measured in floating-point operations per second (FLOPS) instead of million instructions per second (MIPS). Since 2017, supercomputers have existed which can perform over 1017 FLOPS (a hundred quadrillion FLOPS, 100 petaFLOPS or 100 PFLOPS). For comparison, a desktop computer has performance in the range of hundreds of gigaFLOPS (1011) to tens of teraFLOPS (1013). Since November 2017, all of the world's fastest 500 supercomputers run on Linux-based operating systems. Additional research is being conducted in the United States, the European Union, Taiwan, Japan, and China to build faster, more powerful and technologically superior exascale supercomputers.
A Beowulf cluster is a computer cluster of what are normally identical, commodity-grade computers networked into a small local area network with libraries and programs installed which allow processing to be shared among them. The result is a high-performance parallel computing cluster from inexpensive personal computer hardware.
Project Athena was a joint project of MIT, Digital Equipment Corporation, and IBM to produce a campus-wide distributed computing environment for educational use. It was launched in 1983, and research and development ran until June 30, 1991. As of 2023, Athena is still in production use at MIT. It works as software that makes a machine a thin client, that will download educational applications from the MIT servers on demand.
High-performance computing (HPC) uses supercomputers and computer clusters to solve advanced computation problems.
Linux Terminal Server Project (LTSP) is a free and open-source terminal server for Linux that allows many people to simultaneously use the same computer. Applications run on the server with a terminal known as a thin client handling input and output. Generally, terminals are low-powered, lack a hard disk and are quieter and more reliable than desktop computers because they do not have any moving parts.
HTCondor is an open-source high-throughput computing software framework for coarse-grained distributed parallelization of computationally intensive tasks. It can be used to manage workload on a dedicated cluster of computers, or to farm out work to idle desktop computers – so-called cycle scavenging. HTCondor runs on Linux, Unix, Mac OS X, FreeBSD, and Microsoft Windows operating systems. HTCondor can integrate both dedicated resources and non-dedicated desktop machines into one computing environment.
GPFS is high-performance clustered file system software developed by IBM. It can be deployed in shared-disk or shared-nothing distributed parallel modes, or a combination of these. It is used by many of the world's largest commercial companies, as well as some of the supercomputers on the Top 500 List. For example, it is the filesystem of the Summit at Oak Ridge National Laboratory which was the #1 fastest supercomputer in the world in the November 2019 TOP500 list of supercomputers. Summit is a 200 Petaflops system composed of more than 9,000 POWER9 processors and 27,000 NVIDIA Volta GPUs. The storage filesystem called Alpine has 250 PB of storage using Spectrum Scale on IBM ESS storage hardware, capable of approximately 2.5TB/s of sequential I/O and 2.2TB/s of random I/O.
Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) is a free and open-source virtualization module in the Linux kernel that allows the kernel to function as a hypervisor. It was merged into the mainline Linux kernel in version 2.6.20, which was released on February 5, 2007. KVM requires a processor with hardware virtualization extensions, such as Intel VT or AMD-V. KVM has also been ported to other operating systems such as FreeBSD and illumos in the form of loadable kernel modules.
Hardware virtualization is the virtualization of computers as complete hardware platforms, certain logical abstractions of their componentry, or only the functionality required to run various operating systems. Virtualization hides the physical characteristics of a computing platform from the users, presenting instead an abstract computing platform. At its origins, the software that controlled virtualization was called a "control program", but the terms "hypervisor" or "virtual machine monitor" became preferred over time.
A computer cluster is a set of computers that work together so that they can be viewed as a single system. Unlike grid computers, computer clusters have each node set to perform the same task, controlled and scheduled by software.
Locus Computing Corporation was formed in 1982 by Gerald J. Popek, Charles S. Kline and Gregory I. Thiel to commercialize the technologies developed for the LOCUS distributed operating system at UCLA. Locus was notable for commercializing single-system image software and producing the Merge package which allowed the use of DOS and Windows 3.1 software on Unix systems.
libvirt is an open-source API, daemon and management tool for managing platform virtualization. It can be used to manage KVM, Xen, VMware ESXi, QEMU and other virtualization technologies. These APIs are widely used in the orchestration layer of hypervisors in the development of a cloud-based solution.
The Slurm Workload Manager, formerly known as Simple Linux Utility for Resource Management (SLURM), or simply Slurm, is a free and open-source job scheduler for Linux and Unix-like kernels, used by many of the world's supercomputers and computer clusters.
A supercomputer operating system is an operating system intended for supercomputers. Since the end of the 20th century, supercomputer operating systems have undergone major transformations, as fundamental changes have occurred in supercomputer architecture. While early operating systems were custom tailored to each supercomputer to gain speed, the trend has been moving away from in-house operating systems and toward some form of Linux, with it running all the supercomputers on the TOP500 list in November 2017. In 2021, top 10 computers run for instance Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), or some variant of it or other Linux distribution e.g. Ubuntu.
openQRM is a free and open-source cloud-computing management platform for managing heterogeneous data centre infrastructures.
The OpenBMC project is a Linux Foundation collaborative open-source project that produces an open source implementation of the baseboard management controllers (BMC) firmware stack. OpenBMC is a Linux distribution for BMCs meant to work across heterogeneous systems that include enterprise, high-performance computing (HPC), telecommunications, and cloud-scale data centers.
Data center management is the collection of tasks performed by those responsible for managing ongoing operation of a data center. This includes Business service management and planning for the future.
