HPC 360 Highlights Manufacturing’s Missing Middle

Oct 05, 2010 | Last week, HPC resource provider R Systems hosted its annual HPC 360 conference with a distinct focus on empowering the missing middle of manufacturing via access to high-performance computing capabilities. The event highlighted the need for complex software packages for modeling and simulation and on a larger level, emphasized the value of the "Silicon Prairie" as an enabler for businesses feeding into the larger international manufacturing supply chain.
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HPC-as-a-Service Gaining Traction in Enterprise Arena

Sep 29, 2010 | Data accumulation rates are growing astronomically and managing data in traditional ways is getting difficult in the same proportion. HPC is emerging as a champion for large-scale data management needs in the enterprise. It is required by businesses that rely on high powered analytics to provide data driven insights, companies that need more than simple reports and dashboards and is increasingly being delivered on-demand via HPC as a Service.
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GPU Acceleration for the On-Demand Era

Sep 28, 2010 | There is increasing convergence between the once disparate worlds of GPUs and HPC. This gap is closing, particularly now that scientific and enterprise users are being granted access to GPU acceleration via on-demand HPC and GPU-driven services. Such offerings are expected to grow along with a rise in the number of applications available, marking what might be a new era for HPC and GPGPU both individually and as a unit.
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Embedded Clouds: A Look Back at HPEC 2010

Sep 22, 2010 | High-performance computing (HPC) isn't restricted to computer rooms. It is also found "embedded" within expensive gadgets. For example, it is at your local hospital inside the CAT and MR scanners. It is inspecting new semiconductors. It is inside defense RADAR and signals intelligence platforms. In fact, the market for embedded HPC is thought to be about the same size as the market for supercomputers.
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Elastic Application Platforms for Cloud Computing

Sep 21, 2010 | Despite the price/performance advantages of clouds, it remains hard to accelerate and scale the performance of applications, which are often written for a single computer and thus cannot leverage the parallelism inherent in cloud environments without extensive refactoring and reprogramming. What is needed, therefore, are elastic application platforms that simplify the development and deployment of ultra-high-performance elastic applications.
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Cloud Use Cases Group Takes SLAs to Task

Sep 17, 2010 | Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are crucial to any nontrivial use of the cloud. Once an organization understands its requirements, it needs a guarantee from its cloud provider that those requirements will be met. Cloud consumers trust cloud providers to deliver some or all of their infrastructure services, so it is vital to define what those services are, how they are delivered and how they are used.
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Technical Clouds: Seeding Discovery - An Interview with Microsoft's Dan Reed

Sep 16, 2010 | Dan Reed helps drive Microsoft’s long-term technology vision and the associated policy engagement with governments and institutions around the world. He is also responsible for the company’s R&D on parallel and extreme scale computing. In advance of his keynote at ISC Cloud in Frankfurt, Dan answers questions about the future of technical clouds and summarizes key challenges and highlights of the cloud for scientific computing.
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"Intelligent" Cloud Automation Gets Substantial Push From Investors

Sep 15, 2010 | Adaptive Computing, known for its Moab automation technology, announced today that it was one of four companies selected by Intel Capital for a round of Series A funding. The company is set to receive $14 million with Intel’s line combined with further resources from two other investment firms who saw promise in the company and its nine-year track record of growth and profitability.
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Jamcracker CEO Chandrasekhar on Cloud Brokerage, New IT Landscape

Sep 11, 2010 | Jamcracker has been in the business of helping clients as they try to solve complex cloud management and provisioning issues since before "cloud" was the latest buzzword in IT. The company's CEO and founder discusses its recent partnership with Eucalyptus, cloud brokerage services and the future of enterprise cloud models.
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Why Mission Critical Applications Are Staying Put

Sep 08, 2010 | Perhaps a better title would be, “yet another reason why mission critical applications are staying put” since this is so frequently a topic of discussion. However, to break from the string of latency, performance and development challenges for a moment, we are left with the more nebulous issue of IT culture; namely, the clearly defined tensions between virtualization advocates and the stalwart owners of core, revenue-critical applications.
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Cloud Computing: Improving Enterprise IT Efficiency and Agility

Sep 08, 2010 | 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.
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Inching Closer to a New Era for Interoperability Standards

Sep 07, 2010 | 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.
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On Par for 2 Billion: 3PAR Discusses Cloud Strategy

Sep 01, 2010 | 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.
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Busting the "Cloud in a Box" Myth

Aug 30, 2010 | 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.
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Achieving Ultra High Performance in the Cloud

Aug 24, 2010 | 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.
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Are Cloud Datacenters Greener and Cleaner?

Aug 19, 2010 | 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.
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Challenges Ahead for HPC Applications in the Cloud

Aug 16, 2010 | 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.
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HPC Sharing in the Cloud

Aug 12, 2010 | 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.
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To Build or to Buy Time: That is the Question

Aug 11, 2010 | 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.
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The Network in the Cloud. An Interview with Mellanox’ Senior Director Gilad Shainer

Aug 05, 2010 | 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.
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Cloud Developments for Developers: An Analyst View

Aug 03, 2010 | In the realm of HPC as well as for developers and enterprises, the cloud offers a range of possibilites, including the ability to create applications that would otherwise be prohibitive due to infrastructure costs for developers. There is promise on the horizon for innovations that will allow more developers to access HPC hardware and services.
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Close Encounters of the Storage Kind

Jul 29, 2010 | Steve Campbell scours the floor at SIGGRAPH 2010 in Los Angeles in search of some of the most compelling firms catering to Hollywood's HPC needs and finds that BlueArc fits the bill. Storage and cloud companies are finding that the entertainment industry is always seeking the next big tech and the fight is on to deliver.
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An Intelligent Public Cloud for HPC

Jul 27, 2010 | Adaptive Computing came forth this morning with some details about their early involvement with Amazon's new HPC-geared instance type. In addition to the more predictable news about the role of their Moab technology, they also tested Cluster Compute Instances to determine how they would perform for HPC users.
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NVIDIA Serves Up Reality, GPU-Style

Jul 26, 2010 | This morning NVIDIA and its hosting partner PEER 1 announced that they would be delivering the industry's first large-scale hosted GPU cloud, which means, among other things, that the popular RealityServer platform might be able to infiltrate more user groups due to the shedding of GPU cluster requirements.
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GIS Applications Take to the Clouds

Jul 20, 2010 | Geographic Information Systems (GIS) applications have been among those relegated to the traditional mode of software delivery until more recently as some of the main players in the industry have taken the first tentative steps toward to the clouds. This new delivery model marks a paradigm shift from a business model standpoint and has the potential to bring compute-intensive GIS applications to a larger user base than ever before.
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