June 01, 2011
It’s one thing to claim you have the ideal location for the world’s largest radio telescope, but it’s another matter entirely to claim you have the raw crunch-power needed to handle the massive data demands.
In its effort to secure the rights to the $2.1 billion Square Kilometer Array (SKA) Australia is beefing up its efforts to prove it has the compute might required to tackle the deluge. According to reports, there is a broad initiative between Australia and New Zealand to leverage cloud computing to create a workable environment for the vast amount of scientific data. If this plan is realized it would create the largest scientific cloud computing network in the world, accessing the computing power of desktop users everywhere.
According to the Oxford researchers who are considering data management solutions, even in 2020 before full completion of the SKA, the instrument will be pumping out so much data that only viable option would be to distribute the work across every desktop available. They note that using a cloud resource like Amazon would be far too expensive, even just as a source of storage.
Call it cloud, call it grid, call it SETI—the effort is gaining serious traction in Australia. According to SKA officials, “the SKA could need data links with a capacity greater than that of the current Internet—the whole Internet.” As PopSci reported, “Australia is already sinking $8- million into the Pawsey Center in Western Australia, a supercomputing hub that will be petaflop-capable and the third fastest supercomputing the world when it comes online in 2013 based on today’s rankings.”
Full story at PopSci
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.
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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)...
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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.
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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.