Smartphones and Supercomputers: The Emerging Mobile Trend

Dec 15, 2010 | Cloud computing has opened doors to accessing high-end resources that many organizations were once barred from due to cost. With the convergence of mobile applications that provide interfaces to sophisticated resources, we are on the verge of yet another shift in high-performance computing in the next few years.
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Cloud's Little Helpers: 12 Companies to Watch in 2011

Dec 14, 2010 | As the end of the year approaches, it seemed like a great time to look back on some companies that shaped the HPC cloud ecosystem as a whole as well as to give a holiday "heads up" on some companies to keep an eye on in the coming year. There's no way to put together a list that encompasses everything but here are a few honorable mentions.
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NVIDIA's Senior Solution Architect, Dale Southard on GPU Clouds for HPC

Dec 08, 2010 | This week we talked to Dale Southard of NVIDIA about the challenges and benefits of providing access to GPU resources in a cloud enviornment. We touch upon issues related to performance, CUDA, future directions, and Dale's own experiences in HPC and how they carried over to his work with GPU clouds.
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Google Donates Cloud-Based Platform, CPU Hours to Environmental Research

Dec 07, 2010 | This year at the International Climate Change Conference, Google was on hand to announce its cloud-based platform, Google Earth Engine, and its donation of 20 million CPU hours to aid in enviornmental research. The project culls Landsat data, which was only recently brought online, and provides a platform to create and use applications specific to defined research areas, including forestry, water conservation and beyond.
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Data Deluge Pushes Medical Imaging, Healthcare into the Cloud

Dec 06, 2010 | Within the broader field of healthcare, medical imaging is one area that is expected to grow, both in terms of the amount of money involved and the datasets that are generated. With regulations forcing hospitals to store all of this data, often permanently, the cloud is looking like the only the viable solution for already-stretched infrastructure.
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Mainframe, Client-Server and the Clouds Above

Dec 01, 2010 | There have been numerous discussions about how cloud computing is the next great paradigm shift in computing, following the initial mainframe explosion, then on to client/server. Others have put forth the argument that clouds are, in fact, the culmination of these two separate movements—if not the very revolution capable of maximizing the “best of both worlds.”
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SC10 Wrap Up: The Cutting Room Floor

Nov 24, 2010 | At the SC10 event in New Orleans we were able to capture quite a bit of video, some of which never made it live on the site during the course of the busy week. We wanted to share a few highlights with you--and thank those of you who stopped by the HPCwire/HPCin the Cloud booth to say hello.
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Investing in China’s Cloudy Vision

Nov 24, 2010 | While its supercomputing might is no longer in question, If China is to become a serious player in the emerging industries that will revolve around cloud computing—which now includes everything from hardware to services to mobile technology developments—its infrastructure shortage could be the Achilles’ heel, preventing it from reaching its 2015 cloudy vision.
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SC10 Video Feature: Songnian Zhou on the IT Renaissance

Nov 19, 2010 | During this year's SC event in New Orleans, we caught up with co-founder and CEO of Platform Computing, Songnian Zhou to take a big picture look at key movements in computing--and where grid and clouds fit within the "Renaissance" Zhou feels is taking place.
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Easy HPC in the Big Easy: An SC10 Interview with Bill Hilf

Nov 17, 2010 | This week during the kickoff for SC10 we spent an hour with Bill Hilf, General Manager of Microsoft's Technical Computing Group--a segment of the company that is devoted to HPC as well as parallel and cloud computing. We were able to cover everything from ease of use of HPC applications, GPU accessibility issues, job schedulers and their role in cloud for high-performance computing applications--and how Microsoft might finally be finding a way to grab the HPC market once again.
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GPU Supercomputing Arrives on Amazon's Cloud

Nov 15, 2010 | This week has brought news about GPU computing to the forefront of media attention with the announcement of the world's most powerful supercomputer, which boasts 7,168 NVIDIA Tesla GPUs. It has also been a notable week for GPU computing in the cloud with Amazon's unveiling of a new instance type--the Cluster GPU.
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The HPC Cloud-Centric Guide to SC10

Nov 12, 2010 | Stormy weather projections aren't the only reason why it's cloudy in New Orleans this year. On the official program for SC10 there are a number of sessions, presentations, tutorials and poster receptions all geared toward exploring specific topics in the HPC cloud arena. We've put together a meaty list for those who wish to hear some leading luminaries in HPC and cloud debate and explain current challenges and successes--and we hope to see you for at least a few.
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Cloud Security: The Federated Identity Factor

Nov 09, 2010 | As the popularity of cloud-based applications continues to grow, IT departments will increasingly turn to federated identity as the preferred means for managing access control. The advantage is that it enables the enterprise to maintain full and centralized control over access to all applications, whether internal or external.
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NASA Takes Cloud on Mars Mission

Nov 08, 2010 | Last week it was announced that NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) would be making use of Amazon's cloud to handle the massive influx of data from the extended Mars rover missions--data that had outgrown its home in the initial systems the agency dedicated. This marks a critical stage in testing the cloud for government agency research missions, and opens the door to future use of its own Nebula cloud, which is still being evaluated.
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Vineet Tyagi from Impetus Technologies on The Hadoop, Cloud, and Mafia Connection

Nov 04, 2010 | Vineet Tyagi of Impetus Technologies presented a session at Cloud Expo on Hadoop and Big Data Analytics, which covered issues relevant to the use of Hadoop in the enterprise and an introduction to the ecosystem that has emerged around it. In this video interview, he went beyond the session to discuss some important side issues--and let us know what has been, quite literally, lost in translation to many.
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Entering Enterprise Territory at Cloud Expo 2010: Notes from the Show Floor

Nov 03, 2010 | Highlights and thoughts from the floor of Cloud Expo 2010 in Silicon Valley where we attended to look for the intersection between high-performance computing, large-scale enterprise and what the two have in common as they look to the clouds.
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Top HPC Cloud Luminaries Gather in Germany

Nov 02, 2010 | Last week leading figures from the HPC and cloud realm gathered in Frankfurt, Germany, for the ISC Cloud Conference, which was organized by the same team that puts together the long-running International Supercomputing Conference each year. The conference drew leading speakers from industry and academia to discuss the challenges, benefits and future of cloud for high-performance computing.
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Intel Lays Groundwork to Fulfill 2015 Cloud Vision

Oct 29, 2010 | This week Intel announced its vision for the cloud in 2015, which targets a number of issues including interoperability standards, efficiency, security and simplication of use across devices. While the breadth of the announcement is far-reaching and the goals lofty, the company is finally laying forth the first pieces of how it views itself as part of the "paradigm shift" of cloud computing -- even if it's clear that some of the ideals might take longer than 2015 to be realized.
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Distributed Data Grids and the Cloud: A Chat With ScaleOut’s Dr. William Bain

Oct 27, 2010 | Distributed data grids have been receiving more attention lately due to the scalability provided by the cloud and the increasing need for users to do more with record amounts of data in near real-time. We talk with Dr. William Bain, founder and CEO of ScaleOut Software about scalability, the history of parallel computing and of course, distributed data grids--and how the cloud is changing all three.
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SC10 Disruptive Technology Preview: The First Cloud Portal to “R” and Beyond

Oct 26, 2010 | Each year at SC, a handful of disruptive technologies are selected as showcase items to represent drastic innovations for high-performance computing. On the list this year is a "Google Docs-like portal for scientific computing in the cloud" that delivers the first front-end door to the R language as well as a host of other useful features and tools for statisticians, scientists and the HPC community at large.
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Cloud-Driven Tools from Microsoft Research Target Earth, Life Sciences

Oct 19, 2010 | Last week at their eScience Workshop at the University of California, Berkeley Microsoft Research announced two key technological progress points related to their Azure cloud. The advancements are currently serving researchers in ecological studies as well as biology and further demonstrate the potential of their cloud offering in further scientific computing projects.
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Enabling Research with MATLAB on the TeraGrid

Oct 18, 2010 | Last year Cornell University and Purdue University received funding from the National Science Foundation to undertake their MATLAB on the TeraGrid project. Since its inception a number of researchers have been making use of the resource and Cornell's Center for Advanced Computing is demonstrating that the resource might have a permanent place in the TeraGrid resource provider collection in the future.
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On the Grid-Cloud Border at CERN

Oct 12, 2010 | At the core of the CERN HPC information technology infrastructure is the use of their own internal HPC grid that manages the vast data volumes. Due to the amount of data and complexity of this infrastructure, CERN has created a separate information technology team to handle all aspects of their HPC data volume. According to one of the leaders of this team, CERN's Sverre Jarp, the facility is "taking steps to move HPC grid infrastructure into the cloud" to better manage this data.
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Harvard Medical School Demonstrates Cloud as Research, Business Model

Oct 11, 2010 | Harvard Medical School, in an effort to centralize its existing HPC infrastructure and better manage researcher's access to computational resources, has pieced together and tested its own private cloud. Via this internal cloud, researchers across the HMS system and within its network of external instiutions have been proving cloud not only as a valid research tool but as a sound business model.
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Bringing Digital Manufacturing to Market

Oct 06, 2010 | Last week in Washington, new research from NCMS and Intesect 360 was presented to help convince government leaders of the inherent value of making high-performance computing software and resources accessible to the manufacturing sector--from the bottom up. Without having access to core technologies, particularly in the realm of modeling and simulation, many smaller design and manufacturing shops have a hard time remaining competitive, but this is an expensive, risky leap to make for many firms.
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