Force10 Nabs ExaScale Moniker, Cites Power Efficiency
Exascale computing may be far in our future, but the branding folks at Force10 Networks have it for you on a label today. Announced back in March, 2009, the Force10 ExaScale E-Series of core routers and switches boasts impressive performance specifications, now spiced with leading power efficiency:
Data center power and cooling costs are forecasted to rise significantly in the next several years. Ironically, positive device attributes, such as performance and port density, are driving these higher costs. Consequently, we anticipate data center managers will more closely examine how switches are architected to minimize energy consumption,” said Kevin Tolly, founder, The Tolly Group. “Our testing indicated that Force10 clearly recognizes this ongoing concern and has demonstrated a critically
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Timing Right for New Blog on Government Clouds
There are a number of great sources out there for news on Cloud Computing, and I particularly like what Nicole Hemsoth is doing over at HPC in the Cloud. So when I read about a new blog on Government Clouds I immediately pedaled over to check it out.
CloudGovTalk editor Tim Harder of EMC states his mission simply:
Looking at the trends in data storage, it’s becoming very plain to see that data is quickly outpacing the amount of storage that organizations have in their data centers. Every day, the amount of information increases, and we’ve reached a point where implementing a cloud infrastructure to meet these demands is an integral part of the organization’s health and success.
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NZ weather predictor rejects commercial clouds on bandwidth basis
I thought this was an interesting tidbit. Computerworld New Zealand is running a story hat mentions the country’s weather modeling agency evaluated, but subsequently rejected, outsourcing some of its computational needs to a commercial cloud
The upgrade will be almost entirely a hardware matter says CIO Russell Turner [of MetService]. It will involve doubling the linear resolution, taking data points at the corners of 4km squares rather than 8km squares and possibly increasing the number of vertical layers in the model, currently “30 or 40”, he says. From a software point of view that task will be comparatively easy.
Approximately an eightfold increase in computer power is the main emphasis of the move.
…Cloud operation is probably not feasible,
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The Rich Report: The 16 Terabyte PC – SGI Bets on Exascale
“You know, with today’s Nehalem EX you can get two, four, and eight socket systems. If you think in that way, the Altix UV scales beyond that eight socket limit all the way to 256 sockets and 16 Terabytes of memory. So that’s one way to look at the Altix UV.”
– Dr. Eng Lim Goh, CTO, SGI
NVIDIA-based cloud service offers GPUs for rent
PEER1 Hosting announced from SIGGRAPH yesterday in Los Angeles that their GPU-powered public rendering cloud is up and going. From the press release
The system is running the RealityServer 3D web application service platform, developed by mental images, a wholly owned subsidiary of NVIDIA. The RealityServer platform is a powerful combination of NVIDIA Tesla GPUs and 3D web services software that delivers interactive, photorealistic applications over the web using the iray renderer, enabling animators, product designers, architects and consumers to easily visualize 3D scenes with remarkable realism.
With the use of massively parallel NVIDIA Tesla GPUs PEER 1 Hosting can now offer customers flexible and reliable access to a system capable of delivering high computational performance across demanding applications such as
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Open Grid Forum president says grids not dead yet
OGF president Craig Lee contributed an opinion piece to iSGTW last week opining (unsurprisingly) that grids aren’t dead yet. He sees a role for all the work that has gone before in grid computing as users seek to federate clouds
To sum it all up in one phrase – grids are about federation; clouds are about provisioning. To say “data can cross enterprise and data center boundaries in new ways” is to elide the issues of security and governance across administrative domains. These issues have to be addressed regardless of what technology is being used.
…Buzzwords become loaded with baggage from previous implementations and hype resulting in unrealized expectations. (It is hard to imagine that cloud computing will be completely immune to unrealized expectations!) The
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House calls for investigation into security of cloud computing at NASA
Here’s something that people tend to gloss over when they get all wide-eyed with the promise of clouds: a good deal of the scientific computing around the world done by the state, in state-owned computing facilities. And more than half of that is done in the United States. Where there is a patchwork of legislation and regulation that expressly forbids the storage of federal data of various kinds on non-federal computers.
So it was with interest that I read Title IX of the House National Aeronautics and Space Administration Authorization Act of 2010 (text here)
TITLE IX. OTHER PROVISIONS
Sec. 901. Cloud Computing
(b) REPORT.—Not later than 1 year after NASA has entered into a contract for its first use
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Amazon adds support for traditional HPC workloads with Cluster Compute instance
Today Amazon CTO Werner Vogels announced on his blog that Amazon EC2 has added what it is calling Cluster Compute instances specifically to support the kinds of closely coupled workloads that traditional HPC users often run. This is an important step in growing the relevance of EC2 resources to high performance computing given the (unsurprising) benchmark results that have indicated that Amazon’s traditional highly virtualized servers underperform on these types of applications (lots of writing on this, but see here and here for examples). Vogels acknowledges this in his post
As much as Amazon EC2 and Elastic Map Reduce have been successful in freeing some HPC customers with highly parallelized workloads from the typical challenges of HPC infrastructure in capital
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RMSC and ESRI Collaborate on GIS Cloud
…can we get any more insane with the acronyms? The Rocky Mountain Supercomputing Center [RMSC] and ESRI have jointly announced a collaboration to build a cloud computing platform for GIS applications.
Generally speaking, “cloud computing” services have left the application workload definition up to the user. In some sense, this is the whole idea behind cloud computing. However, more often than not, performance suffers. In this case, RMSC and ESRI are making what looks to be a reasonably attempt at building a “market-focused” cloud, which may prove to be more successful.
The cloud computing paradigm is the future of GIS,” said Earl J. Dodd, RMSC Executive Director. “HPC Cloud technology has the potential to
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Euro grid initiative shuts down
Here’s something that happened back in April, but I missed it somehow, and didn’t notice it until I saw this post from European research blog AlphaGalileo
The Enabling Grids for E-SciencE (EGEE) project closed on 30 April 2010, having nurtured innovative, world-class research across Europe and around the globe. EGEE-III brought together a computing infrastructure, software tools and services to support more than 10,000 scientific researchers across more than 170 research communities.
EGEE is supplanted by the European Grid Infrastructure, which is being funding by the European Commission and started up on 1 May
“The establishment of EGI.eu represents a new phase for the European Grid Infrastructure,” says Steven Newhouse, EGI.eu Director. “Sustainability is key for supporting the next generation of data intensive science projects. EGI,
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