Platform Computing Inc. released its Platform Open Cluster Stack (OCS) Dell Edition this week to tap into these new users of HPC because, according to the vice-president of product management James Pang, that's "the growth area in the market".

Platform OCS is optimized to run on Dell which means that while it can run on any x86 cluster, it works better on Dell hardware given the integration with Dell's OpenManage suite of systems management applications.

The choice of Dell for this vendor-specific offering, said Pang, stems from the "much tighter OEM partnership" that existed with the company, and of Dell's notable market share around data center hardware.

Besides integration with Dell OpenManage, Platform OCS also integrates with third-party cluster management tools such as those from the open source community. That ability, according to Pang, reflects the array of open source technologies that are "quite good and really well-tailored to this marketplace."

The broad integration capability essentially lets HPC installations "talk to the non-HPC side", said Pang. Integration is essential in HPC, he said, because the primary reason for purchasing clusters is to run applications faster and cheaply, and "if they don't have those out-of-the box application integrations, the customers just have the bare metal."