A Question of 'Gridgistics'

Dec 17, 2007 | In this interview, several members of the gridGISTICS management team tell GRIDtoday how the company's Aware Server product creates a "high-performance, all-encompassing" grid/utility computing environment that takes advantage of both virtualization and SOA.
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Low-Lying (Blue) Clouds

Dec 17, 2007 | While most of the hype around cloud computing has been focused on grand visions of globally interconnected fabrics of computing resources a la Google, the reality is that the first incarnation of commercially accessible cloud solutions (at least labeled as such) will be localized. Due out in the spring, IBM's first Blue Cloud offering will take the form of a BladeCenter.
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Computation on Demand: The Promise of Dynamic Provisioning

Dec 10, 2007 | What is lacking from many virtualization efforts is a high-quality provisioning model. It is one thing to take a large number of existing servers and consolidate them, but it is quite another to leverage virtualization to achieve the promise of on-demand computing. One platform, or model, for accomplishing this is Amazon's EC2 service.
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451 Group: Virtualization Competition Heating Up

Dec 10, 2007 | The 451 Group | The 451 Group believes that competition in virtualization technology is heating up and has moved to the management layer. Thanks to open source projects, the hypervisor has become a commodity. As a result, hypervisor vendors have become virtualization management vendors and are now selling virtualization administration.
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A New Face in Data Caching

Dec 03, 2007 | In this Q&A, ScaleOut Software founder and CEO William Bain discusses his company's distributed data caching solutions, including how they are being adopted by e-commerce and financial services customers, as well as how ScaleOut's products differentiate themselves from the competition.
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Data Storage the Web 2.0 Way

Nov 26, 2007 | GRIDtoday recently spoke with Layered Technologies president and COO Todd Abrams to get the scoop on the company's DynaVol on-demand storage solution. Utilizing virtualized containers and based on LayeredTech's popular grid hosting platform, Abrams believes it offers more than competitors such as Amazon's S3.
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Grid.org Relaunches as Open Source Community

Nov 19, 2007 | UnivaUD | An online community for open source grid and cluster users, administrators and developers debuted today on the Internet at Grid.org. Grid.org provides the single aggregation point for information and interaction by the community of users, administrators, and developers interested in a complete open source grid and cluster stack.
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OGF Spec Makes Grids Interoperable

Nov 19, 2007 | Open Grid Forum | The HPC Basic Profile will enable users of Microsoft's Window's HPC Server 2008, Altair's PBS Professional and Platform LSF products to achieve interoperability and manage resources across multi-site, multi-vendor grids. The profile also will be implemented in open source software running some of the world's largest production grids in North America, Europe and Asia.
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Yahoo Advancing R&D for Internet Computing

Nov 19, 2007 | Yahoo! Inc. | First it was Google, and now it is Yahoo providing resources to university researchers who want to advance development of systems software for distributed computing. Yahoo's program is intended to leverage its leadership in Hadoop to enable researchers to modify and evaluate the systems software running on a 4,000-processor supercomputer provided by Yahoo.
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A Job Scheduler for the Ages

Nov 12, 2007 | One might be a little underwhelmed by Advanced Systems Concepts Inc.'s (ASCI) decision to market its ActiveBatch software as a "job scheduler," even though its list of capabilities lends the product to far sexier (and more nebulous) labels. Among its plethora of features are dynamic reallocation of agents and mobile management, as well as a seemingly infinite number of scheduling options.
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TACC Partners with World Community Grid

Nov 12, 2007 | The Texas Advanced Computing Center recently announced its partnership with the World Community Grid and will assist the project by running World Community Grid software on its employee PCs, installing the client on the new Stampede cluster -- helping scientists scale their research for the World Community Grid -- and allowing other large TACC clusters to run grid computations when there are idle processors.
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Gartner IDs 14 Delivery Models that Will Transform IT

Nov 05, 2007 | Gartner Inc. | Gartner Inc. has identified 14 alternative delivery models that will completely transform the IT market in the next five years. They include: business process utilities; infrastructure utilities; storage as a service; grid computing; communications as a service; utility computing; capacity on-demand; remote management services; SaaS; Web platforms; community source; software streaming; software-based "appliances"; and user-owned devices.
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Folding@home Recognized by Guinness World Records

Nov 05, 2007 | Folding@home program has been recognized by Guinness World Records as the most powerful distributed computing network in the world. The record was initially set on Sept. 16, as Folding@home surpassed one petaflop -- a computing milestone that has never been reached before by a distributed computing network.
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Tales from a Trading Desk: Resiliency Made Easy

Nov 05, 2007 | Today's electronic world has resulted in a major shift in terms of how organizations think about resiliency. Firms of all sizes are not only faced with the challenge of determining how resilient their mission-critical systems need to be, but also how they can efficiently and cost-effectively architect a "resilient" system. With millions of dollars per minute running through electronic channels 24x7, traditional high availability and disaster recovery notions are no longer good enough.
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Balancing Peformance and Simplicity for Wall Street

Oct 29, 2007 | GigaSpaces has made a name for itself by creating a platform that focuses on simplicity while delivering the low latency and high availability that today's financial services firms require. One such firm is Germany's Commerzbank, who made the switch to GigaSpaces this year and already is looking for new applications to run on it.
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Summit Puts Spotlight on High-Performance Grid Computing

Oct 22, 2007 | HPC and grid computing, and the promises and challenges for biomedical applications, were the focus of the first annual Biomedical High Performance Computing Leadership Summit. Charles Coleman and Cheryl Doninger of the SAS Institute recap the event's themes and presentations, which spanned the spectrum of industry applications.
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Google/IBM Initiative Tackles Internet-Scale Challenges

Oct 15, 2007 | IBM; Google | The goal of this initiative is to improve computer science students' knowledge of highly parallel computing practices to better address the emerging paradigm of large-scale distributed computing. IBM and Google are teaming up to provide hardware, software and services to augment university curricula and expand research horizons.
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Gartner Identifies Top 10 Strategic Technologies for 2008

Oct 15, 2007 | Gartner Inc. | Gartner analysts highlighted the top 10 technologies and trends that will be strategic for most organizations. The list includes familiar distributed technologies such as business process modeling, virtualization 2.0, WOA and computing fabrics.
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How to Pair Grids and Databases

Oct 01, 2007 | On Sept. 27, IBM and Objectivity sponsored a webinar called "Unleashing the Power of Grid." For anyone thinking about implementing a grid, or anyone just interested in learning more about grid-enabled databases, this webinar should be very informative.
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On the Origin of Utility Computing, Pt. 2

Oct 01, 2007 | Since the idea utility computing first came to be, the assumption by most was that it had to be an outsourced service, just like the energy utility from which it takes it name. As is prone to happen, however, utility computing has evolved into some forms -- including some located within a user's own datacenter -- that bear little resemblance to their not-so-ancient ancestors.
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On the Origin of Utility Computing

Sep 24, 2007 | Part 1 of this two-part series on the various incarnations of utility computing examines two big names in on-demand resource, Sun's Network.com and Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). The article explores what makes them unique, who's using them, how they work and how they will continue to evolve in the years to come.
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Digipede: 2.0 and Beyond

Sep 17, 2007 | Digipede president and CEO John Powers took some time to answer our questions about Digipede Network v.2.0 -- which sees improvements around developer-friendliness, latency and interoperability with Microsoft products -- and how it will set up the company for future growth.
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Taking Over the Reins: New OGF President Craig Lee

Sep 17, 2007 | In this interview, new OGF president Craig Lee (of Aerospace Corporation) discusses a variety of topics, ranging from what he thinks will be his key focuses and challenges during his tenure to the importance of working with other bodies and embracing new technology areas.
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When HPC Meets Wall Street

Sep 10, 2007 | GRIDtoday spoke with Peter Harris, chair of next week's High Performance on Wall Street conference, about the event and about the technologies that are allowing financial services firms to take their computing needs to the next level. Hot topics this year include low latency, hardware acceleration and grid technologies.
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A Match Made in Hosting Heaven

Sep 03, 2007 | By combining their core hosting businesses with the capabilities of grid platforms, hosting companies are hoping to cash in on the increasing push for simplicity and savings in the datacenter. Today, providers like Layered Technologies and ServePath are leading the charge, offering their growing, Web 2.0-heavy customer bases ease of use, scalability and on-demand functionality in an outsourced model.
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