SLA-Aware Scheduling and Virtual Efficiency

Jun 18, 2013 | 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...

CloudSigma CEO Elaborates on Science Cloud

Jun 14, 2013 | 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...

Examining Questions of Virtualization and Security in the Cloud

Jun 13, 2013 | 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...

HPC in the Cloud: Old Wine in New Bottles

Jun 10, 2013 | Cloud computing has become mainstream in today’s HPC world. In order to enable the HPC researchers who currently work with large distributed computing systems, to bring their expertise to cloud computing, it is essential to provide them with easier means of applying their knowledge.
Read more...

Research Roundup: Integrating Grids and Clouds

Jun 07, 2013 | In this week’s hand-picked assortment, researchers consider integrating grid and cloud infrastructures, explore building secure governance clouds, and review HPC scheduling systems in grid and cloud environments.
Read more...

Floating Genomics to the Cloud with AWS

Jun 05, 2013 | David Pellerin and Jafar Shameen, both of HPC Business Development at Amazon Web Services, gave a presentation at AWS Summit 2013 to discuss which industries and companies are using the cloud service to run HPC applications. The talk mostly centered on applications in genomics and the life sciences, as highlighted by a third speaker in Alex Dickinson, SVP of Cloud Genomics at Illumina.
Read more...

DDN, University College of London Aim at 100PB Research Network

Jun 03, 2013 | The important scientific research questions of 2013 more often than not require a significant amount of collaboration and data sharing among the prestigious universities working on them. In that light, the University College of London (UCL) partnered with DataDirect Networks (DDN) to develop what will eventually turn into a 100-PB collaborative, cloud-based research network.
Read more...

The Science Cloud Cometh

May 28, 2013 | Monumental scientific undertakings have very different goals, but one important feature in common: the huge amounts of data that must be processed efficiently in order to yield accurate results. The answer to this dilemma may lie in one of today’s most innovative computing delivery technologies: cloud computing.
Read more...

CometCloud: Using a Federated HPC-Cloud to Understand Fluid Flow in Microchannels

May 22, 2013 | The ever-growing complexity of scientific and engineering problems continues to pose new computational challenges. Thus, we present a novel federation model that enables end-users with the ability to aggregate heterogeneous resource scale problems. The feasibility of this federation model has been proven, in the context of the UberCloud HPC Experiment, by gathering the most comprehensive information to date on the effects of pillars on microfluid channel flow.
Read more...

CERN, Google, and the Future of Global Science Initiatives

May 21, 2013 | Large-scale, worldwide scientific initiatives rely on some cloud-based system to both coordinate efforts and manage computational efforts at peak times that cannot be contained within the combined in-house HPC resources. Last week at Google I/O, Brookhaven National Lab’s Sergey Panitkin discussed the role of the Google Compute Engine in providing computational support to ATLAS, a detector of high-energy particles at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
Read more...

Avoiding Scientific Computing Bottlenecks in the Cloud

May 17, 2013 | Frank Ding, engineering analysis & technical computing manager at Simpson Strong-Tie, discussed the advantages of utilizing the cloud for occasional scientific computing, identified the obstacles to doing so, and proposed workarounds to some of those obstacles.
Read more...

Overcoming the Cloud Security Barrier for Financial Services

May 10, 2013 | The private industry least likely to adopt public cloud services for data storage are financial institutions. Holding the most sensitive and heavily-regulated of data types, personal financial information, banks and similar institutions are mostly moving towards private cloud services – and doing so at great cost.
Read more...

Research Roundup: Toward a More Efficient Cloud

May 10, 2013 | In this week's hand-picked assortment, researchers explore the path to more energy-efficient cloud datacenters, investigate new frameworks and runtime environments that are compatible with Windows Azure, and design a unified programming model for diverse data-intensive cloud computing paradigms.
Read more...

The Evolution of the Virtual Platform

May 01, 2013 | At the 2013 Open Fabrics International Developer Workshop, in Monterey, California, VMware's in-house HPC expert Josh Simons delivered a presentation on the Software-Defined Datacenter. At its essence, a software-defined datacenter is a prescriptive model for bringing the benefits of virtualization to rest of the datacenter.
Read more...

On the Verge of Cloud 2.0

Apr 26, 2013 | Last week Mellanox debuted a new network adapter, ConnectX-3 Pro, the first interconnect solution to feature cloud offload engines for overlay networks. Like its predecessor, ConnectX-3, it supports both 10/40 Gigabit Ethernet as well as 56Gb/s InfiniBand, but it's the overlay offloading engine that is poised to unlock cloud's potential.
Read more...

Research Roundup: Prepping Clouds for Data Influx

Apr 26, 2013 | In this week's hand-picked assortment, researchers explore the path to data-intensive cloud computing, investigate extreme heterogenous architectures for a truly multi-purpose cloud, and set out to create a more predictable cloud programming model...
Read more...

Middleware Is Cool

Apr 16, 2013 | Despite the important advances that middleware enables in both the HPC and enterprise spheres, it generally fails to elicit the same excitement as, say, brand-new leadership class hardware. But middleware, such as Adaptive Computing's intelligent management engine, Moab, is cool and you don't have to take Adaptive's word for it. During the company's annual user event last week, Gartner gave Adaptive its "Cool Vendor" stamp of approval.
Read more...

Five Steps to a Private Cloud

Apr 12, 2013 | One of the sessions at this week's MoabCon event focused on best practices for private cloud. There are five steps that Adaptive recommends for companies seeking to transition into the next-generation of IT: Focus on ROI, Facilitating Self-Service, Use Chargeback, Continuously Optimize, and lastly, Go Vertical – Not Horizontal...
Read more...

HPC in the Cloud Research Roundup

Apr 12, 2013 | The top research stories of the week have been hand-selected from leading scientific centers, prominent journals and relevant conference proceedings. In this week's assortment, researchers tackle the distinctions between HPC and science clouds, present a way to use fuzzy logic to make clouds more efficient, and provide a review of grid security best practices.
Read more...

Data Protection: One Size Does Not Fit All

Apr 10, 2013 | In object storage applications, cluster sizes run the gamut from just a few nodes built into a medical imaging modality to thousands of nodes spanning multiple datacenters. Fulfilling the economic and manageability promises of a unified storage approach means using the best protection scheme for each particular use case. The proposed solution leverages both replication and erasure coding to ensure scalability, while optimizing footprint efficiency.
Read more...

HTC, Big Data and the God Particle

Mar 29, 2013 | Contributor Miha Ahronovitz traces the history of high throughput computing (HTC), noting the particularly enthusiastic response from the high energy physics world and the role of HTC in such important discoveries as the Higgs boson. As one of the biggest generators of data, this community has been dealing with the "big data" deluge long before "big data" assumed its position as the buzzword du jour.
Read more...

HPC in the Cloud Research Roundup

Mar 29, 2013 | Our top HPC cloud research story this week lays out a lightweight approach to implementing virtual machine monitors. Other items explore an innovative parallel cloud storage system, HPC-to-cloud migration, anywhere-anytime cluster monitoring, and a framework for cloud storage.
Read more...

Why Cloud Computing Hasn't Taken Off in the EU

Mar 22, 2013 | Cloud computing has been very slow to catch in the EU, not because they didn't know about it or didn't have the resources to make use of it, but because most Europeans are considerably more paranoid about the security of their data.
Read more...

HPC in the Cloud Research Roundup

Mar 15, 2013 | The top HPC cloud research story this week addresses the question: What if it were possible to cheaply and easily test the suitability of moving to a cloud platform – a virtual "try it before you buy it"? In other items, researchers explore the reliability of HPC cloud, take another pass at GPU virtualization, and evaluate I/O performance in Amazon's EC2 cloud.
Read more...

HPC Bolsters Life Sciences

Mar 14, 2013 | HPC, cloud and big data are experiencing this rich synergy, and it seems nowhere is this more evident than in life sciences. The Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Center (MGHPCC), a new state-of-the-art facility in Western Mass., just received more than $4.5 million in funding for a cloud-based system for computational biology that will tap into this union.
Read more...

UberCloud HPC Experiment Readies for Round Three

Mar 05, 2013 | The UberCloud Experiment is issuing an open invitation to members of the HPC, CAE, life sciences, and big data communities to join round three. Teams will be involved in applying the cloud computing services model to compute and data-intensive workloads on remote cluster computing resources. The idea behind the experiment is to explore the end-to-end process of using remote computing resources as a service, and learning to tackle the many roadblocks.
Read more...

Utility Supercomputing Heats Up

Feb 28, 2013 | The HPC in the cloud space continues to evolve and one of the companies leading that charge is Cycle Computing. The utility supercomputing vendor recently reported a record-breaking 2012, punctuated by several impressive big science endeavors.
Read more...

HPC in the Cloud Research Roundup

Mar 01, 2013 | The HPC cloud top research stories of the week have been hand-selected from prominent journals and leading conference proceedings. Items this week include an evaluation of a cloud storage service, an HPC cloud proof-of-concept, and a survey of cloud-based workflows.
Read more...

Warning to Cloud Adopters: Check the Fine Print

Feb 25, 2013 | Central to the attraction of cloud computing is the "pay for only what you use" claim made by almost all service providers. But look a little deeper within the contracts and you will often find that they are not quite as attractive as first appears.
Read more...

Yottamine Serves Up Predictive Analytics On-Demand

Feb 15, 2013 | Startup Yottamine Analytics is riding the twin waves of cloud and big data. Its cloud-based predictive modeling solution combines the benefits of EC2 spin-up automation and large-scale program parallelism to provide predictive power by the hour for pennies a minute.
Read more...

UK Creates Massive 200,000-Core 'HPC Service'

Feb 07, 2013 | The United Kingdom is rapidly ramping up its HPC capabilities. The nation just launched its third HPC service in the last 12 months, a 200,000-core powerhouse, called "Accelerator," designed to accommodate a wide range of academic and industry workloads.
Read more...

The Open Cloud: Management Standards Achieve Interoperability

Feb 01, 2013 | IT managers around the globe are adopting cloud computing technologies to deliver higher quality services while lowering costs and improving efficiencies. While there have been significant gains, developing cloud standards that promote interoperability is a crucial next step. This article details the benefits of such standards and looks at how they are being enabled.
Read more...

China's Cloud Positioning and the Prospect of Foreign Outsourcing

Jan 18, 2013 | China has borne less of the brunt of economic recession than we have felt here in the States. In a position to invest capital into the future of their country, one of the major arenas they intend to dominate is cloud computing. This should come as little surprise as spending on transition to cloud computing continues to rise in the most technologically advanced countries.
Read more...

Student Projects Highlight Cloud's Potential

Jan 04, 2013 | If ideas are what will help students to survive outside the classroom, creative use of technologies like cloud computing will help them to change the world. Dr. Jose Luis Vazquez-Poletti shares current student Master's Thesis projects that leverage cloud computing and open source tools in order to carry out high-value research, despite budgetary constraints.
Read more...