Penguin Computing acquires Scyld

We've always sold Beowulf clusters. In the beginning it was mainly to universities and research laboratories. That market continues to grow, but now the corporate world is really interested in clusters as well.

Most of our business has historically come from our enterprise customers. About a year ago they started to get very interested in high performance computing (HPC). Now an increasing number of our customers have their own clusters.

Corporate customers really care about "total cost of ownership". It's a term that is used derisively in the Linux community, but in the enterprise it's very important. Scyld has engineered the best management framework for clusters, so it was a natural fit for us to buy them.

The immediate focus of our combined organizations is to make our clusters easier to deploy, operate, and administer. We're also very focused on how to make clusters easily upgradeable. So a customer could start with a small cluster (around 16 nodes) and expand over time to be much larger.

Simultaneously, we will be concentrating on longer term goals. We have a very clear vision as to where clustering is going. There is going to be a lot of innovation in the next few years.

Based on extensive input from the existing customers of both companies, we have already begun work on the next generation of software and hardware solutions for the HPC space.

Every engineering group at every large corporation will need access to a cluster. We're already seeing the demand in fields like biotechnology, physics, computational fluid dynamics and electronic design automation.

Job scheduling and resource utilization will become more and more important as clusters are shared throughout a corporation. We're working on some very elegant solutions to these problems.

That's an interesting question. Penguin Computing was started when the market for Linux servers was still very small. Along the way we've helped grow the market with a lot of innovations. For example, we introduced the first Intel based 1U Linux server. We also had the first Linux server with hot-swap RAID. As different industries have adopted Linux, we've been there to support them with our servers and professional services. Now we'll be able to offer complete solutions in the rapidly growing cluster market.

What's great about Scyld is that it's an analogous situation. Don Becker, the founder and CTO of Scyld is the inventor of Beowulf. So Scyld's software and knowledge have grown with the market.

That said we're now seeing considerable growth in biotech, Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) and Electronic Design Automation (EDA). We're gaining customers that are using clusters in each of these fields. As we do, our knowledge increases, and new customers come our way, often recommended by word of mouth.

But it's not just those three fields either; it's amazing some of the things our clusters are being used for. Clusters are being used almost everywhere there is a computationally intensive problem. And it's not just in places where supercomputers would have been used before. Because the cost of a cluster is at least an order of magnitude less than a monolithic supercomputer, it has opened up whole new markets.

We've always been highly focused on delivering great computer systems with great support. We purchased Scyld because the majority of our customers are or will soon be doing clustering. This is not a new market for us; but now we have a more complete solution for our customers.

Our rallying call since day one of our founding has been "the world's most reliable Linux systems". What we're about is making very reliable computers that are still cost effective, and providing really great support for those computers.

Dell's an interesting comparison choice. If you want real support from them you have to buy something called DLine Plus. For fifteen problems over three years you pay $2,999 extra.

At Penguin Computing we include all of our experience, and completely support the server for no additional charge. We've been engineering and supporting Linux servers longer than Dell and IBM.

On the cluster front, it's an even easier choice. With the acquisition of Scyld we have the best management framework for Beowulf clustering. And Don and his team have more knowledge about Beowulf than anyone else. After all Don invented it!

Scyld has a number of resellers, including Hewlett-Packard, and we definitely value those relationships. So, HP or any of Scyld's other resellers is also a very good choice for clusters.

We are the largest pure-play Linux systems company. But as a private company we don't release any of those numbers. I can tell you that we're seeing significant growth, both quarter over quarter, and year over year.

Donald Becker was the leader of the team that invented Beowulf, and he's also one one of the primary contributors to the Linux Kernel. Don has written most of the commonly used Linux network drivers and continues to maintain many of them. Scyld has contributed to many, many Open Source programs and will continue to do so.

Another project that is near and dear to our hearts is lm_sensors. We often have to write new code to make lm_sensors work with our next generation servers, and we make sure that we GPL all of that. Some other projects that we've contributed to include LCDproc.

In addition to directly writing code, we do a lot to support the Linux and Open Source community. We're a corporate patron of FSF/GNU and have also donated servers to them (including the server they use to run their mailing lists). Penguin Computing has also given servers to H. Peter Anvin so he could develop RAID-6. Finally, along with BitMover, we provide and host kernel.bkbits.net, which is used by many of the senior kernel developers.