Managing your cluster efficiently – introducing OCF Steel

Managing your cluster efficiently – introducing OCF Steel

By Laurence-Horrocks Barlow, Technical Director at OCF

OCF Steel

Ensuring a cluster is being utilised efficiently is the key to a successful HPC environment. Moreover, the importance of the management stack when building a cluster can’t be underestimated.

Over the past few years, we’ve invested a lot of time and focus on what our customers require and developed our own HPC cluster management software suite. This year saw the latest release of the software suite, named OCF Steel.

OCF Steel incorporates the best software tooling available allowing organisations to run HPC applications on their clusters, together with the tools that help to manage, maintain, and monitor the HPC environment.  

An HPC cluster isn’t an HPC cluster until you install a management stack on top of it, it’s just a collection of nodes. In taking a modular approach, our customers can choose from OCF Steel’s range of standard software stack installation with tried and tested technologies, combined with the unique flexibility of choosing bespoke components if required.

With our 20 years of experience in HPC cluster management, we can offer a flexible pathway to our customers utilising open-source technologies, making it easier to upgrade and support the cluster management software stack without any software licensing fees.

OCF Steel is deployed using a resilient open-source virtualised management platform, making it simpler to facilitate any necessary upgrades or adaptations to the cluster. Also, customers using the OCF Steel stack are supported by our dedicated HPC support team.

If you’d like to find out more about how we can help with maximising the efficiency of your HPC cluster, please get in touch with us here.