November 09, 2010
This coming spring researchers at the University of Oregon, led by professor Allen Malony, will have access to a cloud system following a $1.97 million grant under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.
The university’s system, which will be an Applied Computational Instrument for Scientific Synthesis (ACISS) will be installed in the Computing Center and shared by a wide array of departments to meet the goals of integrative science projects.
The list of those in queue to make use of the system includes researchers studying of behavior via brain imaging data as well as various projects in bioinformatics, chemistry and neuroinformatics.
The goal of integrative science is to examine problems across disciplines, looking for relationships between diverse areas of study and melding them into one cohesive whole for closer study and the school’s new ACISS open source-driven cloud cluster will provide “hundreds of terabytes of storage space, thousands of processing cores, high performance computational accelerators and high-speed integrated InfiniBand network interfaces.”
As Malony stated in an interview, “The ACISS system is at the forefront of a revolution to apply cloud computing for scientific investigation. Building on technological advances in multi-core processing and GPU computing, ACISS will be realized as a private science cloud offering the most powerful computing resources yet at UO in pursuit of research discoveries in biology, physics, chemistry, human brain science and computer science.”
When asked about the ultimate benefit of the grant and ACISS system, Malony responded, “…the cloud computing model encompasses the notion of clouds interacting with other clouds to enhance their services and expand their resources. The ACISS project is a bellwether for the future of computing throughout Oregon’s educational institutions.”
Full story at UO News
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.
Read more...
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)...
Read more...
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.
Read more...
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.