Platform Computing Corp last week announced its LSF 1.1 Load Sharing Facility software, a transparent distributed system that it says turns a network of heterogeneous Unix systems into a virtual supercomputer. The Toronto company has strategic alliances with Digital Equipment Corp and Convex Computer Corporation to bundle LSF with their cluster systems. It is also a partner in Hewlett-Packard Co’s Cluster Computing Programme and IBM Corp is distributing the software. It claims that the interactive response time of key application can be trimmed 30% to 40% and batch job throughput doubled. It also runs on IRIX, Solaris, SunOS systems. The product stems from research done at the Computer Systems Research Institute at the University of Toronto.
