Cloud Connect Speakers Reflect Industry's Growth and Challenges

Feb 20, 2012 | This week's Cloud Connect conference in Santa Clara, Calif., exhibited all the energy and diversity of topics you might expect from one of the IT industry's fastest-growing sectors.
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Cloudnumbers Expedites Cloud-Based Supercomputing

Feb 14, 2012 | Configuring a cluster on a public cloud infrastructure such as Amazon Web Services potentially requires a lot of work. The various steps involve setting up the machines, dealing with the security keys, installing the applications, negotiating the administration, and more. Most HPC users would prefer to avoid this time-consuming process if possible. That's where German startup Cloudnumbers comes in.
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TIBCO Seeds Cloud with Silver Grid

Feb 07, 2012 | TIBCO is moving its grid computing software to the cloud, starting with its GridServer product. The company is leveraging the Amazon Web Services computing infrastructure to provide customers with an easier and less expensive way to access its sophisticated grid computing technology.
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Learning from Clouds Past: A Look Back at Magellan

Jan 31, 2012 | Despite high-hopes, community support, and a lot of good science, the Magellan cloud computing project has ended after a two-year run. Like the famous explorer, the current-day Magellan also navigated uncharted waters and documented the journey for the benefit of future generations. The results of the two-year study are now available in the form of an extensive 169-page report.
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Blue Waters to Use Globus Online File Transfer Service

Jan 24, 2012 | When Blue Waters comes online this year, scientists will be able to spend more time on actual research, thanks in part to Globus Online, a cloud-based managed file transfer service. The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) selected Globus Online for its ability to move and synchronize files reliably between multiple locations without the need to install complex software.
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Hybrid Cloud Ready for Takeoff in 2012

Jan 17, 2012 | Hybrid cloud computing, which strategically combines the best of on-premise and hosted solutions, is not without challenges; however, when done right, it's a compelling business model, one that maximizes the benefits of cloud while minimizing its risks. This piece looks at how the hybrid approach may be the key to unlocking cloud's potential.
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Mastering Windows Azure Application Development

Jan 10, 2012 | In the years to come, cloud computing will take a substantial piece of the market from traditional deployment models. This implies growing demand for applications that can operate in a cloud environment, and for software engineers skilled in cloud computing technologies. Mastering application development for Windows Azure is a most valuable investment for a .NET programmer.
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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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Above the Clouds: An Interview with Armando Fox

Aug 02, 2011 | If you spend any time reading about scientific computing in the clouds, it is quite likely you have encountered the name Armando Fox at least once. Fox has been writing about cloud computing before the term ever emerged into mainstream computing speak and continues to be a prolific source of information about cutting-edge cloud computing research for scientific and technical computing.
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Research Targets Computational Experiments in the Cloud

Jul 27, 2011 | A team of researchers, with backing from Amazon Web Services, set about to explore the viability of running computational experiments on virtualized hardware--specifically, Amazon's public cloud. Their findings confirm that there are benefits but also explore some of the challenges that persist. We talk with one of the leads of the "experiment on experiments" to learn more.
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Dell Uses Force to Enhance Integrated Datacenter Portfolio

Jul 20, 2011 | Dell announced today that it intends to buy San Jose-based Force10 Networks, in part due to their Open Cloud Networking framework. The move represents a clear cloud datacenter-driven buy from Round Rock and signals what they hope will be more incentive for customers to see the value in integrated datacenter solutions.
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The New Era of Intelligent Application Mobility

Jul 19, 2011 | Duncan Johnston-Watt, founder & CEO of Cloudsoft describes the concept of intelligent application mobility and the new possibilities this signals via the ability to seamlessly move applications across clouds and locations.
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Microsoft Brings MapReduce into the Fold

Jul 18, 2011 | Microsoft announced this week that it would be offering its Project Daytona up for scrutiny--an iterative MapReduce framework that they hope will bring researchers flocking to their cloud service.
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IBM Partnership “Brokers” Disease Research Breakthrough

Jul 14, 2011 | IBM partnered with Swiss startup CloudBroker to provide the high performance cloud computing resources needed to combat deadly, drug-resistant pathogens. The time to results produced pleasant surprises for the scientists and opens the door for services like CloudBroker to find inroads in research and enterprise.
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Unlocking the Potential of HPC Cloud Computing

Jul 05, 2011 | Arpit Joshipura from Force10 Networks describes the requirements for cloud networking at the compute, network, and storage layers for HPC data centers and explores the concept of an open cloud networking framework.
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Blue Gene Sniffs for Black Gold in the Cloud

Jun 27, 2011 | Dr. Manish Parashar describes the winning supercomputing as a service project from Rutgers University that demonstrates how to connecting two IBM Blue Gene/P systems in two different continents to form a large HPC cloud using the CometCloud framework.
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Toward a Fault-Tolerant Cloud

Jun 23, 2011 | With the proliferation of public cloud infrastructures, our dependability on them has increased. Many of our vital services pertaining to the research, industry or even lifestyle domain have been massively moved onto the cloud. Then, what happens when the cloud services we are depending on go down? Dr. Jose Luis Vazquez-Poletti shares some key aspects on how the scientific community can provide answers to this problem.
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Video Interview: The AMD Path to HPC Clouds

Jun 16, 2011 | This week at the AMD Fusion Developer Summit we sat down with AMD's Margaret Lewis to discuss the role the chipmaker will play in the high-performance clouds of the future, how its Opteron has served as a cloud datacenter foundation, and what the future holds following the introduction of Bulldozer later this year.
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European Cloud Projects Center Stage in Timisoara

Jun 13, 2011 | Dr. Jose Luis Vazquez-Poletti highlights a number of notable cloud computing research efforts that received attention during the Second Workshop on Software Services: Cloud Computing and Applications based on Software Services held last week in Timisoara.
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IBM Tunes Clouds for HPC Verticals

Jun 09, 2011 | IBM announced the first of its industry-specific HPC cloud offerings today with its Engineering Cloud, which is provided without virtualization performance overhead and a host of tools to cater to EDA, manufacturing and beyond.
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Plume Rises Over Oil and Gas Industry

Jun 08, 2011 | Finding case studies that highlight cloud computing, especially using public cloud or multitenant resources, is no easy task. To take the temperature of the industry's willingness to consider outsourcing some of their HPC, we talked to Rigstar and Marlabs who have put together a cloud tailored to the unique concerns of oil and gas customers.
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Will Community Clouds Float on Wall Street?

Jun 03, 2011 | The technology division for the New York Stock Exchange's parent company has announced a community cloud for the financial services industry. The platform, set to come out of beta at the beginning of July could teach enterprises some valuable lessons about shared resources--for better or for worse.
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ClusterTech CEO Shines Light on China’s HPC Clouds

Jun 01, 2011 | This week we discussed high performance computing and the arrival of clouds in China with physics scholar-turned-CEO Wai-Mo Suen. Dr. Suen provides insights about the future of cloud-enabled HPC and presents a sense of some key differences between cloud computing in China versus other areas.
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Grid Engine Gets a PaaS

May 24, 2011 | Grid Engine's new caretaker, Univa, announced a partnership with Eucalyptus Systems to bring managablility to HPC cloud users. This week we spoke with CEO of Univa, Gary Tyreman about what this means for Grid Engine users as they seek to allow the cloud to tackle some of their challenges.
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A Plateau of Productivity for Grids

May 23, 2011 | According to a recent report from Excelian, grid computing has finally "grown up" which provides a window for users in the financial services industry to consider (and reconsider) best practices for distributed computing and evaluate variations on old models.
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Bull's Market for HPC on Demand

May 18, 2011 | French high performance computing vendor Bull announced its HPC cloud service, eXtreme Factory at SC10, emphasizing its value for simulation-driven customers. This week we checked in on progress with the company's head of HPC, Pascal Barbolosi, to see how the platform has weathered its first six months.
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Video Feature: The Cloud's Criminal Element

May 17, 2011 | This week we sat down with cybercrime and cloud security expert Dr. Nir Kshetri to discuss key challenges for users and providers of cloud computing services. Kshetri provides some background on crimes delivered across networks, both economic and technological, and discusses some key legal and policy changes that could shape remote resources to come.
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Opening Sequences for HPC on Demand

May 11, 2011 | Next-generation sequencing has opened a world of possibilities for science and medicine, but for providers of remote high performance computing like Penguin Computing via its HPC on demand service, the new world of massive genomics analytics has opened other doors--for researchers and their own business model.
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Air Force, University of Illinois Take Aim at Cloud Challenges

May 09, 2011 | This week the University of Illinois, the Air Force Research Laboratory and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research launched a new initiative to tackle some of the most persistent security and data integrity related issues that plague the cloud. We discussed the effort and its projected outcomes with the project lead, Dr. Roy Campbell.
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Simulating Society at the Global Scale

May 06, 2011 | A group of European researchers is vying to create a distributed supercomputer of unprecedented scale to deploy real-time analytics from hundreds of streams (economic, social, environmental, medical and beyond) to arrive at a living, breathing simulation of life on earth.
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Licensing Blocks Path to HPC Cloud Business Development

May 11, 2011 | Earl Dodd explores the tense ecosystem that supports rapid development in high performance and cloud computing while still maintaining software licensing models that incapable of allowing high performance clouds to float above current constraints.
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Bad Moon Rises Over Cloud Perceptions

May 11, 2011 | It's a glorious day for those with backup and recovery services to pitch, not to mention for those who are nipping at the heels of Amazon Web Service's cloud empire. On the flip side, for those who just got word that their data is unrecoverable via a short letter, not to mention those who have been proclaiming cloud computing as the safe bet for mission critical applications--it's been quite a bleak morning.
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National Science Foundation Partnership Funds Cloud-Society Research

May 11, 2011 | The National Science Foundation (NSF) and Microsoft have selected thirteen cloud computing projects for monetary and infrastructure funding. From research focused on energy, sustainability, genomics, medicine and the IT systems themselves, these undertakings find innovative ways to maximize valuable data for the good of all.

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Next Level IT Sourcing: The New Data Center Model

May 11, 2011 | Valery Herrington defines the concept of next level IT sourcing and discusses the value and challenges of these new models with the rise of cloud computing. Although enterprise-driven in focus, the idea of this particular model of IT is applicable across the board; from large research organizations to the smallest of startups.
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GlobusWORLD Video Series: Ian Foster on Accelerating Science and Discovery

Apr 15, 2011 | This week we sat down with Ian Foster, grid luminary and Director of the Computation Institute at the University of Chicago to discuss some of the fundamental changes in how IT trends are reshaping research and progress. We also explore some of Foster's ideas about grid computing and its evolution over the course of the last several years.
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GlobusWORLD Video Series: Steve Tuecke on Science, SaaS Synergies

Apr 14, 2011 | During this week's GlobusWORLD event at Argonne National Laboratory, we took time out to discuss grid and cloud movements and new developments in web-delivered services that are allowing scientists to shed IT concerns and get back to focusing on research.
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GlobusWORLD Video Series: Brigitte Raumann on the New Era for Biologists

Apr 13, 2011 | This week at Argonne National Laboratory we caught up with Brigitte Raumann from the Initiative in Biomedical Informatics to discuss some of the challenges facing life sciences research today. The problem is no longer a lack of data, however, it's the proliferation that is stretching infrastructure to its limit.
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Boosting Biology with High Performance Clouds

Apr 11, 2011 | Dr. Asoke K. Taukder discusses the range of biological applications that can be run in a cloud environment and provides an overview of how high performance computing in the cloud can reshape the way research in the life science is performed.
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Supercomputer in the Cloud Speeds Biotech Research

Apr 08, 2011 | With one of the largest biotechnology events in the world just around the corner, an announcement that provides details about a supercomputer dedicated exclusively to a biosciences application is bound to draw some attention. However, when that machine could be placed in the top 100 of the Top500 list of the world’s most powerful clusters and exists only in the cloud, it is certainly worth taking a second look at.
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Cloud Sparking Rapid Evolution of Life Sciences R&D

Apr 06, 2011 | Bruce Maches provides a thorough examination of the complexity and resource requirements of specialized life science applications and what the role (and challenges) will be as cloud continue to enter into the industry. Many life science companies are struggling to afford to internally build, implement, and support much of the required systems and infrastructure but as Maches argues, there are alternatives.
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Cloud Surfing Made Simple

Apr 05, 2011 | Alex Lesser, Vice President of the Cloud/Data Infrastructure Group at PSSC Labs asks, "What is a cloud?" Obviously it is group of small water particles we see in the Earth’s atmosphere, but when combined with the word “computing” a cloud takes on a life of its own, especially for high-performance computing users.
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IEEE Declares War on Cloud Computing Challenges

Apr 04, 2011 | Today the IEEE announced a broad cloud computing initiative that seeks to untangle some of the most complicated knots binding cloud advancement--interoperability and general clarity of the ecosystem. The group sees a long road ahead but trusts its methods from past international standards will apply during this process as well.
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Are Reports of Mainframe Death Greatly Exaggerated?

Apr 01, 2011 | A new report released by a data center management organization indicates that mainframes are set to go the way of the dinosaur, in part due to cloud computing. However, some question whether or not this point is valid in their preduictions for the mainframe's cloudy future.
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Compliance Complexities Challenge Cloud Adoption

Mar 31, 2011 | Cloud and infrastructure compliance expert, Shawn R. Chaput, lends his understanding of the range of regulatory and other constraints that affect a number of users of high-performance computing. This week he took a look at the challenges of compliance burdens and what to consider when weighing cloud computing options based on lessons learned during his compliance consulting experiences.
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Emerging Marketplace Deals in Spare Cycles

Mar 29, 2011 | As more users warm to the idea of using cloud-based resources, new ways of distributing spare compute cycles are emerging, including via the use of marketplaces like that offered by SpotCloud. Such services allow those with excess capacity to sell their downtime while providing users with cheap access to resources they need.
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Microsoft “Targets” Virtualization Goals of Mega-Retailers

Mar 25, 2011 | Implementing an aggressive virtualization strategy involving over 300,000 endpoints, including 15,000 servers, 29,000 workstations and several other sources of input is no simple task. American retail giant Target announced how it managed the feat, while at the same time giving Microsoft some credibility in its role in a sphere dominated by stiff competition.
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Brain Computer Interfaces Benefit from Cloud Advancements

Mar 23, 2011 | What do you get when you mix compute clouds and electroencephalograms (EEG)? We asked Kathleen Ericson, a PhD candidate in the Department of Computer Science at Colorado State University, who has explored some of these possibilities in an award-winning piece at the IEEE Conference on Cloud Computing Technology & Science in December 2010.
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Clouds Set to Make Smart Grids Smarter

Mar 21, 2011 | Over the next few years, the very sources of massive energy consumption--data centers that power cloud computing--could soon turn to serve the goals of energy efficiency programs. Cloud platforms and the scalable needs they can serve are increasingly being seen as key to energy management, especially as the range of devices, sensors and measurement tools grows and renewable sources are being fed back into the system.
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Cloud@Home: Goals, Challenges and Benefits of a Volunteer Cloud

Mar 17, 2011 | Building on ideas from grid computing, Dr. Salvatore Distefano and Dr. Antonio Puliafito discuss the concept of volunteer computing via Cloud@Home. This could be a way for implementing ubiquitous and pervasive computing as many computational devices and systems can be engaged simultaneously for performing ordinary activities, and may not necessarily be aware that they are doing so.
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The SaaS Stepping Stone to Strong IaaS Support

Mar 15, 2011 | We recently published an article that provided the opinions of a number of thought and industry leaders on the subject of public cloud viability for mission-critical or business-critical needs. While the responses were rather wide-ranging, there were a few common issues (including matters of cost, security and existing investment) that got Robin Meehan’s wheels turning.
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Calamities, Contingencies and the Cloud

Mar 14, 2011 | As the dust settles, both literally and figuratively, in Japan following the series of disasters more comprehansive assessments of the damage are emerging on a number of fronts--human, environmental, structural and otherwise. While clouds have played an important role in allowing global sharing and collaboration the datacenters that support them in Japan were put to the ultimate test.
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Considerations for the Cryptographic Cloud

Mar 11, 2011 | Members of the Microsoft Research Cryptography Group describe the complexities of building a secure cloud storage service on top of a public cloud infrastructure, which is often not fully trusted by the user. Dr. Kamara and Dr. Lauter also shed light on key architectures that combine recent and non-standard cryptographic primitives and survey the benefits such rchitectures would provide to both cloud providers and their end users.
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EDA Industry Leaders Build a Case for Clouds, Explore Limitations

Mar 08, 2011 | Cloud computing has been a consistent item on the programs of a number of Electronic Design Automation (EDA) industry events. To add to the discussion we explored the current role of clouds and looked to the future with five EDA executives to gauge their sense of cloud adoption and the reasons behind (or working against) it.
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The Eye of the Cyclone: Christian Tanasescu on SGI's Role in Technical Cloud Computing

Mar 07, 2011 | One year ago, SGI announced its SGI Cyclone for large-scale, on-demand cloud computing services specifically dedicated to technical applications. This first anniversary seemed like the perfect time to get an update from someone who is deeply involved with Cyclone, Christian Tanasescu. As Vice President Software Engineering at SGI. Christian, among others, leads SGI’s activities around Cyclone. He gives a status update on the technical clouds and talks about future directions for SGI.
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Migrating Scientific Experiments to the Cloud

Mar 04, 2011 | Despite the high interest about cloud computing from the scientific community it is still a wide open field. Dr. Oliveira and colleagues describe how choosing the best cloud support is a step forward, but also address the persistent need for services focused on the scientific workflow execution to bridge the gap between the cloud and real science in practice.
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Expert Panel: What’s Around the Bend for Big Data?

Mar 02, 2011 | This week we checked in with experts from Microsoft, IBM, Yahoo, Facebook's Hadoop engineering team and others to discuss some diverse issues related to big data, including changes in use, frameworks and applications. We also identify the year’s most profound trends and speculate on what lies ahead.
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HUBzero Paving the Way for the Third Pillar of Science

Feb 28, 2011 | What if researchers could access and share scientific simulation and modeling tools as easily as YouTube videos with the power of the cloud to drive it all? That’s the underlying premise for the HUBzero Platform for Scientific Collaboration, a cyberinfrastructure developed at Purdue University.
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Grid Pioneer Ian Foster Discusses the Future of Science in the Cloud

Feb 24, 2011 | In this interview, Ian Foster discusses the next logical steps beyond grid that leading to a major transformation in science. While there are new avenues opened via access to an unprecedented amount of computational power, there are still some challenges ahead. Foster details these issues and presents some updates from the Globus team, including information about Globus Online.
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Glimpses of the Brave New World for Cloud Security

Feb 22, 2011 | Yanpei Chen and Randy H. Katz, both from UC Berkeley, discuss the range of threats to cloud security from multiple perspectives--academia, industry, government and the "black hat" community, arguing that history teaches us that developing security architectures early in the process can pay off greatly as systems evolve and accrue more disparate security requirements. The challenge is to achieve some measure of adequate and affordable security without undermining the economic advantages of cloud computing.
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Azure Use Case Highlights Challenges for HPC Applications in the Cloud

Feb 21, 2011 | Although there are a number of use cases for HPC applications in the cloud, there are still platform and other challenges that must be met. Vedaprakash Subramanian and his colleagues recently had the experience of porting an HPC application, Numerical Generation of Synthetic Seismograms, onto Microsoft’s Windows Azure cloud and have generated some opinions to share about some of the challenges ahead for HPC in the cloud based on their experiences.
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Big Data, Big Demand: Navigating the Cloud Storage Landscape

Feb 17, 2011 | To clear the haze that muddles the much-needed "big picture" view of the cloud storage landscape for big data, we asked a number of storage experts about how users with high performance computing or big data needs should evaluate cloud storage options. We also take a look at what the future of cloud storage looks like as data volumes continue to grow.
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CTO Panel: Are Public Clouds Ripe for Mission Critical Applications?

Feb 15, 2011 | This week we gathered the opinions of five technical leaders from cloud service companies to gauge their views on customer reception of the idea of placing mission-critical applications on public resources. Just as important as the initial question about the viability of public clouds for core apps is a secondary query—for those that did decide to send mission-critical apps to the public cloud, what was the driving factor?
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The Cloud-Enabled Space Weather Platform

Feb 14, 2011 | Everett Toews describes the Cloud-Enabled Space Weather Platform, which uses a cloud-based solution to lower the barriers for physicists who are running complex space weather models and simulations. In addition to providing a scalable platform for space weather and magnetosphere research, the resource provides an opportunity for scientific collaboration at the cloud scale.
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Grid Perspectives on the Cloud Phenomenon

Feb 10, 2011 | Dr. Junlei Jiang discusses the nature of adotion of grid computing versus cloud computing, noting differences in the founding and subsequent evolution of both paradigms. While both share the same vision, the processes behind them vary--as do the adoption curves. Dr. Jiang presents an overivew of the main differences, pointing out the process of computing model natural selection that he sees happening.
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DRC Energizes Smith-Waterman, Opens Door to On-Demand Service

Feb 09, 2011 | Users of the compute-intensive Smith-Waterman algorithm, which provides fine-tuned yields from genetic sequence analysis projects, have often paid the price of expensive runs. Acceleration that can be plugged into standard servers that can run in the cloud could provide new opportunities to a broader set of researchers.
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Mapping the SLA Landscape for High Performance Clouds

Feb 07, 2011 | This in-depth article by Dr. Ivona Brandic notes that while a wealth of work has been accomplished to suit the technological development of clouds, there has yet been very little work done in the area of the market mechanisms that support them. Service Level Agreement (SLA) mapping is a relatively new concept designed to standardize the way users find and use cloud service providers--and create the necessary environment for dynamic and open cloud markets.
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More In the Spotlight Testing

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Mars as a Service: Cloud Computing for the Red Planet Exploration Era

Feb 03, 2011 | The MetNet project aims to go where no other Mars missions have gone before, at least in terms of the way it will gather and then process data. This mission to Mars will be based on the power of a new type of dandelion seed-shaped landing vehicle called the MetNet Lander. Dr. Jose Luis Vazquez-Poletti describes the project's goals, methods, and how cloud computing is set to provide the resources for this data-intensive mission.
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Looking Back at Microsoft’s First Year in the Cloud

Feb 02, 2011 | Just one year after its formal, public entry into the cloud computing arms race, Microsoft has carved out a sizable user base for its Azure offering. While there are still gaps in terms of use cases relevant to high-performance computing, a range of features signaling its maturation provides some glimmers of hope for what it can provide to HPC cloud users in its second year.
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Remote Interactive 3D Visualization and the Key to HPC Cloud Acceptance

Jan 31, 2011 | Earl Dodd argues that for the HPC cloud to gain practical acceptance as a viable decision-support tool in a wide variety of businesses and industries, it must include Remote Interactive 3D Visualization as a fundamental component of its architecture. Without this vital functionality, the HPC cloud runs the risk of being considered a technological novelty with limited commercial success. However, there are some persistent non-technical barriers that are preventing the full emergence of a broad new user group in the high-performance computing in the cloud space.
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Lessons from the Grid: An Interview with Argonne’s Kate Keahey

Jan 25, 2011 | In this interview with Kate Keahey from Argonne National Lab, we discuss her background with distributed computing, limitations of the grid, challenges and benefits of cloud computing for HPC and her view on critical elements that the community as a whole—vendor, users, and scientists alike—will need to address as the space matures.
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Cisco’s Cloud CTO Clarifies Strategy, Describes Datacenters of the Future

Jan 24, 2011 | Cisco's CTO of Cloud Computing, Lew Tucker, came clean on the company's cloud strategy this week in a video interview. In addition to revealing a rough path for the coming months, Tucker also revealed his insights about the "many clouds" theory, the role of the network in cloud computing, and innovations that could change datacenter design.
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Managing CERN: OpenNebula Team Tames the Cloud

Jan 21, 2011 | This week, Rubén S. Montero, one of the members of the team behind helping researchers manage the complex infrastructure at the world’s largest particle physics laboratories in the world, shares insights about managing CERN’s infrastructure. At the heart of the IaaS cloud CERN has implemented is OpenNebula, which now serves as the management layer in production following extensive prototyping and testing. Montero describes the project’s evolution and current status as CERN considers offering a public cloud interface.
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Grid Engine Finds Safe Harbor at Univa

Jan 18, 2011 | Author Wolfgang Gentzsch, former CEO and President of Genias Software, which originally developed the Grid Engine software, shares his view on GE's new home in Univa. He provides context and history of the software and discusses how the Grid Engine open source community can rest assured that robust development will continue.
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Canada Explores New Frontiers in Astroinformatics

Jan 17, 2011 | The number of scientific instruments available to astronomy researchers for gathering data has grown significantly in recent years, leading to unprecedented amounts of information that requires vast storage and processing capabilities. Canadian researchers are finding a way around this problem with a new solution that combines the best of grid and cloud computing, allowing them to more efficiently reach their research goals.
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Cloud to Improve Genomic Research at Spanish National Cancer Research Centre

Jan 13, 2011 | The need to analyze increasingly large amounts of genomics and proteomics data has meant that research institutions such as the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre (CNIO) allocate an increasing amount of to time and budget provisioning, as well as managing and maintaining their scientific computing infrastructure, areas that not their core business. A European IT company, powered by AWS is showing how cloud computing can mitigate these problems and get researchers back to their mission.
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