Adaptive Computing, the company behind the Moab unified intelligent automation technology, plans to offer its Moab Adaptive HPC Suite and Moab Adaptive Computing Suite on IBM’s System x, BladeCenter and iDataPlex server families to create dynamic, intelligent HPC clusters in data centers and cloud environments.

A supported option for IBM’s System Cluster 1350 solutions, Moab integrates IBM’s Extreme Cluster Administration Toolkit (xCAT) monitoring and provisioning manager with its intelligent policy-based governance capabilities.

Together they are supposed to deliver a unified intelligent operating environment that in Adaptive’s marketing-speak “optimizes infrastructure efficiency and responsiveness to dynamically changing workload and organizational requirements.”

This, it says, reduces costs, improves service levels and helps manage risk to ensure scalability and resource availability. Large cluster administration is also simplified.

xCAT has been used to deploy IBM Linux clusters since 1999 and currently supports the largest computing installation in the world, the Roadrunner system at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

IBM open sourced xCAT two years ago and the widgetry can now support all kinds of scale-out solutions. With the onset of the cloud and the growing size of data centers, xCAT is reportedly being widely adopted.

xCAT can control nearly every aspect of the infrastructure, and when combined with Moab’s job flow control the pair says “a true cloud-computing environment is possible.”

Moab uses the power and temperature information that xCAT collects to schedule workloads and save power. xCAT queries the health of the hardware and Moab queries xCAT so it knows how to deal with the workloads to improve service availability and performance.

“Moab takes xCAT to the next level by leveraging xCAT’s client/server model to take administration from manual and static to automated, assisted and dynamic,” said Egan Ford, executive IT specialist at IBM. “With Moab and xCAT together, ultra-scale hybrid clouds of bare metal and virtual machines can be created to maximize effective utilization while minimizing power consumed. And this is just the beginning.”

Moab Adaptive Computing Suite for data centers and the cloud and Moab Adaptive HPC Suite for compute- and data-intensive applications enable a large pool of diverse resources to be orchestrated to create an environment that can immediately respond to changing workload requirements, enforce SLAs and enable on-demand provisioning for both in-house and cloud-based environments.