As we talked about in our last blog (or in a different blog, if you’re not reading these in order), a handful of vendors are pushing technology that lets users tie bunches of smaller systems into large, shared-everything SMP servers. ScaleMP was founded in 2003 and has been shipping products since 2006. They are pitching a software-based solution that allows customers to combine up to 16 x86 nodes into a large, single-image system. This can give customers up to 128 cores and 4TB of RAM in a single o/s instance to use with apps that need huge memory or can’t be easily parallelized. However, as the company points out, even highly parallelized message-passing apps perform faster on shared memory systems.

‘Read More’ to see our video interview with ScaleMP…

What caught our eye is that in addition to their own booth, they were being shown off in a number of partner booths. ScaleMP’s partner list includes every Tier 1 server vendor and a number of Tier 2 OEMs and, according to the company, they’re seeing increasing interest from these partners as word spreads about ScaleMP’s unique approach to scaling. The company discusses their offerings in virtualization terms, turning the VMware ‘many virtual machines from one’ concept 180 degrees to ScaleMP’s ‘one virtual machine from many’ value proposition. This is an effective approach, and I found their ‘big picture’ pitch to be among the best that I’ve seen from a company of their age and size.

We spent some time talking to Benjamin Baer, ScaleMP’s VP of Marketing, while visiting their booth at SC09. In the video, Benjamin talks about the show and how their products work…despite the fumbling, inept, “um-” and “ah-” spewing interviewer.