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

Sep 25, 2012 | The last week of September, ISC Cloud had its third annual event in Mannheim, Germany, organized by Uber Cloud Experiment leader Wolfgang Gentzsch. The broad-ranging yet ambitiously-dense program attracted a nice balance of users and technology enablers from research and industry.
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Internet Freedom Fighters: Amazon, Facebook, Rackspace and 54 More to Lobby Gov't

Sep 25, 2012 | This week, not one but two groups of IT heavyweights launched with plans to expand the scope of the Internet while protecting the free flow of ideas it provides. The Internet Infrastructure Coalition (i2Coalition) counts already 42 founding members, including infrastructure providers Rackspace, Softlayer, ProfitBricks and Tucows, while the Internet Association's 14-strong roster claims Web giants Google, Yahoo, Facebook, eBay and Amazon.
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Grid Community Gathers in Prague

Sep 18, 2012 | This week, over 400 participants from the European research-computing community - and some of their American partners - came together in one of Europe's most beloved cities, Prague. On Monday, GlobusEUROPE took over the third floor of the Hotel Clarion Congress, located in Vysocany, a modern section of the city, just 15 minutes away from the historic center of Prague and the famous Prague Castle. The remainder of the week, Tuesday through Friday, is dedicated to the European Grid Infrastructure Technical Forum.
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Globus and Grid: Blazing Trails for Future Discovery

Sep 13, 2012 | As participants from around the world make their way to Prague for the EGI Technical Forum, grid-enabled tools continue to facilitate global collaboration. Grid computing provides the backbone for a wide range of research, all the way from basic science to once-in-a-lifetime breakthroughs, like the recent achievements surrounding the elusive Higgs boson particle.
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Public Cloud Market to Exceed $100 Billion by Next Prez Race

Sep 17, 2012 | Between the ubiquity of Internet-connected devices and businesses looking to expand their reach through digital means, it's becoming nearly impossible to talk about technology without mentioning "the cloud." In the last week, two big name analysts have released reports, each predicting a public cloud services market that reaches northward of $100 billion by the next presidential election.
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The State of HPC Cloud

Sep 11, 2012 | While HPC cloud is still in the early stages of adoption, it is becoming more commonplace. Various hurdles must be overcome and users must become comfortable with new usage models, but as technology ramps up to meet these challenges, the benefits of a cloud model will attract more and more HPC users.
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China Cashes in on Cloud

Sep 11, 2012 | From 2001-2011, China's GDP grew an astounding 550 percent. During the same time period, the US economy increased by just 50 percent. Given China's dramatic growth, the country appears to be focused on catching up with the United States in a variety of aspects including defense, technology and even Olympic medals. A recent flurry of announcements indicate that China is betting on cloud technologies, even besting some US providers at their own game.
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Cloud APIs: Agent for Vendor Lock-in or the Anti Vendor Lock-in?

Sep 04, 2012 | The combined LinuxCon/CloudOpen conference, which took place in San Diego last week, provided a forum for valuable keynotes on the state of Linux and cloud, many informative booths, and a wide array of interesting activities and sessions. On the first day of the three-day event, a panel on Cloud APIs had everyone talking about what it means to be open or closed in this increasingly connected world.
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Why Are CAE Software Vendors Moving to the HPC Cloud?

Sep 04, 2012 | When it comes to running HPC workloads in the cloud, traditional software licensing models have presented a significant barrier to adoption. But as cloud becomes ever more entrenched, this is starting to change. More and more ISVs have started to experiment with cloud computing and are adjusting their licensing models accordingly.
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VMware to Join OpenStack Camp

Aug 28, 2012 | As cloud heats up, it's making for some strange bedfellows. VMware is seeking to become a member of the foundation that governs OpenStack, the popular cloud-building framework. Intel and NEC are also applying. The news, which broke the day before the annual VMworld gala, caught the cloud community by surprise and sparked speculation as to VMware's motives.
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Amazon Launches Glacier, Puts Data on Ice

Aug 28, 2012 | Amazon has just announced a new storage service called Glacier. The cloud giant describes its new offering as a secure, extremely low-cost storage technology for data archiving and backup. Like the name implies, the service is slow, cold and remote.
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OpenStack, VMware, Red Hat - Will the Real 'Linux of the Cloud' Please Stand Up?

Aug 21, 2012 | A search for "Linux of the Cloud" will turn up several candidates with claims staked to this honorific, among them OpenStack, VMware and Red Hat. In the race to open source cloud dominance, achieving a kind of Linux parity is the ultimate stamp of approval, but are any of these plays worthy of the bestowal?
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Red Hat Debuts Enterprise OpenStack Preview

Aug 14, 2012 | Red Hat on Monday announced its intention to provide an enterprise-grade version of the popular open source cloud framework, OpenStack. The company rolled out a preview release of its OpenStack distribution, which runs on top of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, and allows companies or service providers to create Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) clouds.
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Legal Aspects of Cloud Computing

Aug 13, 2012 | HPC and grid/cloud expert Wolfgang Gentzsch conducts an interview with Paolo Balboni, scientific director of the European Privacy Association and founding partner at ICT Legal Consulting in Milan. Dr. Balboni will be featured speaker at ISC Cloud in Mannheim, Germany, Sept. 26-27, 2012, where he will be discussing the legal aspects of cloud computing.
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It's Official - Rackspace Moves to OpenStack

Aug 07, 2012 | Rackspace is now the largest OpenStack-based public cloud in the world. After a four-month beta period, Rackspace began using the open source cloud management platform OpenStack, which it cofounded with NASA, to power its extensive public cloud infrastructure. The move occurs just weeks after OpenStack celebrated its second birthday.
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Implementing Disaster Recovery Within the Education Sector

Aug 06, 2012 | Current financial pressures have led educational institutions to look for a more sustainable and innovative way of managing their services, this includes the IT infrastructure that underpins the teaching and learning. The author proposes a cloud-based solution for implementing disaster recovery and business continuity at the college level.
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When Time Is of the Egress: Optimizing Your Transfers

Jul 31, 2012 | Traditionally running scientific workloads in AWS provides a diverse toolkit that allows researchers to easily sling data around different time zones, regions, or even globally once the data is inside of the infrastructure sandbox. However, getting data in and out of AWS has historically been more of a challenge. Cycle Computing's Andrew Kaczorek and Dan Harris offer some helpful tips on optimizing ingress and egress transfers.
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OpenNebula Project Director Discusses High-Profile Deployments

Jul 24, 2012 | They say they don't invest in marketing, but OpenNebula has not gone unnoticed. While the open source cloud management platform, based in Spain, has a low-key US profile, their European and Asian presence is strong. In addition to participating in the Helix Nebula project, OpenNebula is also the core component in China Mobile's Big Cloud infrastructure, which will soon be used to provide services to more than 600 million customers. HPC in the Cloud reached out to OpenNebula Project Director Ignacio M. Llorente to get the details on these and other developments.
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CAE in the Cloud – New Business Opportunities for Manufacturers and ISVs

Jul 19, 2012 | Most manufacturers, especially small and medium businesses (SMBs), mainly use desktop workstations for their daily R&D work. Often they do prep work during the day and production runs over-night, resulting in one simulation job per day. In this article, we will investigate how breaking the CAE jobs free from the restrictions of the workstation environment and moving them to the cloud could benefit the CAE engineers as well as the CAE software vendors.
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Helix Nebula: from Grid to Cloud and Lessons Learned So Far

Jul 17, 2012 | European cloud computing is taking off as can be seen in the progress of Helix Nebula. The major pan-European cloud project announced last week that they were moving from the initial proof of concept phase to the start of the two-year pilot phase, which involves expanded proofs of concept and perhaps some additional demand side partners. Just a few months into the project, the participants discuss the challenges of migrating science into the cloud.
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Department of Defense Lays Out Cloud Strategy

Jul 17, 2012 | The Department of Defense has announced a cloud computing strategy that aligns the agency with Federal efficiency standards. It details the transition from traditional IT services, including methods to promote adoption, establish an enterprise cloud infrastructure and consolidate datacenter resources. Beyond technical details, the program also aims to overcome any cultural challenges associated with migration to cloud technology.
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Madrid Workshop Explores the Business Case for Clouds

Jul 16, 2012 | Cloud, as an abstraction, represents a flexible, ubiquitous and consistent platform accessible from anywhere at any time. Last week, the International Workshop on Clouds for Business and Business for Clouds provided the perfect meeting point for both industry and academia to explore the truth of this statement and further discuss how organizations can benefit from the myriad of available cloud models.
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Cloud APIs – Is Amazon the de Facto Standard?

Jul 10, 2012 | The availability of cloud management platforms means that pretty much anyone can create cloud infrastructure. Service providers can use these IaaS-building frameworks to make public clouds and enterprises can use them to construct their very own private clouds. On the proprietary side, the most popular such cloud OS is VMware's vCloud product – but the real action lately is on the open source side. And as the space heats up, we're seeing a resurrection of the incendiary API debate.
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In the Wake of the Higgs Boson: Helix Nebula – The Science Cloud

Jul 09, 2012 | Announced earlier this year, the pan-European cloud computing project, Helix Nebula - the Science Cloud, brings together select IT service providers with leading research institutions, CERN, the European Space Agency (ESA), and the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL). Representatives from all three centers will take part in a joint keynote session at the ISC Cloud conference, taking place this September in Mannheim, Germany. In this brief Q&A, they share their perspectives on the initiative and provide an outline of what's to come.
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Google Enters IaaS Cloud Race

Jul 03, 2012 | Google is officially in the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) business. Last week at the Google I/O Developers Conference in San Francisco, the search giant unveiled Google Compute Engine, a utility computing service that lets users run their workloads inside the company's vast datacenters. While the public cloud can be used for a range of workloads, Google has suggested several primary use cases, including video rendering, data analysis and high performance computing.
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