ScaleMP will today announce a partnership with AMD. Previously ScaleMP has supported only Intel based architectures, but ScaleMP’s virtualization solution will soon run on AMD architecture. The new version of the software will be available through ScaleMP’s channel partners starting in October.

ScaleMP offers a solution that allows clusters of commodity servers to be clustered into a single virtual machine. Unlike most virtualization systems, such as those from VMware and Citrix, the goal is to pool resources from many machines, towards a single task, not to create multiple virtual machines running multiple operating systems for different purposes. And unlike Beowulf clusters, ScaleMP’s virtual machines appear as a single server, running a single operating system, not a cluster of separate machines working on separate chunks of calculations.

CEO Shai Fultheim says that the primary benefit of of the AMD chips is that AMD chips have twice the number of cores as a typical Intel machine. It will also provide a dramatic improvement floating point and integer representation. AMD machines also have more memory slots, allowing users to pool up to 64TB RAM.

The downside is that AMD only has two and four socket machines, while Intel has eight socket machines. But Fultheim says that users could stitch together 20 machines to create an 80 socket monster of a server.

Fultheim said that ScaleMP started out supporting Intel only because Intel has the largest marketshare. But as ScaleMP’s customer base has grown, Fultheim says the demand for AMD has increased.

Services Angle

As Alex Williams recently wrote here, high performance computing is becoming more important in the age of big data. ScaleMP is one of many ways to get better big data performance for less money.