UberCloud HPC Experiment Readies for Round Three

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

Utility Supercomputing Heats Up

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

HPC in the Cloud Research Roundup

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

Warning to Cloud Adopters: Check the Fine Print

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

Yottamine Serves Up Predictive Analytics On-Demand

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

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

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

The Open Cloud: Management Standards Achieve Interoperability

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

China's Cloud Positioning and the Prospect of Foreign Outsourcing

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

Student Projects Highlight Cloud's Potential

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

Top 10 Cloud Stories of 2012

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

HPC as a Service: Lessons Learned

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

Redshift, New Instance Types, Price Cuts and More at AWS Re: Invent

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

Adaptive Revs Moab, Debuts Remote Virtualization Edition

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

Grid Software Creates Virtual Windows Supercomputer

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

Microsoft Outfits Azure Cloud for Big Compute

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

SC12: Supercomputing with a Helping of Cloud

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

AMD Unveils 64-Bit ARM Strategy

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

Cloud Lends Power to Next Generation Martian Missions

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

Promoting Hemispheric Advancement Through Collaborative Research

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

The Future of Workload Management

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

Digital Gold Rush Powered by GPUs

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

Ahead by a Century: Utility Supercomputing Advances Stem Cell Research

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

Government Computing: The Case for Private Cloud

Oct 05, 2012 | Federal IT departments are faced with some tough challenges these days. Not only are budgets constrained, but mandates are starting to stack up like the tax code. One of the most talked about is the cloud-first mandate, but what kind of cloud will it be?
Read more...

HPC, Clouds & Big Data Converge at ISC Cloud 2012 - Part Two

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

ISC Cloud 2012 BOFs: Applications/Software, Reference Architectures and Data Transfer

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