Top 10 Cloud Stories of 2012

Dec 11, 2012 | As 2012 winds down, it's time to reflect on the major cloud computing themes and stories of last 12 months. With the "What is cloud?" question finally laid to rest, thanks in large part to the official NIST Cloud Computing Definition, everyone was free to move on with the business of actually building, implementing and managing cloud platforms.
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HPC as a Service: Lessons Learned

Dec 10, 2012 | After a fast-paced three months, round 1 of the HPC Experiment (also known as the Uber-Cloud Experiment) concluded last month, with more than 160 participating organizations and individuals from 25 countries, working together in 25 international teams. In this article we present their main findings, challenges, and their lessons learned.
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Redshift, New Instance Types, Price Cuts and More at AWS Re: Invent

Dec 04, 2012 | AWS used its first ever customer and partner conference, AWS re: Invent, held last week in Las Vegas, as a launch pad for some major company news. During their respective keynotes, AWS Senior Vice President Andrew Jassy revealed a brand new data warehouse service, AWS Redshift, and another price cut for the S3 storage service, while Amazon.com CTO Werner Vogels announced two super-sized EC2 Instance Types, and another new service, the AWS Data Pipeline.
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Adaptive Revs Moab, Debuts Remote Virtualization Edition

Nov 27, 2012 | At SC12, Adaptive announced its Moab HPC Suite 7.2 release, which includes several productivity enhancements and introduces support for Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors. The workload management vendor also launched two new products as part of its Moab HPC Suite: Application Portal Edition and Remote Visualization Edition.
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Grid Software Creates Virtual Windows Supercomputer

Nov 20, 2012 | What if you could combine the benefits of virtualization, grid and cloud computing to accelerate Windows-based applications? An Israeli company, Xoreax, is doing just that. We spoke with Xoreax at SC12 in Salt Lake City, Utah, last week to learn more about their offering.
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Microsoft Outfits Azure Cloud for Big Compute

Nov 13, 2012 | Microsoft has unveiled a set of "big compute" capabilities for its Windows Azure offering. The company is courting the HPC space with more powerful hardware, new instance configurations, and the updated Microsoft HPC Pack 2012.
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SC12: Supercomputing with a Helping of Cloud

Nov 12, 2012 | The SC12 technical forum schedule is impressive for the quality and depth of content and the sheer scope of subjects covered, however this same depth and scope can make it daunting to wade through. For that reason, HPC in the Cloud has pared the list down to the sessions that promise the most relevance to the HPC cloud and grid computing community.
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AMD Unveils 64-Bit ARM Strategy

Nov 01, 2012 | On Monday, AMD announced it is adding ARM-based Opterons to its portfolio, the first non-x86 server chips in the company's history. The new processors, due out in 2014, will use 64-bit ARM SoCs on top of its SeaMicro Freedom Fabric technology, and will be aimed at the datacenter and cloud space.
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Cloud Lends Power to Next Generation Martian Missions

Oct 29, 2012 | Martian rover Curiosity successfully performed an on-site validation of an application essential to the next generation of Martian missions. Cloud computing, specifically Amazon Web Services, played an important role.
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Promoting Hemispheric Advancement Through Collaborative Research

Oct 23, 2012 | The Organization of American States (OAS) has been called the UN of the Americas and it is involved in everything from food security to supercomputing. It is the prime political forum of the western hemisphere and the world's oldest regional organization.
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The Future of Workload Management

Oct 12, 2012 | In this era of heterogeneous architectures and hybrid infrastructures, workload managers are necessarily becoming more and more sophisticated. Looking toward the future of workload management, there are three major trends: application insight, big data awareness, and HPC clouds. While inter-related, each has something important to contribute to the advancement of HPC.
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Digital Gold Rush Powered by GPUs

Oct 09, 2012 | Coinlab, a Seattle-based startup that offers a unique monetization service, is considering a move into high performance computing. Today the company mines Bitcoins, digital currency to help online gamers make money. But they believe the same infrastructure that powers their operation can be parlayed into an HPC service business.
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Ahead by a Century: Utility Supercomputing Advances Stem Cell Research

Oct 08, 2012 | What if researchers could access virtually unlimited computing resources? That question was at the heart of Cycle Computing's BigScience Challenge. Now winner Victor Ruotti of the Morgridge Institute for Research has completed his utility supercomputing run, logging over a compute century on the Amazon cloud. The results will be used to build an indexing system for stem cells and their derivatives.
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Government Computing: The Case for Private Cloud

Oct 05, 2012 | Federal IT departments are faced with some tough challenges these days. Not only are budgets constrained, but mandates are starting to stack up like the tax code. One of the most talked about is the cloud-first mandate, but what kind of cloud will it be?
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HPC, Clouds & Big Data Converge at ISC Cloud 2012 - Part Two

Oct 02, 2012 | The HPC cloud space is still a work in progress, but judging from a set of European conferences that took place this September, there is also actual progress to speak of. With GlobusEUROPE and the EGI Technical Forum in Prague from Sept. 17-21, and ISC Cloud in Mannheim, Germany, Sept. 24-25, there was an abundance of topics to cover.
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ISC Cloud 2012 BOFs: Applications/Software, Reference Architectures and Data Transfer

Oct 02, 2012 | At ISC Cloud 2012, talking points for the Birds of a Feather sessions were hand-picked by the participants. While the importance of security was a key theme throughout the two-day event, other salient topics emerged during the voting process. The finalized BoF roster included "Applications and software in the cloud," "HPC Cloud Reference Architectures" and "Data Transfer in/out of Clouds."
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HPC, Clouds & Big Data Converge at ISC Cloud 2012 - Part One

Sep 25, 2012 | The last week of September, ISC Cloud had its third annual event in Mannheim, Germany, organized by Uber Cloud Experiment leader Wolfgang Gentzsch. The broad-ranging yet ambitiously-dense program attracted a nice balance of users and technology enablers from research and industry.
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Internet Freedom Fighters: Amazon, Facebook, Rackspace and 54 More to Lobby Gov't

Sep 25, 2012 | This week, not one but two groups of IT heavyweights launched with plans to expand the scope of the Internet while protecting the free flow of ideas it provides. The Internet Infrastructure Coalition (i2Coalition) counts already 42 founding members, including infrastructure providers Rackspace, Softlayer, ProfitBricks and Tucows, while the Internet Association's 14-strong roster claims Web giants Google, Yahoo, Facebook, eBay and Amazon.
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Grid Community Gathers in Prague

Sep 18, 2012 | This week, over 400 participants from the European research-computing community - and some of their American partners - came together in one of Europe's most beloved cities, Prague. On Monday, GlobusEUROPE took over the third floor of the Hotel Clarion Congress, located in Vysocany, a modern section of the city, just 15 minutes away from the historic center of Prague and the famous Prague Castle. The remainder of the week, Tuesday through Friday, is dedicated to the European Grid Infrastructure Technical Forum.
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Globus and Grid: Blazing Trails for Future Discovery

Sep 13, 2012 | As participants from around the world make their way to Prague for the EGI Technical Forum, grid-enabled tools continue to facilitate global collaboration. Grid computing provides the backbone for a wide range of research, all the way from basic science to once-in-a-lifetime breakthroughs, like the recent achievements surrounding the elusive Higgs boson particle.
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Public Cloud Market to Exceed $100 Billion by Next Prez Race

Sep 17, 2012 | Between the ubiquity of Internet-connected devices and businesses looking to expand their reach through digital means, it's becoming nearly impossible to talk about technology without mentioning "the cloud." In the last week, two big name analysts have released reports, each predicting a public cloud services market that reaches northward of $100 billion by the next presidential election.
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The State of HPC Cloud

Sep 11, 2012 | While HPC cloud is still in the early stages of adoption, it is becoming more commonplace. Various hurdles must be overcome and users must become comfortable with new usage models, but as technology ramps up to meet these challenges, the benefits of a cloud model will attract more and more HPC users.
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China Cashes in on Cloud

Sep 11, 2012 | From 2001-2011, China's GDP grew an astounding 550 percent. During the same time period, the US economy increased by just 50 percent. Given China's dramatic growth, the country appears to be focused on catching up with the United States in a variety of aspects including defense, technology and even Olympic medals. A recent flurry of announcements indicate that China is betting on cloud technologies, even besting some US providers at their own game.
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Cloud APIs: Agent for Vendor Lock-in or the Anti Vendor Lock-in?

Sep 04, 2012 | The combined LinuxCon/CloudOpen conference, which took place in San Diego last week, provided a forum for valuable keynotes on the state of Linux and cloud, many informative booths, and a wide array of interesting activities and sessions. On the first day of the three-day event, a panel on Cloud APIs had everyone talking about what it means to be open or closed in this increasingly connected world.
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Why Are CAE Software Vendors Moving to the HPC Cloud?

Sep 04, 2012 | When it comes to running HPC workloads in the cloud, traditional software licensing models have presented a significant barrier to adoption. But as cloud becomes ever more entrenched, this is starting to change. More and more ISVs have started to experiment with cloud computing and are adjusting their licensing models accordingly.
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