http://www.hpcinthecloud.com/features RSS Feed for Features en-us Tue, 07 Sep 2010 15:27:45 GMT 2010-09-07T15:27:45Z en-us http://www.hpcinthecloud.com/features/Inching-Closer-to-a-New-Era-of-Interoperability-Standards-102346704.html Interoperability remains a critical issue for groups advocating that users and vendors alike require a healthy, open ecosystem to drive greater adoption rates but the standardization for portability has been slow in coming. Groups like the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) are working together with other standards bodies to create a better cloud as the organization's president discusses during an interview following news of OVF standardization--a first step for workload portability standards. Tue, 07 Sep 2010 15:22:42 GMT http://www.hpcinthecloud.com/features/Inching-Closer-to-a-New-Era-of-Interoperability-Standards-102346704.html 2010-09-07T15:22:42Z http://www.hpcinthecloud.com/features/Cloud-Computing-Improving-Enterprise-IT-Efficiency-and-Agility-102021873.html Cloud computing may be considered a new phenomenon in IT, but, in many ways, it is an evolution propelled by new IT delivery models and enabling technologies. Initially, driven by cost concerns, enterprises turned to collocation as a more efficient IT delivery model. The next logical step, managed hosting, allowed enterprises to leverage the management expertise – and efficiencies – of service providers. Tue, 07 Sep 2010 15:27:45 GMT http://www.hpcinthecloud.com/features/Cloud-Computing-Improving-Enterprise-IT-Efficiency-and-Agility-102021873.html 2010-09-07T15:27:45Z http://www.hpcinthecloud.com/features/On-Par-for-2-Billion-3PAR-Discusses-Cloud-Strategy-101951633.html Storage vendor 3PAR has been at the heart of an intense bidding war between HP and Dell due to its unique refinements and developments in virtualized storage platform concepts. Thin provisioning and a focus on the needs of large-scale enterprises and cloud providers have catapulted the company into the public eye but as 3PAR's Craig Nunes discusses with HPC in the Cloud, the cloud strategy has been consistent since 1999--even if the world is just taking notice now. Wed, 01 Sep 2010 07:12:02 GMT http://www.hpcinthecloud.com/features/On-Par-for-2-Billion-3PAR-Discusses-Cloud-Strategy-101951633.html 2010-09-01T07:12:02Z http://www.hpcinthecloud.com/features/Busting-the-Cloud-in-a-Box-Myth-101801253.html The concept of private clouds is gaining traction and due to the buzz, more enterprises are taking a much closer look at the possibility—if they haven’t taken steps to virtualize some or all of their infrastructure already. For those who have not yet made the transition, a lack of understanding of the complex process behind private cloud implementation is at the core of hesitancy, therefore vendors are looking for ways to convince users to fear not, the private cloud is not only within reach—but simple to step into. Mon, 30 Aug 2010 16:01:48 GMT http://www.hpcinthecloud.com/features/Busting-the-Cloud-in-a-Box-Myth-101801253.html 2010-08-30T16:01:48Z http://www.hpcinthecloud.com/features/Gaining-Ultra-High-Performance-in-the-Cloud-101386074.html Companies in competitive domains, such as financial services, create large data repositories containing significant amounts of data collected from daily operations. Using supercomputers to analyze these massive datasets might yield the highest level of performance, but this is prohibitively expensive. Using proprietary, custom-built HPC atop cloud environments is also a viable option--although one that does come with a series of drawbacks that must be mitigated to achieve critical performance levels. Wed, 25 Aug 2010 05:13:34 GMT http://www.hpcinthecloud.com/features/Gaining-Ultra-High-Performance-in-the-Cloud-101386074.html 2010-08-25T05:13:34Z http://www.hpcinthecloud.com/features/Are-Cloud-Datacenters-Greener-and-Cleaner-101071314.html New data centers being run by the likes of Google or Microsoft are enormous and boast cost efficiencies 5-10X greater than traditional, “un-virtualized” enterprise data centers, which are also typically smaller. The efficiency benefits inherent in cloud data centers come in different forms and include positive aspects like superior energy efficiency, higher availability, and better performance. Thu, 19 Aug 2010 14:15:16 GMT http://www.hpcinthecloud.com/features/Are-Cloud-Datacenters-Greener-and-Cleaner-101071314.html 2010-08-19T14:15:16Z http://www.hpcinthecloud.com/features/The-Challenges-of-Porting-HPC-Applications-to-the-Cloud.html Cloud infrastructure is still lucrative if comparing its economics to building in-house HPC machines. However, cloud for HPC has to be efficient enough to reach proper performance ceilings without disappointing customers who probably experienced at a certain point to run their HPC applications on dedicated machines. As part of an ongoing series, Dr. Mohamed F. Ahmed addresses the multitude of challenges inherent to porting HPC applications in the cloud and what steps need to be taken in research to address such barriers. Tue, 17 Aug 2010 15:07:43 GMT http://www.hpcinthecloud.com/features/The-Challenges-of-Porting-HPC-Applications-to-the-Cloud.html 2010-08-17T15:07:43Z http://www.hpcinthecloud.com/features/HPC-Sharing-in-the-Cloud-100571134.html Many scientific applications can require significant coordination between large numbers of nodes. Massive effort is spent in the HPC arena to hide much of the latency from coordination with expensive low-latency networks and fine-tuned communication libraries. Such efforts have not yet been translated to the commercial cloud computing arena, which still typically provide systems with varying amounts of installed memory but rarely various quality interconnects. Sun, 15 Aug 2010 17:25:06 GMT http://www.hpcinthecloud.com/features/HPC-Sharing-in-the-Cloud-100571134.html 2010-08-15T17:25:06Z http://www.hpcinthecloud.com/features/To-Build-or-to-Buy-That-is-the-Question-100416559.html The question of whether to invest in a cluster, to make use of HPC on demand services or to look to the public cloud is difficult to answer but some have found that HPC as a Service (renting a cluster) makes financial sense while suiting complex workloads due to the support a large cloud provider might not be able to offer. Wed, 11 Aug 2010 13:11:33 GMT http://www.hpcinthecloud.com/features/To-Build-or-to-Buy-That-is-the-Question-100416559.html 2010-08-11T13:11:33Z http://www.hpcinthecloud.com/features/The-Network-in-the-Cloud-An-Interview-with-Mellanox-Senior-Director-Gilad-Shainer-100057154.html Substantial benefits can be provided to the HPC cloud community if a high-performance network provisioning solution can be devised. In the light of his invited talk at ISC Cloud’10 in October this year in Frankfurt, Wolfgang Gentzsch asks Gilad Shainer from Mellanox for some insights about the cloud networking issue. Thu, 05 Aug 2010 19:34:28 GMT http://www.hpcinthecloud.com/features/The-Network-in-the-Cloud-An-Interview-with-Mellanox-Senior-Director-Gilad-Shainer-100057154.html 2010-08-05T19:34:28Z