OEMs & Systems Integrators - Intel® Cluster Ready Partner Program

Deliver more value. Intel® Cluster Ready architecture helps you make HPC clusters practical even for customers who don’t have previous cluster experience or in-house expertise.

With Intel Cluster Ready, it’s easier to design, manufacture, and support cluster systems. Streamline your manufacturing process and reduce costs by creating cluster designs that meet a broad range of customer needs. Cut down on the effort needed to produce and deploy clusters by using repeatable and verifiable build processes that let you customize hardware performance and characteristics while keeping the software interface to the applications consistent. Build cluster solutions that will work with a large set of pre-qualified, ready-to-run applications.

Intel Cluster Ready defines a consistent, flexible platform architecture for HPC clusters that are interoperable with registered applications. The Intel Cluster Ready reference architecture addresses the entire cluster environment, including requirements for hardware, software, manageability, and functionality. Based on the Linux* operating system kernel and incorporating industry standards and best practices, the Intel Cluster Ready specification defines a set of base requirements but leaves plenty of room for innovation once the base specification is met. The specification supports any number of Linux distributions.

By offering a common platform architecture, Intel Cluster Ready makes it easier to design, produce, and support cluster solutions that meet the needs of a wide array of customers and applications.

Increase your customers’ productivity by shipping Intel Cluster Ready systems that are certified interoperable and ready to run. Use Intel® Cluster Checker to certify your designs and verify your systems conform to the Intel Cluster Ready architecture before they leave your factory. Increase customer satisfaction by catching errors before they have a chance to cause problems.

Intel Cluster Checker is a robust cluster diagnostics tool available to Intel Cluster Ready partners and customers. Use it to validate each new Intel® Xeon® processor-based cluster configuration and verify each copy of your cluster reference design (or recipe). Intel Cluster Checker examines the system at both the node and cluster level, so you know all components work together and can deliver optimal performance. It assesses firmware, kernel, storage, and network settings, and conducts high-level tests of node and network performance using the Intel® MPI Benchmarks, STREAM, the HPC Challenge benchmark (HPCC), and others.

Once your clusters are on-site, Intel Cluster Checker helps you simplify support costs. Customers can run Intel Cluster Checker to maintain their system’s health. If a problem arises, Intel Cluster Checker can quickly identify system issues and provide valuable diagnostics information that the customer can relay to your support engineers.

The need to act as their own system integrator has been a major stumbling block for many customers who can benefit from the improved power and productivity of HPC clusters.

By designing to the Intel Cluster Ready specification and certifying your clusters, you remove this roadblock, enabling customers to run any registered Intel Cluster Ready application without rebuilding the software stack or reconfiguring hardware. This can help you reach new customers and scale your design efforts by gaining more value from each cluster design.

Use Intel Cluster Ready recipes as starting points to designing and building certified Intel Cluster Ready systems. Use the Intel Cluster Ready specification for guidance as you add components and features that enhance capabilities, differentiate your cluster offerings, and add value for end users. Then, certify your cluster solutions, including components, operating systems and middleware.

Solution providers register their applications, to ensure they are interoperable with the full range of certified cluster systems. Application providers also define representative workloads and use a remote Intel Cluster Ready system to verify that their applications ran successfully.

› Explore the software registration process

As a partner, you gain access to all the prerequisites for certifying a cluster, including access to Intel Cluster Checker. Once your system is certified, Intel lists it on the Intel® Cluster Ready website – a great advertising opportunity. Intel also provides marketing and branding materials you can use to promote your Intel Cluster Ready systems and their benefits.