2012 Cloud Forecast

Dec 15, 2011 | 2011 may have been cloud's fifth birthday, but in 2012, the six-year-old will start making a truly distinctive name for itself. Leading Platform-as-a-Service providers will keep investing billions in huge datacenters with megawatts of power capacity, while Software-as-a-Service platform development will be a main goal for software and Internet industry leaders.
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Cloud Computing: It's Not Just for Rocket Scientists

Dec 05, 2011 | In addition to benefiting a host of industrial and formal research workloads, cloud computing is proving to be an invaluable tool for university students. By developing Master Thesis projects related to this technology, students can complement their standard education and perhaps even create the next scientific breakthrough or successful software startup in the process. What follows is a showcasing of the work done by a group of students at the Complutense University of Madrid.
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Nimbix Aims to Accelerate HPC Cloud Adoption

Nov 23, 2011 | It's been a little over a year since Nimbix announced the initial beta launch of its Nimbix Accelerated Compute Cloud (NACC). During the SC11 show in Seattle last week, HPC in the Cloud sat down with Nimbix Co-Founder and CEO Steve Hebert to find out where the company fits in with the small-but-growing stable of cloud providers who specialize in supporting HPC workloads.
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Cycle Computing Spins Big Science

Nov 19, 2011 | HPC in the Cloud talks to Cycle Computing CEO Jason Stowe at SC11 to get the details on the CycleCloud BigScience Challenge 2011. Cycle crafted the contest based on the noble ideal that science should not be hindered by lack of computational resources. So the company put out the call to non-profit institutions: do you have an HPC problem that will benefit humanity in a large-scale way?
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Adaptive Computing Targets Enterprise HPC Space, Demos Cloud Bursting Solution

Nov 16, 2011 | On Tuesday at SC11 in Seattle, Adaptive Computing launched a new version of its Moab HPC Suite targeted at the needs of enterprise HPC users. Moab HPC Suite - Enterprise Edition was a logical next step for the company's HPC workload management product line.
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Amazon Web Services Expands HPC Cloud Offering

Nov 16, 2011 | Amazon Web Services just announced its most powerful offering yet for supercomputing users that require the power of a large cluster on demand. The newest EC2 Cluster Compute Instance, called Cluster Compute Eight Extra Large (CC2), is aimed at businesses and researchers who require additional HPC capacity in an elastic, pay-as-you-go format.
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Bright Computing Bursts Into Cloud

Nov 08, 2011 | Bright Computing is coming to the cloud. On Tuesday the company announced that the upcoming version of its cluster management software, Bright Cluster Manager 6.0, will include support for cloud bursting through Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). HPC in the Cloud spoke with Bright's CEO Matthijs van Leeuwen to get the details.

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Spectra Tape Plays to Cloud, Big Data, HPC Communities

Nov 04, 2011 | Tape storage is not dead. Far from it, in fact. Tape is steadily evolving to suit the storage realities of the 21st century, including a skyrocketing data growth rate. The that end, Boulder, Colo.-based Spectra Logic recently made a series of announcements highlighting the company's growth and its push into the areas of big data, cloud computing, and HPC.
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Running Compute Intensive Tasks in the Cloud

Oct 25, 2011 | The advent of public clouds has brought large-scale HPC resources within easy reach of ordinary companies. In many situations, especially for temporary projects, cloud solutions can be more affordable for HPC than the cost of acquiring the necessary amount of of compute power in-house. Before cloud, only a few companies, such as giant financial services firms, could afford to have this type of resource.
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Dutch HPC Cloud Running at Full Throttle

Oct 19, 2011 | Last October a special event took place at Amsterdam’s Science Park. After 2 years of hard work, the first user-friendly HPC cloud infrastructure in Europe is working at full throttle. The collaboration between SARA and BiG Grid is behind this epic milestone.
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IBM Stands on Platform to Reach HPC

Oct 12, 2011 | Platform Computing came under new ownership this week as IBM took charge of the Toronto-based company and its ability to find new inroads to technical computing markets. Platform's HPC-tuned cloud and grid management software rounds out IBM's portfolio, and offers Big Blue some new opportunities to find new business in HPC--clusters, grids, clouds and beyond...
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SDSC's New Storage Cloud: 'Flickr for Scientific Data'

Oct 06, 2011 | Last month, the San Diego Supercomputer Center launched what it believes is "the largest academic-based cloud storage system in the U.S." The infrastructure is designed to serve the country's research community and will be available to scientists and engineers from essentially any government agency that needs to archive and share super-sized data sets.
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Vendor Showdown Puts HPC Clouds in Spotlight

Oct 03, 2011 | Vendors in the high performance cloud space were put in the hot seat during last week's ISC Cloud event in Mannheim, Germany. Representatives from twelve companies, including HP, Intel, SGI, Bull and others, took part in a "gameshow" event that featured tough questions and a competitive reason to answer them thoroughly.
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HPC Meets Clouds in Mannheim

Sep 26, 2011 | In our first in a series of reports and interviews from ISC Cloud '11 in Mannheim, Germany, we sit down with conference chair, Wolfgang Gentzsch to discuss trends in high performance computing in the cloud--and where the increasing commonalities lie for those exploring HPC clouds for academic and industrial or enterprise use. Gentzsch discusses the prevalence of private and hybrid clouds and lends insight to broader movements in this rapidly evolving space.
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GRDI2020 Envisions New Science Paradigms

Sep 22, 2011 | This week at the EGI Technical Forum in Lyon, France the lofty ten-year goals of the GRDI2020 project received a roadmap to allow for the creation of global research infrastructures. Central to this effort is the role of federation in cloud computing--as well as broader recognition of the challenges presented by the era of data-intensive science.
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Laying the Foundation for National Grid Infrastructures

Sep 21, 2011 | This week during the EGI Technical Forum in Lyon, France we spoke with a number of European organizations with newer or still-developing grid initiatives to expand infrastructure access for research and science. Among the groups we spoke with were representatives from SwING, the Swiss National Grid project.
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European Clouds Take Center Stage in September

Sep 20, 2011 | The second half of September is a ripe time to touch base with the European grid and cloud communities. This week we are attending the EGI Technical Forum in Lyon, France where grids and cloud computing technologies are shaping new paradigms for European research and science endeavors. Five co-located events during the week will give us a sweeping overview of progress toward infrastructure goals in Europe.
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Software Development in the Cloud: Changing Opinions and a Bright Future Ahead

Sep 13, 2011 | Cloud has been a boon for software developers, who were previously beholden to enterprise infrastructures to get their applications up and running. In almost every way, the cloud has begun to offer the benefits promised during those moments when it was first teased, making many IT executives anxious to fully tap its potential as a business technology investment.
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vCompute Boosts HPC Private Cloud Capabilities

Sep 06, 2011 | Although they might not be on your radar given their emphasis on security, privacy and an established network of customers, vCompute is making inroads in its ability to offer high performance computing along a private cloud model via recent GPU and Infiniband upgrades. We talked with the company's CEO to learn more...
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Accelerating Discovery by Outsourcing the Mundane: An Interview with Ian Foster

Aug 29, 2011 | ISC Cloud Conference Chairman Wolfgang Gentzsch spoke with Ian Foster, Director of the Computation Institute, a joint institute of the University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory about an upcoming talk he is set to give about how cloud computing tools can keep science moving forward faster than ever.

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Bioinformatics Cloud Refines Research

Aug 22, 2011 | A recent project at the Ohio State University sought to remove key barriers to effective, timely bioinformatics research via a cloud project designed to cull and 'translate' data for more rapid analysis and use.
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Testing the Cloud: Assuring Availability

Aug 16, 2011 | The ability for enterprises large and small to centralize and outsource increasingly complex IT infrastructure, while at the same time consuming cloud-based IT services on an on-demand basis, promises to transform the economics of doing business.
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ScaleMatrix Offers Glimpse into San Diego Facility

Aug 11, 2011 | This week Steve Campbell ventured out in San Diego, California to meet the leaders of ScaleMatrix, a startup datacenter company that has chosen to build its behemoth in one of the most unlikely cities possible—at least for anyone with electricity cost concerns in mind.
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Fujitsu Rolls Out Technical Cloud Computing Services

Aug 08, 2011 | Today Fujitsu announced its technical cloud computing service, aimed primarily at the needs of the manufacturing sector. The offering encompasses a number of modes of operation, from virtual machine-based environments for running analytical simulations to physical hardware.
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Cloud, Exascale Challenges Converge

Aug 04, 2011 | During a recent talk, distributed computing researcher Ioan Raicu discussed how the challenges of exascale computing will be felt outside of the traditional supercomputing community as IaaS giants like Amazon move into the million-node range.
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