The GridCentric Copper platform enables real-time, on-demand sharing of high-performance computing resources and makes cluster administration a one-click task. With Copper, organisations reduce IT expenditures through significantly lower installation and management costs, higher utilization of their physical infrastructure, and improved sharing of their data assets.

Operators of large clusters face enormous challenges due to system complexity - compute clusters are typically composed of hundreds or even thousands of individual computers, each requiring separate software components for hardware provisioning and management, resource allocation, job scheduling, and application support. Initial set-up of a compute cluster can take several months because of these challenges.

By combining technologies from Cloud and Grid computing, GridCentric's Copper platform provides server provisioning, resource management, job control, and high-level application support in a single integrated software package. With Copper, the time required to set up and configure a compute cluster goes from months to days. Additionally, Copper has built-in support for operating hundreds of "virtual clusters" on the same set of physical resources, scaling their compute footprints on-demand in real time - the industry's first true high-performance Cloud computing platform. Copper gives cluster users the power of a supercomputer with the ease-of-use of a PC.

"GridCentric's approach to cluster management will enable many organisations to service users in ways that would have otherwise been impractical or impossible. Our experiences with it to date have been very positive. Copper is the way of the future for many organisations", stated Professor Michael Bauer of the University of Western Ontario, and Associate Director of the SHARCNET academic supercomputing consortium.

Copper has been in limited trial on a SHARCNET compute cluster located at York University in Toronto, Canada since late 2009, and is now open to all researchers from SHARCNET's 17 academic member organisations.

"GridCentric's Copper product represents a new class of cluster management software", stated Tim Smith, co-founder and CEO of GridCentric Inc. "Systems integrators, cluster operators, and end-users will all benefit from Copper's unprecedented ease of installation, management, and use."