RCE 39: xCAT Extreme Cloud Administration Toolkit

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Created on Thursday, 26 August 2010 02:45

Written by Brock Palen

Brock Palen and Jeff Squyres speak with Egan Ford of IBM and Vallard Benincosa of Sumavi. They took time out to talk about xCAT, The Extreme Cloud Administration Toolkit

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Vallard Benincosa is a founding engineer of Sumavi Inc, a company dedicated to scaled-out management of data centers. Part of the mission of Sumavi is to provide commercial support for xCAT and to extend its capabilities for the enterprise by focusing on ease of-use. Previous to starting Sumavi, Vallard worked at IBM designing, implementing, and supporting large scale cluster solutions including LANL Roadrunner, Toronto' SciNet, NASA, Honda, ARL, Lucas Film, Two University of California clusters, etc. During these implementations Vallard would write code that would eventually be incorporated into xCAT. Vallard holds an MBA from New York University and a BA in Computer Science from UC Berkeley.

Egan Ford started building Web and HPC Linux clusters in 1999 and was the chief architect for IBM's first large HPC cluster (Los Lobos at the University of New Mexico). Since then Egan has led in the design and implementation of some of IBM's largest systems including AIST, LANL Roadrunner, and the US National Science Foundation Teragrid (teragrid.org). Egan is the creator of IBM's first cluster management solution (xCAT) and co-author of two IBM RedBooks on Linux HPC.