Partner Program - Intel® Cluster Ready

Help your customers expand their use of your application to cluster-scale, even if they lack cluster experience or in-house expertise. Intel® Cluster Ready makes it simpler for customers to purchase the right cluster to run your application and experience great application performance, right away.

Increase your market penetration and add to your licensing revenue. Get more return on your investment in development, and reduce the need to test and support multiple systems. When you offer registered Intel® Cluster Ready applications, your application runs on the full range of certified Intel Cluster Ready systems from many different Intel Cluster Ready partners.

Intel Cluster Ready defines a consistent, flexible platform architecture for HPC clusters. 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 develop, validate, and support cluster applications. Systems and components are certified for compliance and present at least the base architecture to the application layer. When applications are developed to run on the architecture, they can be moved to any certified system with confidence they will work correctly.

Intel Cluster Ready partners and customers benefit from using Intel Cluster Checker, a powerful cluster diagnostics tool, to identify trouble spots and validate that the system is functioning correctly. If a customer contacts you with a problem executing your software on an Intel Cluster Ready system, you can have them run Intel Cluster Checker to rule out any system problems. Intel Cluster Checker can quickly identify and isolate system issues and provide detailed diagnostic information. Problems are resolved quickly and customer satisfaction stays high.

Interoperability is a critical customer benefit of the Intel Cluster Ready architecture. Before a system is certified as Intel Cluster Ready, OEMs and system integrators test them to show that they conform to the Intel Cluster Ready specification. By designing to the Intel Cluster Ready specification and certifying their clusters, platform providers assure customers that they can run any registered Intel Cluster Ready application without rebuilding the software stack or reconfiguring hardware.

As an Intel Cluster Ready software partner, you register your applications to ensure they are interoperable with the full range of certified cluster systems. This gives your customers a broader, simpler choice of cluster hardware that can run your application and deliver optimal performance.

To register an application, you define your own representative workloads and use a remote Intel Cluster Ready system to verify that your application ran successfully. Registration clusters are configured with both Gigabit Ethernet and Infiniband interconnects. These clusters are minimally compliant to ensure your application doesn’t unknowingly depend on capabilities that are not a standard part of the Intel Cluster Ready specification.

As an Intel Cluster Ready partner, you gain access to all the prerequisites for registering an application, including access to Intel Cluster Checker. Once your application is registered, Intel lists it on the Intel® Cluster Ready website – a great advertising opportunity. Intel also provides marketing materials you can use to inform customers that your application is supported by certified Intel Cluster Ready systems and describe how this benefits them.