Overview of IBM Spectrum Computing Suite for High Performance Analytics

LSF is a powerful workload management platform for demanding, distributed HPC environments. It provides a comprehensive set of intelligent, policy-driven scheduling features that enable you to use all of your compute infrastructure resources and ensure optimal application performance. The resource connector for LSF feature is also enabled for LSF clusters to borrow resources from supported resource providers.

When large amounts of data are required to complete computations, it is desirable that your applications access required data unhindered by the location of the data in relation to the application execution environment. LSF Data Manager solves the problem of data locality by staging the required data as closely as possible to the site of the application.

Application Center provides a flexible, easy to use interface for cluster users and administrators. Application Center is the full-featured offering, including job submission, monitoring, reporting, application templates, simplified application configuration, extended template and page customization, visualization support through VNC, configurable user access control, and integration with Process Manager. The Application Center desktop client is also included.

Complex scripts are often used to automate lengthy computing tasks. But these scripts can be risky to modify, and can depend on the expertise of a few key individuals. Process Manager simplifies the design and automation of complex computational processes, capturing and protecting repeatable best practices.

Explorer is a lightweight data analysis solution for IBM Spectrum LSF clusters allowing business and technical users to rapidly create and view reports and dashboards. Explorer uses Elasticsearch to rapidly store, index, and query the data. With rich, interactive, and extensible visualization capabilities, you can generate reports on how the compute environment is performing, or which resources projects or lines or business are consuming.

RTM is an operational dashboard for LSF environments that provides comprehensive workload monitoring, reporting, and management. It makes cluster administrators more efficient in their day-to-day activities and provides the information and tools needed to improve cluster efficiency, enable better user productivity, and contain or reduce costs. Dashboards provide comprehensive reports to support the day-to-day administrative tasks associated with managing single and multiple cluster environments. Timely information on the current status of the HPC environment helps improve decision-making, reduce costs, and increase service levels.

An included kit that provides integrated support for the orchestration of open source analytics tools including Python and Dask. Support for TensorFlow and Jupyter Notebooks are included out of the box with the Suite or the stand-alone (Application Center) installers.