March 21, 2013
COLUMBUS, Ohio, March 21 — The State of Ohio has selected IBM for a $267-million 10 year modernization of the State of Ohio Computing Center (SOCC) through the development of a private cloud computing environment and the use of other hardware, software and services from IBM.
"We are working with IBM to significantly reduce the complexity of our infrastructure, improve data center operations and increase service delivery for state agencies and the constituents they serve," Stu Davis, State of Ohio's Chief Information Officer said. "This is a foundational component of Ohio's IT Optimization efforts that will result in savings and culminate in the consolidation of the state's IT assets into a primary state data center. This provides agencies with services they require and ensures we are spending taxpayers' dollars once."
The SOCC includes four floors and more than 350,000 square feet of space. It houses infrastructure for several State agencies that support more than 1,600 applications executing on over 2,700 servers in a complex network environment via an annual $108 million budget for these resources. By working with IBM, the State will be able to focus on meeting application demands that underpin the services it provides to the citizens of Ohio. The program will also lay the groundwork for future opportunities including the State's drive toward private, secure cloud computing.
Highlights of the work with IBM include:
"Many of our clients have looked to IBM to assist them in identifying ways of reducing their overall technology footprint, while improving their ability to serve their stakeholders," Kevin Hill , IBM Client Executive for Ohio said. "The approach the State of Ohio is taking will not only address the State's need to reduce costs, but it will also provide its workers and all Ohioans with the resources they deserve thorough a unique collaboration that is based on leveraging the best that our two organizations can offer."
The State's cloud computing environment will be designed to provide a secure, high-performance and dependable foundation for computing, while costing the State less than its current infrastructure. The goal of the State's IT consolidation is to substantially reduce IT infrastructure services spend, and reallocate those funds to applications and services that support the citizens and businesses of Ohio.
-----
Source: IBM
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.
Read more...
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)...
Read more...
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.
Read more...
Jun 17, 2013 |
With that in mind, Datapipe hopes to establish themselves as a green-savvy HPC cloud provider with their recently announced Stratosphere platform. Datapipe markets Stratosphere as a green HPC cloud service and in doing so partnering with Verne Global and their Icelandic datacenter, which is known for its propensity in green computing.
Read more...
Jun 12, 2013 |
Cloud computing is gaining ground in utilization by mid-sized institutions who are looking to expand their experimental high performance computing resources. As such, IBM released what they call Redbooks, in part to assist institutions’ movement of high performance computing applications to the cloud.
Read more...
Jun 06, 2013 |
The San Diego Supercomputer Center launched a public cloud system for universities in the area designed specifically to run on commodity hardware with high performance solid-state drives. The center, which currently holds 5.5 PB of raw storage, is open to educational and research users in the University of California.
Read more...
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.