Archive for Grid
May 13, 2008 at 11:54 pm · Filed under Grid, blades
http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/24180.wss
ARMONK, NY - 13 May 2008: Driven by growing commercial need in areas such as financial services, digital media creation and medical imaging, IBM (NYSE: IBM) today expanded its High Performance Computing (HPC) capabilities for businesses with the introduction of the IBM® BladeCenter® QS22 — a new, economical supercomputing technology inspired by advanced scientific research facilities.
The heart of the QS22 is a new processor compliant with the Cell Broadband Engine™ (Cell/B.E.) Architecture, originally developed by IBM, Sony and Toshiba to provide the computing power for cutting-edge gaming applications. And for the most challenging arithmetic operations, this new processor, the IBM PowerXCell™ 8i, offers five-times the speed of the original Cell/B.E. processor.
This does sound cool. I remain a big fan of the Cell/B.E platform, any innovation of the platform has to be a good thing for the consumer in terms of choice and the blade platform. The extra memory support sounds very cool and should provide further opportunities/uses for those memory intensive HPC applications.
May 13, 2008 at 7:46 pm · Filed under Grid
http://blogs.itworldcanada.com/shane/2008/04/
22/five-ways-of-defining-cloud-computing/
As with nearly every IT trend, including service-oriented architectures and Web services, just because we’re all talking about cloud computing doesn’t mean we’re talking about the same thing.
I recently joined a LinkedIn/Google group on cloud computing, a member of which posted what should have been an innocent question: Is there a difference between cloud computing and what we know as grid computing? I was ready with my own answer, but overnight about a dozen responses had already flooded in, creating an e-mail chain that offered some interesting nuances on the terminology.
Check out this interesting article talking about the differences between grid and cloud computing, it was interesting to read what different people think about the two concepts.
April 21, 2008 at 10:23 pm · Filed under Grid, blades
http://www.tradingmarkets.com/.site/news/Stock%20News/1404133
Apr 21, 2008 (Datamonitor via COMTEX) — ESIGF | news | PowerRating | PR Charts — ESI Group, a supplier of digital simulation software for prototyping and manufacturing processes, has announced that Audi has implemented its supercomputer to advance safety standards.
According to ESI, the new system is based on the company’s PAM-CRASH 2G simulation software and an HP Cluster Platform 3000BL system, providing 15.36 teraflop/s of computing performance for crash simulation models of Audi.
Very cool, check out this article talking about Audi using HP’s blade technology to provide it with a digital simulation solution, it does sound cool and it’s always good to see how the technology is being used. In this case it’s based on HP BL460c blades using infiband.
April 15, 2008 at 4:47 pm · Filed under Grid
http://www.gemstone.com/
BANGALORE, India and BEAVERTON, Ore., April 14, 2008 –GemStone Systems, the leading provider of Enterprise Data Fabric, and Talentain Technologies, a niche solutions company that specializes in building innovative enterprise solutions, today announced a partnership to deliver high performance computing solutions in the India, the Middle East and South East Asia market regions. As one of the first partnerships in this market, the joint offering addresses the growing need for grid and cluster management solutions.
Building on GemStone’s leading GemFire solution, the partnership will offer a customized high performance computing and cluster infrastructure that supports real-time market data access and analysis for better decisions, more transactional throughput and resilient business operations. By managing the installation, configuration, and monitoring of all nodes in a cluster with minimal use of human resources, the partnership will give customers access to a simpler solution to overcoming challenges normally associated with new deployments. As a result, customers will experience higher resource utilization and a single point of control for the entire system.
As part of the offering, Talentain will provide experience in executing scalable disaster recovery solutions, while providing local support services from initial consultation, design, and integration through implementation. While GemStone’s high-performance distributed data management platform is designed to optimize performance, resiliency and scalability of the cluster solution, it will also help to increase revenue, improve customer service and compliance at a lower total cost of ownership.
Very cool, anything we can do to continue the innovation and ease the deployment/support of hpc computing has to be a good thing, I’ll need to read up more.
I also highlighted this to illustrate the demand for hpc, for IT infrastructure continues around the globe, that as we connect more and more markets, the demand for the infrastructure to connect these markets, to enable trading from all the stakeholders, the consumer, the small business, as well as the financial institutions continues, as do the business and trading opportunities - very cool.
April 10, 2008 at 10:12 pm · Filed under Grid, How IT works
http://www.businesswire.com/portal/site/google/?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20080402006390&newsLang=en
PLANO, Texas–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Layered Technologies, Inc., a leading worldwide provider of “on demand” IT infrastructure, and 3Tera, Inc., the leading innovator of grid computing technology and utility computing services for Web applications, today announce support for Woopra, the real-time Web analytics platform. The companies will provide 100 grid-based servers in order to assist Woopra as it experiences a huge market demand prior to official launch.
“We are extremely pleased that Layered Technologies has stepped up to pledge the infrastructure necessary for us to meet the growing demand for Woopra,” said Elie Khoury, CIO of Woopra. “We are also grateful for all of the public feedback and support we have been given in the past 48 hours. We vow to work as quickly as possible to make Woopra available to as many as 100,000 Web sites within the next few weeks.”
Woopra provides real-time stats delivered via a revolutionary client-server application, and includes unique features such as the ability to identify and chat real time with visitors to the monitored site. The beta version of Woopra was quietly unveiled to a select audience of 200 at WordCamp Dallas, but news rapidly spread to over 2 million as buzz began to grow.
“We are excited about the launch of Woopra and the fact that we will be hosting it on The Grid,” said Todd Abrams, COO and President of Layered Technologies. “With such high demand, we are working closely with Woopra to ensure that all of Layered Technologies’ clients can gain access to the application as quickly as possible.”
With more than 12,000 servers and nearly a decade of experience, Layered Technologies has developed an expertise in data center operations. Using 3Tera’s award-winning AppLogic OS, Layered Technologies is able to provide grid computing solutions by harnessing the power of their data centers and making it available on-demand - processing power, bandwidth, and storage capacity. 3Tera’s AppLogic Grid OS allows a customer to package their entire application into a single self-contained logical entity. The packaged system can be scaled from a fraction of a CPU to hundreds of machines without any code modification.
Check out this article talking about grid/utility or ‘on demand’ technologies being used as an enabler, it’s always interesting to see how the technology is being used, very cool.
April 10, 2008 at 12:18 am · Filed under Grid, How IT works
http://www.business-standard.com/common/news_article.php?autono=319376&leftnm=4&subLeft=0&chkFlg
The first years of the new century have seen a dramatic increase in the number of internet users (1.3 billion — or 20 per cent of the world population), usage and bandwidth demand as new patterns of usage (Web 2.0) grow exponentially. Against this backdrop now comes the promise of a superfast internet, based on technology which has the computing power to change the way in which future generations collaborate and communicate. The technology is an offshoot of the ‘Big Bang’ idea from the European Centre for Nuclear Research — often referred to as ‘The Birthplace of the Internet’ — which is being used to increase the speed of the internet by almost 10,000 times.
The action started when CERN began working on a much-debated plan 15 years ago to recreate the Big Bang. Despite opposition, the technology is complete and now in a cooling process. On the ‘Red Button Day’ (later this summer), scientists will turn on CERN’s particle accelerator, called the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), and also open ‘The Grid’. The 27-km-long LHC will shoot beams of protons at one another in a bid to recreate conditions similar to those that followed the Big Bang. This will produce enough data each year to fill 56 million CDs. The data cannot be stored locally. It needs a network capable of handling and analysing enormous amounts of data — which explains the need of a grid.
Check out this article which is talking about CERN and it’s work with grid computing, it’s an interesting read and illustrates the use of grid technology - very cool.
April 9, 2008 at 12:26 am · Filed under Grid
http://www.computerweekly.com/Articles/2008/04/04/230146/radar-building-hiv-resistance-using-grid-computing.htm
The processing power of grid computing will be used by University College London (UCL) this year to develop treatments that could be more effective in the treatment of people with HIV.
More than 33 million people live with HIV worldwide and 2.5 million people became infected with the virus in 2007. More than two million people died of an AIDS-related illnesses last year, according to the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS.
The problem with treating the disease is that patients can build resistance to the drugs they are given. The HIV virus can mutate and change in different patients and this can make issuing the right combination of drugs difficult.
In response, staff at UCL will be using the combined supercomputing power of the UK and US ‘national grids’ to simulate a patient’s biological responses to drugs. Doctors currently work by prescribing a course of drugs and then test whether these are working. One of the goals of the project is for such ‘trial and error’ methods to eventually be replaced by patient-specific treatments tailored to a person’s unique genotype.
Very cool, it’s always great to see how the technology is being used (in this case research) as well as what benefits that grid technology can bring to those every day processing/capacity challenges with research, business analytics and computational risk.
April 8, 2008 at 11:16 pm · Filed under Grid, Other things
http://www.digitalmagazine.com.au/2008/04/08/the-grid-at-cern-takes-grid-computing-to-new-levels/
What is grid computing? Grid computing, also known as distributive computing, is a way for incredibly large amounts of data to be spread over multiple network computers for analysis. By using either dedicated computers or the unused idle time and resources on volunteer computers, a project that might take hundreds of years can be completed in a few months. CERN’s new dedicated internet called The Grid, will allow the data collected from the Large Haldron Collider(LHC) to be distributed over networked academic and research facility computers in countries around the world.
The LHC, particle accelerator, will be used to conduct a variety of physics experiments. The experiments range from recreating the environment that existed just after the Big Bang to searching for Higgs boson (what gives mass to particles). These experiments will produce about 15 million gigabytes of data per year. No single computer or single site research center can analyze all of the projected data. So CERN, where the LHC resides, has constructed a dedicated fiber optic network that is 10,000 times faster than any current broadband internet speeds. 50,000 servers (projected to reach 200,000 servers in two years) are spread across the globe. This private internet will allow teams of physicists world wide to analyze and use the data.
Distributive computing has been around since the 1990s. The process gained notoriety when distributive.net in 1997, and SETI@home in 1999 began using volunteer computers as part of grid computing. Since then companies, universities and research facilities have used grid computing for a variety of projects. The volunteer projects range from searching for cures for malaria, cancer and AIDS; determining the range and effects of climate change; searching for extraterrestrial life in space; and solving intricate chess moves.
Check out this interesting article which is talking about grid computing, it was a great read.
April 8, 2008 at 10:36 pm · Filed under Grid, Other things
http://www.hostingtech.com/?m=show&id=2326
Clifton, New Jersey - (The Hosting News) - March 20, 2007 - DedicatedNOW’s Virtual Clustered Hosting, is being supported by utility and grid computing solutions firm, 3Tera, Inc.’s AppLogic Utility Computing Platform.
Virtual Cluster is designed to allow small businesses to scale their online service quickly and effortlessly. DedicatedNOW’s Virtual Cluster is a managed hosting solution developed to facilitate scaling of online services.
Jay Silverglate, CEO of DedicatedNow noted, ”We’ve found that many smaller companies may lack the resources and manpower to deploy full scale managed clusters. Moreover, developing fully managed clusters may be cost prohibitive for these companies. Unlike traditional clustered hosting, our Virtual Clusters provide redundancy and reliability for our clients. They are deployed across enterprise class servers, using the AppLogic utility computing platform, which allows us to deploy, manage, optimize and scale the Virtual Cluster solution to accommodate customer demands for high availability and scalability.”
Very cool, bringing more opportunities for small/medium businesses to scale out their infrastructure has to be a good thing, I wonder how long it might be before we find the concept of capacity on demand becoming more mainstream?
April 3, 2008 at 11:18 pm · Filed under Grid
http://www.gridtoday.com/grid/2248928.html
I had an interesting conversation this week with Forrester’s Frank Gillett about his latest report, which concludes that the term “grid computing” (as well as “high-performance computing”) does not generate interest in typical enterprises. The report includes all sorts of percentages regarding levels of interest and adoption, but the bottom line (at least in North America and Europe) is quite simply that there are more IT decision-makers not interested in grid computing than there are IT decision-makers interested in grid computing.
Gillett attributes much of this apathy to the fact that grid computing is, in general, beneficial to vertically specific applications. Most businesses, he notes, do not have much use for its ability to run parallelized, compute-intensive workloads in their general-purpose environments. “There will be usefulness in general-purpose solutions like Platform and DataSynapse,” he explained. “However, with any application that benefits from [grid computing] in a big way, the ISV will build it in, or they will OEM the technology from one of those guys.” In some cases, he added, organizations might be taking advantage of grid computing without realizing it because it has been embedded into their applications out of the box.
Check out this interesting article about grid computing, it’s an interesting read and mentions about the adoption of grid technologies.
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