NASA, Rackspace Open-Sourcing the Cloud

Jul 19, 2010 | Rackspace announced today the arrival of OpenStack in conjunction with NASA, who will be providing a core aspect of its capbility later in the year. This news provides those with interoperability and standardization concerns a noble champion, even though the development and true potential of the open source project have still to be realized.
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Cloudy Costs for Amazon’s New HPC Offering

Jul 16, 2010 | Following Amazon's rather unexpected announcement of its new HPC-geared instance type for EC2 called Cluster Compute Instances (CCI) the questions started emerging about the pricing structure. More specifically, about how this news would either answer or complicate the age-old question of buying or renting a cluster -- or whether the cloud is the most efficient measure for reducing costs without sacrificing performance.
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Amazon Adds HPC Capability to EC2

Jul 13, 2010 | The announcement this morning that Amazon is offering Cluster Compute Instances for EC2 specifically for the needs of HPC users might just be that long-awaited game-changer when it comes to the viability of scientific computing in the public cloud. While it is fresh from a private beta and the results are promising, only time will tell to what degree users will snatch up this opportunity to have supercomputing power on demand.
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Azure on the Horizon

Jul 13, 2010 | Microsoft's Partner Conference kicked off yesterday in Washington, yielding news about several key partnerships with household names like HP, Dell and eBay and more expected to come during the week, including Fujitsu. Less than a year after Azure's release, the company's partner-centered strategy is starting to unfold.
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Supernova Factory Employs EC2, Puts Cloud to the Test

Jul 09, 2010 | Researchers from Berkeley Lab are looking at different options available for scientific computing users to move beyond physical infrastructure, including the possibility of deploying public clouds. A recently-published study of Amazon EC2's handling of data from the Nearby Supernova Factory sheds light on putting large-scale scientific computing into the cloud in practice and in theory.
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Eucalyptus Chief Talks Future After $20 Million Infusion

Jul 06, 2010 | HPC in the Cloud talks at length with CEO of Eucalyptus Systems, Marten Mickos, about the company's recent $20 million funding injection and what it means for the future of the open source and enterprise private cloud vendor. From vision to roadmap to HPC philosophy, Mickos shares his view of the past, present and future for the software firm.
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Clouds Above Calabria: HPC and Cloud Computing at the Cetraro Workshop

Jul 04, 2010 | The International Advanced Research Workshop on High Performance Computing, Grids and Clouds took place in Cetraro, Itally, and was the location for a great deal of discussion about the role and developments of grids and clouds in HPC. Participant Wolfgang Gentzsch reviews highlights from the event.
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Intelligent Clouds on the Horizon for Financial Services

Jul 01, 2010 | Although there have been modifications, much remains to be done to improve the usage of an HPC grid from a software perspective, both in terms of logical business application as well as from the various vendors of HPC products to support improved orchestration of resources for financial services and beyond.
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Renting HPC: What's Cloud Got to Do with It?

Jun 30, 2010 | When compared to the power the word "cloud" seems to wield, the concept of renting an HPC cluster can seem less attractive; however, with some vendors providing a virtualization-free environment with all of the on-demand appeal of clouds and minus the performance hitch, HPC-as-a-Service deserves a second look past the clouds.
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Will Public Clouds Ever Be Suitable for HPC?

Jun 27, 2010 | Since the primary consideration in HPC is performance, it stands to reason that it's no easy task to convince the scientific computing community that the public cloud is a viable option. Accordingly, a handful of traditional HPC vendors are refining their solutions to bridge the cloud performance chasm that exists in EC2, making the cloud more hospitable for HPC.
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Uncovering Results in the Magellan Testbed

Jun 22, 2010 | Since its launch in 2009, the Magellan cloud computing testbed has produced some results of interest to the scientific computing community in its effort to evalue the cost-effectiveness and energy-efficiency, not to mention performance for clouds in scientific applications. Kathy Yelick, NERSC Director discusses some key findings.
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Of Clouds and Mass Spectrometers: The Varian Case

Jun 18, 2010 | Use cases of real HPC happening in the cloud are becoming more common across industries, but life sciences research and development is one key area of movement. This doesn't just mean drug, health or genomics research. Companies requiring compute-intensive simulation and design in the area and investigating their options as well, as in the case of medical device developer, Varian.
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From Clusters to Clouds: An Interview with Platform CEO Songnian Zhou

Jun 15, 2010 | HPC in the Cloud presents an in-depth interview with Songnian Zhou, co-founder and CEO of Platform Computing. Discussion of the company's history and shifting focus from its roots in cluster management to the coming emergence of private clouds -- and all points in between -- are covered.
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Compliance Complexity and the Almighty Audit

Jun 12, 2010 | Is it possible that security and compliance will overshadow new IT investments? For those handling sensitive data, keeping up with regulatory changes has become a significant barrier to cloud adoption; throw in fines big enough to sink an enterprise for non-compliance and IT stagnation sets in.
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The Shape of Enterprise Cloud Models in 2020

Jun 11, 2010 | This week research firm BroadGroup suggested that by 2020 only 10 percent of all applications will remain within the private cloud for enterprise. To get to the heart of this statement, we discussed this and larger datacenter trends in enterprise with report author Marion Howard Healy.
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Engaging the Missing Middle in HPC

Jun 07, 2010 | The missing middle in HPC has been estimated by some to be in the many millions, but reaching this vast segment has been nearly impossible in any cohesive way. The cloud is granting access to the elite space, slowly but surely, and bringing the world more in line with the capabilities and competitive advantages provided by HPC.
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Microsoft's Azure Chief Tallies, Evaluates Cloud User Patterns

Jun 07, 2010 | In a recent address, Microsoft's Manager for Azure stated that the cloud platform had around 10,000 customers and far more users. This revelation sheds light on broader cloud adoption but more specifically, allows companies to evaluate how clouds are being deployed and permits cloud vendors to determine routes to converting new users.
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Back to the Future: Solid-State Storage in Cloud Computing

May 28, 2010 | Solid-state devices based on Flash and PCIe are emerging as a new class of enterprise storage option -- Tier-0. Tier-0 is an optimized storage tier specifically for high performance workloads, which can benefit the most from using flash memory.
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The Cloud Forecast for HPC: Preview of ISC'10

May 25, 2010 | It is becoming more difficult to question cloud's role in HPC as an increasing number of vendors jockey for top position in research, scientific, and large-scale enterprise computing. If the ISC exhibitor list is any indication, we're in for very cloudy conditions in HPC this year.
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Palm Trees, HPC and Virtualization

May 21, 2010 | An interview with Dr. Mazin Yousif, CTO Cloud Computing, IBM Canada, amid the palms and at the AICCSA International Conference on Computer Systems and Applications in Tunisia, where Yousif delivered the keynote on cloud to the gathering.
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Top Ten Security Issues for HPC in the Cloud

May 19, 2010 | Coming up with a list of the top ten threats and concerns in terms of security for HPC in the cloud is the easy part. However, putting that list in an organization-specific order is an exercise in prioritizing issues of not only security, but performance, applications in general, and overall goals.
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StarCluster Brings HPC to the Amazon Cloud

May 18, 2010 | The Software Tools for Academics and Researchers (STAR) group at MIT has created an open-source project called StarCluster that allows anyone to create HPC clusters on Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) without needing to be a cloud expert.
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25 Sources for In-Depth HPC Cloud Use Cases

May 16, 2010 | Finding cloud computing use cases for HPC is not difficult necessarily, but it does take some footwork, especially if one is looking to step beyond the multitude of use cases that are provided by cloud and HPC vendors.
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Fetching Platform: A Tale of Big Data and Small IT

May 11, 2010 | The Fetch-Platform ISF partnership is one of the better practical examples of a large-scale cloud deployment for enterprise in recent weeks. And the good news is, it's is already proving to be successful.
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SARA Opens Gate for HPC Cloud Researchers

May 10, 2010 | Researchers in the Netherlands are being granted the opportunity to take part in a grand HPC experiment over the coming year as the limits of BiG Grid are pushed into the cloud.
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