December 12, 2005
Representatives from North Carolina universities who help provide Internet, video-based distance learning, advanced computing and communications services every day to more than 500,000 students, teachers, administrators and state government workers met at the North Carolina Research and Education Network (NCREN) Community Day to celebrate successes and discuss future collaboration initiatives.
NCREN, a statewide community network operated by MCNC, connects all of North Carolina's public universities, most of the state's private universities and colleges, and state government and other institutions to each other and to the Internet and national research networks including Internet2 and National LambdaRail.
One of the many discussions at the annual NCREN Community Day on Dec. 9 at the MCNC campus showcased how a professor at Louisiana State University, home to one of the largest groups of hurricane experts in the nation, relied on NCREN to hold video-based classes with his students.
When Hurricane Katrina struck, John Pine was visiting Appalachian State University in Boone, N.C., where he teaches a video-based distance learning class along with a resident professor. Pine is director of LSU's Disaster Science and Management academic programs and studies the potential impact of natural and man-made hazards including the vulnerability of social, economic, and environmental resources. At the Community Day, Pine discussed the value of interactive video technologies in a live presentation from LSU with participants at ASU.
Other speakers included Molly Corbett Broad, president of the UNC 16-campus system; Robyn Render, vice president for information resources and chief information officer for the UNC system; and John Crites, president and chief executive officer of MCNC.
"NCREN is more than a network. It is a partnership of cooperation -- of people and organizations," Crites said. "Our ongoing collaboration in the development of NCREN is recognized internationally as a benchmark for serving outstanding universities and educational institutions with information technology resources to advance research and education. We are proud to be stewards of this tremendous asset for North Carolina, and we are honored to host a celebration with our partners that keep North Carolina on the leading edge of innovation."
Other presentations were made from university professors and leaders from across the state to share how NCREN enhances their students' learning experiences.
A UNC-Charlotte professor discussed how he teaches one of the nation's first Grid computing classes with live, interactive discussions in classrooms at 12 public, private and independent universities and colleges throughout the state with access from each location through NCREN to shared high-performance computing resources at MCNC.
Faculty from the departments of Biomedical Engineering at Duke and UNC-Chapel Hill also discussed how their students have used the interactive video network to plan, design, build and evaluate medical devices to assist disabled people.
Researchers from the Suddhananda Engineering and Research Centre in Bhubaneswar, India developed a job scheduling system, which they call Service Level Agreement (SLA) scheduling, that is meant to achieve acceptable methods of resource provisioning similar to that of potential in-house systems. They combined that with an on-demand resource provisioner to ensure utilization optimization of virtual machines.
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Experimental scientific HPC applications are continually being moved to the cloud, as covered here in several capacities over the last couple of weeks. Included in that rundown, Co-founder and CEO of CloudSigma Robert Jenkins penned an article for HPC in the Cloud where he discussed the emergence of cloud technologies to supplement research capabilities of big scientific initiatives like CERN and ESA (the European Space Agency)...
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When considering moving excess or experimental HPC applications to a cloud environment, there will always be obstacles. Were that not the case, the cost effectiveness of cloud-based HPC would rule the high performance landscape. Jonathan Stewart Ward and Adam Barker of the University of St. Andrews produced an intriguing report on the state of cloud computing, paying a significant amount of attention to the problems facing cloud computing.
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Jun 19, 2013 |
Ruan Pethiyagoda, Cameron Boehmer, John S. Dvorak, and Tim Sze, trained at San Francisco’s Hack Reactor, an institute designed for intense fast paced learning of programming, put together a program based on the N-Queens algorithm designed by the University of Cambridge’s Martin Richards, and modified it to run in parallel across multiple machines.
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Jun 17, 2013 |
With that in mind, Datapipe hopes to establish themselves as a green-savvy HPC cloud provider with their recently announced Stratosphere platform. Datapipe markets Stratosphere as a green HPC cloud service and in doing so partnering with Verne Global and their Icelandic datacenter, which is known for its propensity in green computing.
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Jun 12, 2013 |
Cloud computing is gaining ground in utilization by mid-sized institutions who are looking to expand their experimental high performance computing resources. As such, IBM released what they call Redbooks, in part to assist institutions’ movement of high performance computing applications to the cloud.
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Jun 06, 2013 |
The San Diego Supercomputer Center launched a public cloud system for universities in the area designed specifically to run on commodity hardware with high performance solid-state drives. The center, which currently holds 5.5 PB of raw storage, is open to educational and research users in the University of California.
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05/10/2013 | Cleversafe, Cray, DDN, NetApp, & Panasas | From Wall Street to Hollywood, drug discovery to homeland security, companies and organizations of all sizes and stripes are coming face to face with the challenges – and opportunities – afforded by Big Data. Before anyone can utilize these extraordinary data repositories, however, they must first harness and manage their data stores, and do so utilizing technologies that underscore affordability, security, and scalability.
04/02/2012 | AMD | Developers today are just beginning to explore the potential of heterogeneous computing, but the potential for this new paradigm is huge. This brief article reviews how the technology might impact a range of application development areas, including client experiences and cloud-based data management. As platforms like OpenCL continue to evolve, the benefits of heterogeneous computing will become even more accessible. Use this quick article to jump-start your own thinking on heterogeneous computing.