Google Donates Cloud-Based Platform, CPU Hours to Environmental Research

Dec 07, 2010 | This year at the International Climate Change Conference, Google was on hand to announce its cloud-based platform, Google Earth Engine, and its donation of 20 million CPU hours to aid in enviornmental research. The project culls Landsat data, which was only recently brought online, and provides a platform to create and use applications specific to defined research areas, including forestry, water conservation and beyond.
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Data Deluge Pushes Medical Imaging, Healthcare into the Cloud

Dec 06, 2010 | Within the broader field of healthcare, medical imaging is one area that is expected to grow, both in terms of the amount of money involved and the datasets that are generated. With regulations forcing hospitals to store all of this data, often permanently, the cloud is looking like the only the viable solution for already-stretched infrastructure.
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Mainframe, Client-Server and the Clouds Above

Dec 01, 2010 | There have been numerous discussions about how cloud computing is the next great paradigm shift in computing, following the initial mainframe explosion, then on to client/server. Others have put forth the argument that clouds are, in fact, the culmination of these two separate movements—if not the very revolution capable of maximizing the “best of both worlds.”
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SC10 Wrap Up: The Cutting Room Floor

Nov 24, 2010 | At the SC10 event in New Orleans we were able to capture quite a bit of video, some of which never made it live on the site during the course of the busy week. We wanted to share a few highlights with you--and thank those of you who stopped by the HPCwire/HPCin the Cloud booth to say hello.
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Investing in China’s Cloudy Vision

Nov 24, 2010 | While its supercomputing might is no longer in question, If China is to become a serious player in the emerging industries that will revolve around cloud computing—which now includes everything from hardware to services to mobile technology developments—its infrastructure shortage could be the Achilles’ heel, preventing it from reaching its 2015 cloudy vision.
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SC10 Video Feature: Songnian Zhou on the IT Renaissance

Nov 19, 2010 | During this year's SC event in New Orleans, we caught up with co-founder and CEO of Platform Computing, Songnian Zhou to take a big picture look at key movements in computing--and where grid and clouds fit within the "Renaissance" Zhou feels is taking place.
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Easy HPC in the Big Easy: An SC10 Interview with Bill Hilf

Nov 17, 2010 | This week during the kickoff for SC10 we spent an hour with Bill Hilf, General Manager of Microsoft's Technical Computing Group--a segment of the company that is devoted to HPC as well as parallel and cloud computing. We were able to cover everything from ease of use of HPC applications, GPU accessibility issues, job schedulers and their role in cloud for high-performance computing applications--and how Microsoft might finally be finding a way to grab the HPC market once again.
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GPU Supercomputing Arrives on Amazon's Cloud

Nov 15, 2010 | This week has brought news about GPU computing to the forefront of media attention with the announcement of the world's most powerful supercomputer, which boasts 7,168 NVIDIA Tesla GPUs. It has also been a notable week for GPU computing in the cloud with Amazon's unveiling of a new instance type--the Cluster GPU.
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The HPC Cloud-Centric Guide to SC10

Nov 12, 2010 | Stormy weather projections aren't the only reason why it's cloudy in New Orleans this year. On the official program for SC10 there are a number of sessions, presentations, tutorials and poster receptions all geared toward exploring specific topics in the HPC cloud arena. We've put together a meaty list for those who wish to hear some leading luminaries in HPC and cloud debate and explain current challenges and successes--and we hope to see you for at least a few.
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Cloud Security: The Federated Identity Factor

Nov 09, 2010 | As the popularity of cloud-based applications continues to grow, IT departments will increasingly turn to federated identity as the preferred means for managing access control. The advantage is that it enables the enterprise to maintain full and centralized control over access to all applications, whether internal or external.
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NASA Takes Cloud on Mars Mission

Nov 08, 2010 | Last week it was announced that NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) would be making use of Amazon's cloud to handle the massive influx of data from the extended Mars rover missions--data that had outgrown its home in the initial systems the agency dedicated. This marks a critical stage in testing the cloud for government agency research missions, and opens the door to future use of its own Nebula cloud, which is still being evaluated.
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Vineet Tyagi from Impetus Technologies on The Hadoop, Cloud, and Mafia Connection

Nov 04, 2010 | Vineet Tyagi of Impetus Technologies presented a session at Cloud Expo on Hadoop and Big Data Analytics, which covered issues relevant to the use of Hadoop in the enterprise and an introduction to the ecosystem that has emerged around it. In this video interview, he went beyond the session to discuss some important side issues--and let us know what has been, quite literally, lost in translation to many.
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Entering Enterprise Territory at Cloud Expo 2010: Notes from the Show Floor

Nov 03, 2010 | Highlights and thoughts from the floor of Cloud Expo 2010 in Silicon Valley where we attended to look for the intersection between high-performance computing, large-scale enterprise and what the two have in common as they look to the clouds.
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Top HPC Cloud Luminaries Gather in Germany

Nov 02, 2010 | Last week leading figures from the HPC and cloud realm gathered in Frankfurt, Germany, for the ISC Cloud Conference, which was organized by the same team that puts together the long-running International Supercomputing Conference each year. The conference drew leading speakers from industry and academia to discuss the challenges, benefits and future of cloud for high-performance computing.
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Intel Lays Groundwork to Fulfill 2015 Cloud Vision

Oct 29, 2010 | This week Intel announced its vision for the cloud in 2015, which targets a number of issues including interoperability standards, efficiency, security and simplication of use across devices. While the breadth of the announcement is far-reaching and the goals lofty, the company is finally laying forth the first pieces of how it views itself as part of the "paradigm shift" of cloud computing -- even if it's clear that some of the ideals might take longer than 2015 to be realized.
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Distributed Data Grids and the Cloud: A Chat With ScaleOut’s Dr. William Bain

Oct 27, 2010 | Distributed data grids have been receiving more attention lately due to the scalability provided by the cloud and the increasing need for users to do more with record amounts of data in near real-time. We talk with Dr. William Bain, founder and CEO of ScaleOut Software about scalability, the history of parallel computing and of course, distributed data grids--and how the cloud is changing all three.
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SC10 Disruptive Technology Preview: The First Cloud Portal to “R” and Beyond

Oct 26, 2010 | Each year at SC, a handful of disruptive technologies are selected as showcase items to represent drastic innovations for high-performance computing. On the list this year is a "Google Docs-like portal for scientific computing in the cloud" that delivers the first front-end door to the R language as well as a host of other useful features and tools for statisticians, scientists and the HPC community at large.
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Cloud-Driven Tools from Microsoft Research Target Earth, Life Sciences

Oct 19, 2010 | Last week at their eScience Workshop at the University of California, Berkeley Microsoft Research announced two key technological progress points related to their Azure cloud. The advancements are currently serving researchers in ecological studies as well as biology and further demonstrate the potential of their cloud offering in further scientific computing projects.
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Enabling Research with MATLAB on the TeraGrid

Oct 18, 2010 | Last year Cornell University and Purdue University received funding from the National Science Foundation to undertake their MATLAB on the TeraGrid project. Since its inception a number of researchers have been making use of the resource and Cornell's Center for Advanced Computing is demonstrating that the resource might have a permanent place in the TeraGrid resource provider collection in the future.
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On the Grid-Cloud Border at CERN

Oct 12, 2010 | At the core of the CERN HPC information technology infrastructure is the use of their own internal HPC grid that manages the vast data volumes. Due to the amount of data and complexity of this infrastructure, CERN has created a separate information technology team to handle all aspects of their HPC data volume. According to one of the leaders of this team, CERN's Sverre Jarp, the facility is "taking steps to move HPC grid infrastructure into the cloud" to better manage this data.
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Harvard Medical School Demonstrates Cloud as Research, Business Model

Oct 11, 2010 | Harvard Medical School, in an effort to centralize its existing HPC infrastructure and better manage researcher's access to computational resources, has pieced together and tested its own private cloud. Via this internal cloud, researchers across the HMS system and within its network of external instiutions have been proving cloud not only as a valid research tool but as a sound business model.
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Bringing Digital Manufacturing to Market

Oct 06, 2010 | Last week in Washington, new research from NCMS and Intesect 360 was presented to help convince government leaders of the inherent value of making high-performance computing software and resources accessible to the manufacturing sector--from the bottom up. Without having access to core technologies, particularly in the realm of modeling and simulation, many smaller design and manufacturing shops have a hard time remaining competitive, but this is an expensive, risky leap to make for many firms.
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HPC 360 Highlights Manufacturing’s Missing Middle

Oct 05, 2010 | Last week, HPC resource provider R Systems hosted its annual HPC 360 conference with a distinct focus on empowering the missing middle of manufacturing via access to high-performance computing capabilities. The event highlighted the need for complex software packages for modeling and simulation and on a larger level, emphasized the value of the "Silicon Prairie" as an enabler for businesses feeding into the larger international manufacturing supply chain.
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HPC-as-a-Service Gaining Traction in Enterprise Arena

Sep 29, 2010 | Data accumulation rates are growing astronomically and managing data in traditional ways is getting difficult in the same proportion. HPC is emerging as a champion for large-scale data management needs in the enterprise. It is required by businesses that rely on high powered analytics to provide data driven insights, companies that need more than simple reports and dashboards and is increasingly being delivered on-demand via HPC as a Service.
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GPU Acceleration for the On-Demand Era

Sep 28, 2010 | There is increasing convergence between the once disparate worlds of GPUs and HPC. This gap is closing, particularly now that scientific and enterprise users are being granted access to GPU acceleration via on-demand HPC and GPU-driven services. Such offerings are expected to grow along with a rise in the number of applications available, marking what might be a new era for HPC and GPGPU both individually and as a unit.
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Embedded Clouds: A Look Back at HPEC 2010

Sep 22, 2010 | High-performance computing (HPC) isn't restricted to computer rooms. It is also found "embedded" within expensive gadgets. For example, it is at your local hospital inside the CAT and MR scanners. It is inspecting new semiconductors. It is inside defense RADAR and signals intelligence platforms. In fact, the market for embedded HPC is thought to be about the same size as the market for supercomputers.
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Elastic Application Platforms for Cloud Computing

Sep 21, 2010 | Despite the price/performance advantages of clouds, it remains hard to accelerate and scale the performance of applications, which are often written for a single computer and thus cannot leverage the parallelism inherent in cloud environments without extensive refactoring and reprogramming. What is needed, therefore, are elastic application platforms that simplify the development and deployment of ultra-high-performance elastic applications.
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Cloud Use Cases Group Takes SLAs to Task

Sep 17, 2010 | Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are crucial to any nontrivial use of the cloud. Once an organization understands its requirements, it needs a guarantee from its cloud provider that those requirements will be met. Cloud consumers trust cloud providers to deliver some or all of their infrastructure services, so it is vital to define what those services are, how they are delivered and how they are used.
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Technical Clouds: Seeding Discovery - An Interview with Microsoft's Dan Reed

Sep 16, 2010 | Dan Reed helps drive Microsoft’s long-term technology vision and the associated policy engagement with governments and institutions around the world. He is also responsible for the company’s R&D on parallel and extreme scale computing. In advance of his keynote at ISC Cloud in Frankfurt, Dan answers questions about the future of technical clouds and summarizes key challenges and highlights of the cloud for scientific computing.
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"Intelligent" Cloud Automation Gets Substantial Push From Investors

Sep 15, 2010 | Adaptive Computing, known for its Moab automation technology, announced today that it was one of four companies selected by Intel Capital for a round of Series A funding. The company is set to receive $14 million with Intel’s line combined with further resources from two other investment firms who saw promise in the company and its nine-year track record of growth and profitability.
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Jamcracker CEO Chandrasekhar on Cloud Brokerage, New IT Landscape

Sep 11, 2010 | Jamcracker has been in the business of helping clients as they try to solve complex cloud management and provisioning issues since before "cloud" was the latest buzzword in IT. The company's CEO and founder discusses its recent partnership with Eucalyptus, cloud brokerage services and the future of enterprise cloud models.
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Why Mission Critical Applications Are Staying Put

Sep 08, 2010 | Perhaps a better title would be, “yet another reason why mission critical applications are staying put” since this is so frequently a topic of discussion. However, to break from the string of latency, performance and development challenges for a moment, we are left with the more nebulous issue of IT culture; namely, the clearly defined tensions between virtualization advocates and the stalwart owners of core, revenue-critical applications.
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Cloud Computing: Improving Enterprise IT Efficiency and Agility

Sep 08, 2010 | Cloud computing may be considered a new phenomenon in IT, but, in many ways, it is an evolution propelled by new IT delivery models and enabling technologies. Initially, driven by cost concerns, enterprises turned to collocation as a more efficient IT delivery model. The next logical step, managed hosting, allowed enterprises to leverage the management expertise – and efficiencies – of service providers.
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Inching Closer to a New Era for Interoperability Standards

Sep 07, 2010 | Interoperability remains a critical issue for groups advocating that users and vendors alike require a healthy, open ecosystem to drive greater adoption rates but the standardization for portability has been slow in coming. Groups like the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) are working together with other standards bodies to create a better cloud as the organization's president discusses during an interview following news of OVF standardization--a first step for workload portability standards.
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On Par for 2 Billion: 3PAR Discusses Cloud Strategy

Sep 01, 2010 | Storage vendor 3PAR has been at the heart of an intense bidding war between HP and Dell due to its unique refinements and developments in virtualized storage platform concepts. Thin provisioning and a focus on the needs of large-scale enterprises and cloud providers have catapulted the company into the public eye but as 3PAR's Craig Nunes discusses with HPC in the Cloud, the cloud strategy has been consistent since 1999--even if the world is just taking notice now.
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Busting the "Cloud in a Box" Myth

Aug 30, 2010 | The concept of private clouds is gaining traction and due to the buzz, more enterprises are taking a much closer look at the possibility—if they haven’t taken steps to virtualize some or all of their infrastructure already. For those who have not yet made the transition, a lack of understanding of the complex process behind private cloud implementation is at the core of hesitancy, therefore vendors are looking for ways to convince users to fear not, the private cloud is not only within reach—but simple to step into.
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Achieving Ultra High Performance in the Cloud

Aug 24, 2010 | Companies in competitive domains, such as financial services, create large data repositories containing significant amounts of data collected from daily operations. Using supercomputers to analyze these massive datasets might yield the highest level of performance, but this is prohibitively expensive. Using proprietary, custom-built HPC atop cloud environments is also a viable option--although one that does come with a series of drawbacks that must be mitigated to achieve critical performance levels.
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Are Cloud Datacenters Greener and Cleaner?

Aug 19, 2010 | New data centers being run by the likes of Google or Microsoft are enormous and boast cost efficiencies 5-10X greater than traditional, “un-virtualized” enterprise data centers, which are also typically smaller. The efficiency benefits inherent in cloud data centers come in different forms and include positive aspects like superior energy efficiency, higher availability, and better performance.
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Challenges Ahead for HPC Applications in the Cloud

Aug 16, 2010 | Cloud infrastructure is still lucrative if comparing its economics to building in-house HPC machines. However, cloud for HPC has to be efficient enough to reach proper performance ceilings without disappointing customers who probably experienced at a certain point to run their HPC applications on dedicated machines. As part of an ongoing series, Dr. Mohamed F. Ahmed addresses the multitude of challenges inherent to porting HPC applications in the cloud and what steps need to be taken in research to address such barriers.
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HPC Sharing in the Cloud

Aug 12, 2010 | Many scientific applications can require significant coordination between large numbers of nodes. Massive effort is spent in the HPC arena to hide much of the latency from coordination with expensive low-latency networks and fine-tuned communication libraries. Such efforts have not yet been translated to the commercial cloud computing arena, which still typically provide systems with varying amounts of installed memory but rarely various quality interconnects.
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To Build or to Buy Time: That is the Question

Aug 11, 2010 | The question of whether to invest in a cluster, to make use of HPC on demand services or to look to the public cloud is difficult to answer but some have found that HPC as a Service (renting a cluster) makes financial sense while suiting complex workloads due to the support a large cloud provider might not be able to offer.
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The Network in the Cloud. An Interview with Mellanox’ Senior Director Gilad Shainer

Aug 05, 2010 | Substantial benefits can be provided to the HPC cloud community if a high-performance network provisioning solution can be devised. In the light of his invited talk at ISC Cloud’10 in October this year in Frankfurt, Wolfgang Gentzsch asks Gilad Shainer from Mellanox for some insights about the cloud networking issue.
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Cloud Developments for Developers: An Analyst View

Aug 03, 2010 | In the realm of HPC as well as for developers and enterprises, the cloud offers a range of possibilites, including the ability to create applications that would otherwise be prohibitive due to infrastructure costs for developers. There is promise on the horizon for innovations that will allow more developers to access HPC hardware and services.
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Close Encounters of the Storage Kind

Jul 29, 2010 | Steve Campbell scours the floor at SIGGRAPH 2010 in Los Angeles in search of some of the most compelling firms catering to Hollywood's HPC needs and finds that BlueArc fits the bill. Storage and cloud companies are finding that the entertainment industry is always seeking the next big tech and the fight is on to deliver.
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An Intelligent Public Cloud for HPC

Jul 27, 2010 | Adaptive Computing came forth this morning with some details about their early involvement with Amazon's new HPC-geared instance type. In addition to the more predictable news about the role of their Moab technology, they also tested Cluster Compute Instances to determine how they would perform for HPC users.
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NVIDIA Serves Up Reality, GPU-Style

Jul 26, 2010 | This morning NVIDIA and its hosting partner PEER 1 announced that they would be delivering the industry's first large-scale hosted GPU cloud, which means, among other things, that the popular RealityServer platform might be able to infiltrate more user groups due to the shedding of GPU cluster requirements.
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GIS Applications Take to the Clouds

Jul 20, 2010 | Geographic Information Systems (GIS) applications have been among those relegated to the traditional mode of software delivery until more recently as some of the main players in the industry have taken the first tentative steps toward to the clouds. This new delivery model marks a paradigm shift from a business model standpoint and has the potential to bring compute-intensive GIS applications to a larger user base than ever before.
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NASA, Rackspace Open-Sourcing the Cloud

Jul 19, 2010 | Rackspace announced today the arrival of OpenStack in conjunction with NASA, who will be providing a core aspect of its capbility later in the year. This news provides those with interoperability and standardization concerns a noble champion, even though the development and true potential of the open source project have still to be realized.
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Cloudy Costs for Amazon’s New HPC Offering

Jul 16, 2010 | Following Amazon's rather unexpected announcement of its new HPC-geared instance type for EC2 called Cluster Compute Instances (CCI) the questions started emerging about the pricing structure. More specifically, about how this news would either answer or complicate the age-old question of buying or renting a cluster -- or whether the cloud is the most efficient measure for reducing costs without sacrificing performance.
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Amazon Adds HPC Capability to EC2

Jul 13, 2010 | The announcement this morning that Amazon is offering Cluster Compute Instances for EC2 specifically for the needs of HPC users might just be that long-awaited game-changer when it comes to the viability of scientific computing in the public cloud. While it is fresh from a private beta and the results are promising, only time will tell to what degree users will snatch up this opportunity to have supercomputing power on demand.
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Azure on the Horizon

Jul 13, 2010 | Microsoft's Partner Conference kicked off yesterday in Washington, yielding news about several key partnerships with household names like HP, Dell and eBay and more expected to come during the week, including Fujitsu. Less than a year after Azure's release, the company's partner-centered strategy is starting to unfold.
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Supernova Factory Employs EC2, Puts Cloud to the Test

Jul 09, 2010 | Researchers from Berkeley Lab are looking at different options available for scientific computing users to move beyond physical infrastructure, including the possibility of deploying public clouds. A recently-published study of Amazon EC2's handling of data from the Nearby Supernova Factory sheds light on putting large-scale scientific computing into the cloud in practice and in theory.
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Eucalyptus Chief Talks Future After $20 Million Infusion

Jul 06, 2010 | HPC in the Cloud talks at length with CEO of Eucalyptus Systems, Marten Mickos, about the company's recent $20 million funding injection and what it means for the future of the open source and enterprise private cloud vendor. From vision to roadmap to HPC philosophy, Mickos shares his view of the past, present and future for the software firm.
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Clouds Above Calabria: HPC and Cloud Computing at the Cetraro Workshop

Jul 04, 2010 | The International Advanced Research Workshop on High Performance Computing, Grids and Clouds took place in Cetraro, Itally, and was the location for a great deal of discussion about the role and developments of grids and clouds in HPC. Participant Wolfgang Gentzsch reviews highlights from the event.
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Intelligent Clouds on the Horizon for Financial Services

Jul 01, 2010 | Although there have been modifications, much remains to be done to improve the usage of an HPC grid from a software perspective, both in terms of logical business application as well as from the various vendors of HPC products to support improved orchestration of resources for financial services and beyond.
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Renting HPC: What's Cloud Got to Do with It?

Jun 30, 2010 | When compared to the power the word "cloud" seems to wield, the concept of renting an HPC cluster can seem less attractive; however, with some vendors providing a virtualization-free environment with all of the on-demand appeal of clouds and minus the performance hitch, HPC-as-a-Service deserves a second look past the clouds.
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Will Public Clouds Ever Be Suitable for HPC?

Jun 27, 2010 | Since the primary consideration in HPC is performance, it stands to reason that it's no easy task to convince the scientific computing community that the public cloud is a viable option. Accordingly, a handful of traditional HPC vendors are refining their solutions to bridge the cloud performance chasm that exists in EC2, making the cloud more hospitable for HPC.
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Uncovering Results in the Magellan Testbed

Jun 22, 2010 | Since its launch in 2009, the Magellan cloud computing testbed has produced some results of interest to the scientific computing community in its effort to evalue the cost-effectiveness and energy-efficiency, not to mention performance for clouds in scientific applications. Kathy Yelick, NERSC Director discusses some key findings.
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Of Clouds and Mass Spectrometers: The Varian Case

Jun 18, 2010 | Use cases of real HPC happening in the cloud are becoming more common across industries, but life sciences research and development is one key area of movement. This doesn't just mean drug, health or genomics research. Companies requiring compute-intensive simulation and design in the area and investigating their options as well, as in the case of medical device developer, Varian.
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From Clusters to Clouds: An Interview with Platform CEO Songnian Zhou

Jun 15, 2010 | HPC in the Cloud presents an in-depth interview with Songnian Zhou, co-founder and CEO of Platform Computing. Discussion of the company's history and shifting focus from its roots in cluster management to the coming emergence of private clouds -- and all points in between -- are covered.
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Compliance Complexity and the Almighty Audit

Jun 12, 2010 | Is it possible that security and compliance will overshadow new IT investments? For those handling sensitive data, keeping up with regulatory changes has become a significant barrier to cloud adoption; throw in fines big enough to sink an enterprise for non-compliance and IT stagnation sets in.
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The Shape of Enterprise Cloud Models in 2020

Jun 11, 2010 | This week research firm BroadGroup suggested that by 2020 only 10 percent of all applications will remain within the private cloud for enterprise. To get to the heart of this statement, we discussed this and larger datacenter trends in enterprise with report author Marion Howard Healy.
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Engaging the Missing Middle in HPC

Jun 07, 2010 | The missing middle in HPC has been estimated by some to be in the many millions, but reaching this vast segment has been nearly impossible in any cohesive way. The cloud is granting access to the elite space, slowly but surely, and bringing the world more in line with the capabilities and competitive advantages provided by HPC.
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Microsoft's Azure Chief Tallies, Evaluates Cloud User Patterns

Jun 07, 2010 | In a recent address, Microsoft's Manager for Azure stated that the cloud platform had around 10,000 customers and far more users. This revelation sheds light on broader cloud adoption but more specifically, allows companies to evaluate how clouds are being deployed and permits cloud vendors to determine routes to converting new users.
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Back to the Future: Solid-State Storage in Cloud Computing

May 28, 2010 | Solid-state devices based on Flash and PCIe are emerging as a new class of enterprise storage option -- Tier-0. Tier-0 is an optimized storage tier specifically for high performance workloads, which can benefit the most from using flash memory.
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The Cloud Forecast for HPC: Preview of ISC'10

May 25, 2010 | It is becoming more difficult to question cloud's role in HPC as an increasing number of vendors jockey for top position in research, scientific, and large-scale enterprise computing. If the ISC exhibitor list is any indication, we're in for very cloudy conditions in HPC this year.
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Palm Trees, HPC and Virtualization

May 21, 2010 | An interview with Dr. Mazin Yousif, CTO Cloud Computing, IBM Canada, amid the palms and at the AICCSA International Conference on Computer Systems and Applications in Tunisia, where Yousif delivered the keynote on cloud to the gathering.
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Top Ten Security Issues for HPC in the Cloud

May 19, 2010 | Coming up with a list of the top ten threats and concerns in terms of security for HPC in the cloud is the easy part. However, putting that list in an organization-specific order is an exercise in prioritizing issues of not only security, but performance, applications in general, and overall goals.
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StarCluster Brings HPC to the Amazon Cloud

May 18, 2010 | The Software Tools for Academics and Researchers (STAR) group at MIT has created an open-source project called StarCluster that allows anyone to create HPC clusters on Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) without needing to be a cloud expert.
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25 Sources for In-Depth HPC Cloud Use Cases

May 16, 2010 | Finding cloud computing use cases for HPC is not difficult necessarily, but it does take some footwork, especially if one is looking to step beyond the multitude of use cases that are provided by cloud and HPC vendors.
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Fetching Platform: A Tale of Big Data and Small IT

May 11, 2010 | The Fetch-Platform ISF partnership is one of the better practical examples of a large-scale cloud deployment for enterprise in recent weeks. And the good news is, it's is already proving to be successful.
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SARA Opens Gate for HPC Cloud Researchers

May 10, 2010 | Researchers in the Netherlands are being granted the opportunity to take part in a grand HPC experiment over the coming year as the limits of BiG Grid are pushed into the cloud.
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One Small Step for Man, One Giant Leap for HPC and Cloud

May 05, 2010 | Gaia's infrequent but immense demands for mission-critical data processing created the need for one of the most convincing proof of concept measures tackled by cloud infrastructure and development giants, The Server Labs and RightScale.
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Big Banks Grab Pitchforks, Storm Fortress

Apr 29, 2010 | Bank of America, Commonwealth Bank of Australia and Deutsche Bank have announced that they are forming an alliance to collaborate for the common goal of attempting to cut back on their general IT infrastructure costs by adopting cloud strategies.
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Cloud's New Language Set to Bloom

Apr 26, 2010 | A new, simplified language for programming in cloud environments called "Bloom" is set for release later this year. An interview with one of Bloom's creators, Joseph Hellerstein of U.C. Berkeley, explains the practical elements.
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Hybrid Multi-Cloud Enablement -- the Next Wave for Enterprise?

Apr 23, 2010 | The ability to have, on-demand, a selection of cloud providers with easy transfer -- all based on which can best utilize resources to the maximum -- might be the next big thing for enterprise.
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Adaptive's Moab Enhancements Beckon to Wall Street

Apr 20, 2010 | Adaptive Computing, creator of Moab technologies, has announced two interconnected pieces of Moab news targeting the vast infrastructural and resource management needs of financial services.
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A Crisis of Definitions?

Apr 18, 2010 | It may seem there is little difference between the concepts of cloud as a technology versus a style or methodology of computing in defining enteprise HPC in the cloud. Consistency in terming it is becoming necessary.
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Public, Private, Hybrid: What the 'Enhanced' Public Cloud Means for Enterprise

Apr 15, 2010 | The issue at stake is not necessarily what to do with the irregularity of resources that pull scientific enterprises between having too much or too little, but rather, how they can maximize the results of the economies of scale in the cloud.
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Deja Vu All Over Again?

Apr 12, 2010 | It appears the adage that “The more things change, the more things stay the same” is not far off the mark. Distributed computing will be heretofore considered as the foundation from which the “newer” technologies of grids, fabrics, and clouds have naturally evolved.
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Licensed to Bill?

Apr 08, 2010 | Faced with mounting pressure from partners and end users in the HPC community, application software vendors are striving to cope with what it means to offer their software as a service. To learn more about the potential for cloud expansion, InterSect360 Research has been conducting a study of the outlook of SaaS and cloud computing models among the HPC ISV community.
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Cloud Computing Will Usher in a New Era of Science Discovery

Jan 26, 2010 | Computation is commonly considered the third mode of science, where the previous modes or paradigms were experimentation/observation and theory. With the introduction of high performance supercomputers, the methods of scientific research could include mathematical models and simulation of phenomenon that are too expensive or beyond our experiment's reach. With the advent of cloud computing, a fourth mode of science is on the horizon.
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Security -- The Dark Side of the Cloud

Jan 25, 2010 | Despite the many benefits to cloud computing, security remains one of the biggest challenges. IT organizations have a hard enough time defending their in-house private cloud resources. Companies offering public cloud, pay-for-usage models are faced with a more difficult challenge since they must serve multiple organizations on the same platform. In response to security threats, there is an opportunity for innovation of flexible cloud-based security service offerings.
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The Impact of Cloud Computing on Corporate IT Governance

Jan 25, 2010 | While cloud computing is enabling some fundamental changes on how IT groups deliver services, from a corporate management viewpoint, the basic principles of IT governance still remain true. However, the advent of cloud computing is having an increasing impact on how the components of the governance process are executed. For the purpose of this article, we will use the COBIT model (Control OBjectives for Information and related Technology) that is comprised of five major process focus areas: Strategy Alignment, Value Delivery, Resource Management, Risk Management, and Performance Measurement.
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The Impact of Cloud Computing on Internal IT Governance

Jan 25, 2010 | In theory, the realization of IT governance should be a seamless process running from the board room to actual delivery of IT services. In practice however, many organizations have an institutionalized steering committee with its associated processes that supports the organization's IT related goals while the IT group has a leadership team or council whose governance activities are focused inward on such things as technical issues, standards, and resource management.
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Timesharing 2.0

Nov 03, 2009 | Is cloud computing today's hot technology that promises to lower TCO, reduce energy costs, and enable dynamic, agile datacenters -- or is it just the latest hype? That is, will cloud computing really happen and will it deliver on its promises? And what does it mean for high performance computing?
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Cloud Computing Vendors for HPC

Nov 03, 2009 | The number of cloud offerings for HPC users seems to be growing by the day. In this article, we attempt to aggregate all the current vendors with products that address the cloud delivery model for high performance computing applications.
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Grid Computing Done Right

Nov 02, 2009 | Writing and implementing high performance computing applications is all about efficiency, parallelism, scalability, cache optimizations and making best use of whatever resources are available -- be they multicore processors or application accelerators, such as FPGAs or GPUs. HPC applications have been developed for, and successfully run on, grids for many years now.
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Cloud for Academia?

Nov 02, 2009 | Grid computing was born in academia and was originally designed to support scientific and research computing. In contrast, cloud computing has a business background and is designed to enable the delivery of scalable Web applications. The BEinGRID project has looked into how Grid is appropriate for business use, but what about looking at whether the cloud is useful for academia?
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Cloud Computing Opportunities in HPC

Nov 02, 2009 | High-end, public cloud computing offerings represent a convergence of grid and Internet technologies, potentially enabling workable new business models. Smaller, private clouds are a technical evolution that expands the ease of use and deployment of grids in more organizations.
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Grids or Clouds for HPC?

Nov 02, 2009 | Time and again, people ask questions like "Will HPC move to the cloud?" or "Now that cloud computing is accepted, are grids dead?" or even "Should I now build my grid in the cloud?" Despite all the promising developments in the grid and cloud computing space, and the avalanche of publications and talks on this subject, many people still seem to be confused and hesitant to take the next step.
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A Network Manager's Utility Belt

Dec 11, 2008 | The vigilant network manager, like Batman looking down on Gotham, knows that somewhere out there, something bad probably is happening -- something that’s making an application go astray. ExtraHop Networks’ Application Delivery Assurance Appliance doesn’t come with batwings, but it does provide tools to hook the kind of data and insight needed to identify the perpetrators of slowdowns and other snafus clogging up the system.
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Has Cloud Computing Found its 'Killer App?'

Dec 09, 2008 | Most people talk about putting their applications in the cloud, but SOASTA has a different take. The company’s CloudTest offering brings the power of cloud computing to your application. For a fraction of what it would cost with traditional solutions, SOASTA uses VMs across public clouds to simulate hundreds of thousands of concurrent users.
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Storage Virtualization: Everybody in the Pool

Dec 05, 2008 | Relatively speaking, storage virtualization is a simple concept offering low risk and high reward. Studies say that within the next year or two, 47 percent of U.S. companies (and 61 percent in Europe) will have adopted the technology. If only it were that easy ...
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Cloud-Powered SaaS Needs No-Nonsense Backend

Dec 01, 2008 | With its infrastructure-as-a-service model, BlueLock gives its SaaS-provider customers all the IT and management they need to host their applications in the cloud. Fortunately for all involved, BlueLock found F5 Networks to manage traffic, balance load and optimize application delivery.
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VKernel Keeps Hershey 'In the Know' on Virtualization

Nov 26, 2008 | The IT team at Hershey Entertainment and Resorts adopted VKernel’s Capacity Analyzer to monitor shared CPU, memory, network, storage and disk I/O utilization trends across its VMware environment, and Chargeback, which provides details about who is using which resources and the associated costs.
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Scalpel or Cleaver: CIOs Can Show CFOs the Light

Nov 23, 2008 | Unless you secure passage to an alternate, idyllic IT universe, you’ll be hearing frequently about cutting costs in the coming quarters. Apptio brings a few twists that should be appealing in these financially interesting times, including offering its tools on a SaaS platform.
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10 Companies Spurring Enterprise Cloud Computing (Pt. II)

Nov 21, 2008 | While their customers numbers range from dozens to hundreds of thousands, the one thing these companies all have in common is innovation. From enabling computing in the cloud to encouraging hybrid cloud computing to providing an end-to-end set of cloud products, these companies' technologies strive to make cloud computing as flexible and non-threatening as possible.
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10 Companies Spurring Enterprise Cloud Computing (Pt. I)

Nov 18, 2008 | There are those who doubt cloud computing will ever permeate large enterprise in any meaningful way. Don't tell that to this group of vendors and providers, who have been supplying IT to the world's largest enterprises for decades. If their robust cloud technology portfolios are paired with determined sales and marketing efforts, these companies could play a big part in making "the big switch" a reality.
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Virtual Labs Migrate into the Cloud

Nov 14, 2008 | Almost everybody seems to agree that the cloud is not ready to house enterprise applications. But that does not mean enterprises cannot leverage the cloud’s myriad benefits. With increasing pressures to lower costs and increase efficiency, the practice of building virtual test labs in the cloud has companies drooling.
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