In this video from the 2013 Open Fabrics Developer Workshop, Sreev Doddabalapur from Mellanox presents: Accelerating Big Data over RDMA.
You can check out more OFA videos at our Open Fabrics Workshop Video Gallery.
Video: Accelerating Big Data over RDMA
SGI Infinite Storage Gateway Appliance Implements DMF in Minutes
Today SGI announced the InfiniteStorage Gateway, an appliance that delivers virtualized data management to lower the cost of high volume storage. Why an appliance? SGI’s Floyd Christofferson described it as a way to “install DMF within minutes and enable greatly simplified storage management for Big Data.”
The SGI InfiniteStorage Gateway reduces the dependency on high-cost primary storage by creating a virtualized storage fabric that can include any mixture of disk, tape, Zero-Watt Disk or MAID, and object storage. While appearing to users and applications simply as online data, SGI InfiniteStorage Gateway offers IT administrators the ability to keep data protected and online at a fraction of the cost of primary storage systems.
As data growth has continued to sky-rocket, IT organizations increasingly face the problem of infrastructure fragmentation, and the fact that their most expensive primary storage arrays are often used to house mostly inactive data,” said Laura DuBois, program vice president, IDC Storage Systems, Software and Solutions. “Data management is not only about the performance of active data today. It also must provide a seamless long-term strategy for all data that keeps costs at a minimum and reduces IT administrative burden without impacting users.”
With up to 276TB of onboard capacity in a single 4U appliance, the gateway automatically places data on any or all storage devices and locations based upon what works best for the access requirements and data protection policies.
Read the Full Story or View the Slides on Slideshare.
Canada’s Top Supercomputing Conference Comes to Ottawa June 2-6
The 2013 High Performance Computing Symposium is open for registration and technical program submissions. Canada’s top supercomputing conference is being held at the University of Ottawa from 2-6 June.
HPCS 2013 will address the role of ‘big data’ and ‘big computing’ – using the largest, most powerful computers available – for breakthroughs and innovation in medicine, industry, government and academia including:
- The role of Big Data in brain research and transplant surgery;
- How Big Data and supercomputing saves time and resources in mining and exploration;
- Challenges governments face with massive quantities of data and powerful computing in everything from privacy to security of critical infrastructure such as power grids; and
- How Canadian business and industry can achieve the height of global competitiveness through the power of data analysis and supercomputing.
Big Data and high-performance computing is playing a bigger role every day in our lives and in our workplaces,’ said Bill Appelbe, president and CEO of Compute Canada. “The High Performance Computing Symposium brings together some of the world’s leading visionaries, researchers, entrepreneurs and users of Big Data and big computing to learn of the latest breakthroughs and future applications.”
This story appears here as part of a cross-publishing agreement with Scientific Computing World.
Obama Initiative Leverages Big Data to Explore the Brain
This week President Obama announced a research initiative that has the ambitious goal of “revolutionizing our understanding of the human brain,” according to a White House press release.
Know as BRAIN (Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies), the initiative is being launched in FY 2014 with an initial budget of about $100 million, a modest amount given the project’s goals.
In short, BRAIN is designed to help researchers find “…new ways to treat, cure, and even prevent brain disorders, such as Alzheimer’s disease, epilepsy, and traumatic brain injury.” Included is support for new technologies that will allow researchers to produce dynamic pictures of the brain that show how individual brain cells and complex neural circuits interact in real time.
This is a foray into Big Data. The initiative will let researchers amass and analyze the data needed to “…explore how the brain records, processes, uses, stores, and retrieves vast quantities of information, and shed light on the complex links between brain function and behavior.”
Among the many public and private organizations involved in the effort are the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and the National Science Foundation (NSF). NSF in particular is leading the charge in applying the technologies and techniques of Big Data to the initiative.
The National Science Foundation will play an important role in the BRAIN Initiative because of its ability to support research that spans biology, the physical sciences, engineering, computer science, and the social and behavioral sciences,” according to the White House release. “The National Science Foundation intends to support approximately $20 million in FY 2014 in research that will advance this initiative, such as the development of molecular-scale probes that can sense and record the activity of neural networks; advances in ‘Big Data’ that are necessary to analyze the huge amounts of information that will be generated, and increased understanding of how thoughts, emotions, actions, and memories are represented in the brain.”
In a story in Information Week posted the same day, senior editor J. Nicholas Hoover, writes, “On a conference call with reporters after the President’s announcement, National Institutes of Health director Francis Collins said that the brain-mapping initiative might eventually require the handling of yottabytes of data. A yottabyte is equal to a billion petabytes.”
That’s Big Data at its mind-boggling best.
Read the Full Story.
DSSD is Andy Bechtolsheim’s Secret Chip Startup for Big Data
Over at GigaOm, GigaStacey writes that the solution for better and faster storage may lie in DSSD, a stealthy chip startup backed by Andy Bechtolsheim. Founded in 2010 by Sun Alums Jeff Bonwick and Bill Moore, DSSD is trying to build a chip that would improve the performance and reliability of flash memory for high performance computing, newer data analytics, and networking.
My sources tell me the startup is building a new type of chip — they said it’s really a module, not a chip — that combines a small amount of processing power with a lot of densely-packed memory. The module runs a pared-down version of Linux designed for storing information on flash memory, and is aimed at big data and other workloads where reading and writing information to disk bogs down the application. This fits with the expertise of the team, but this is a problem that others are trying to solve as well with faster and cheaper SSDs and targeted software to to optimize the flow of bits to a database. But the proposal here appears to be about designing an operating system that takes advantage of the difference in Flash memory when compared to hard drives to boost I/O.
Read the Full Story.
Xyratex Partners with AMD on Apache Hadoop and Object Storage
Today Xyratex announced that that the company is now a strategic supplier for AMD and their SeaMicro solutions for Big Data.
AMD will use Xyratex OneStor Modular Enclosure as one of the building blocks for its big data and storage intensive solutions and optimized the SeaMicro SM15000 server to provide more than five petabytes of storage capacity in two racks for big data applications such as Hadoop and Object Storage.
SeaMicro SM15000 server with the Freedom Fabric Storage solution is known in the market for its superior computing efficiency and storage density, as well as the lowest total cost of ownership,” said Dhiraj Mallick, Corporate Vice President and General Manager of Data Center Server Solutions at AMD. “With the combination of the SM15000 and the Xyratex OneStor data storage product, we have a winning solution that is unmatched in storage density and capacity.”
The combination of Xyratex and AMD products delivers an ultra-dense, high performance platform that eliminates excess hardware costs and cabling while simplifying installation and minimizing footprint requirements.
Read the Full Story.
Video: How to Talk to Your CFO about HPC and Big Data
In this video from the 2013 National HPCC Conference, Rich Brueckner from inside-BigData moderates a panel discussion on How to Talk to Your CFO about HPC and Big Data.
Panelists:
John C. Morris – Pfizer
Dr. George Ball – Raytheon
Henry Tufo – University of Colorado, Boulder
Dr. Flavio Villanustre – LexisNexis
As members of the HPC community, we spend a good share our time sharing our work and best practices with our colleagues. But how do we communicate the business value of high performance computing and Big Data analytics to CFOs who have little affinity to discussions of things like cores, Hadoop, and MPI? In this panel discussion, experts and Big Data and HPC will come together to share best practices and communication strategies that have proven effective when talking to CFOs and other C-level executives.”
Video: HPC Trends for 2013
In this video from the 2013 National HPCC Conference, Addison Snell from Intersect360 Research presents: HPC Trends for 2013.
Addison Snell will present some of the top insights from recent market intelligence studies from Intersect360 Research, including forward-looking views of the vertical markets, new applications, and technologies with the best prospects for growth in 2012 and beyond. The view from Intersect360 Research will include applications in both High Performance Technical Computing (HPTC) and High Performance Business Computing (HPBC), with an emphasis on the opportunities for HPC technologies in emerging Big Data applications. The evolving industry dynamics around accelerators, file systems, and InfiniBand will also be discussed.”
View the slides on Slideshare.
Panel Discussion: Big Systems, Big Data, Better Products
In this video from the 2013 National HPCC Conference, Bob Feldman moderates a panel discussion entitled: Big Systems, Big Data, Better Products.
Panelists:
- Devin Jensen – Altair
- Rene Copeland – SGI
- Dr. Stephen Wheat – Intel
- Sanjay Umarji – HP
How will enormous data sets and an endless stream of ever-more granular variables drive supercomputing in the coming years? Will it be like a dust storm that buries us, or flood waters we can redirect and manage? How will it alter the evolution of architecture and subsystems? How will it change computer science education, development tools and job descriptions? And will gargantuan data form a barrier to our evolution to Exascale and beyond by sapping the shrinking resources for funding and creativity?
Video: The Value of Large Scale Entity Analysis for National Security
In this video from the 2013 National HPCC Conference, Dr. Flavio Villanustre and Mary Galvin from LexisNexis present: The Value of Large Scale Entity Analysis for National Security.
HPCC Systems from LexisNexis Risk Solutions works with clients in various industries to manage different types of risk by helping them derive insight from massive data sets. To do this, we have developed our High Performance Computing Cluster (HPCC) technology, making it possible to process and analyze complex, massive data sets in a matter of seconds.
SGI’s Eng Lim Goh Presents: From Extreme Scale Computing to Big Data
In this video from the 2013 National HPCC Conference, Dr. Eng Lim Goh from SGI presents: From Extreme Scale Computing to Big Data.
The internet, sensors and high performance computing are some of the top Big Data producers. Recently, there has been increased focus on extracting more value out of these generated data. Analysis of Big Data sets may be simplified as “looking for needle in a haystack” on one end of a spectrum to “looking for relationships between hay in a stack” on the other. We will discuss the architectural platforms and tools suitable for different parts of this spectrum.”
Video: Challenging Large-Data Problems at NASA
In this video from the 2013 National HPCC Conference, Dr. Tsengdar Lee from NASA presents: Challenging Large-Data Problems at NASA.
NASA’s observations from Earth-orbiting satellites and outputs from computational climate models have contributed to one of the most data-intensive scientific disciplines today. The Earth system science tries to analyze the data, turns the data into information, makes sense of the information into knowledge and wisdom, utilize the knowledge and wisdom in decision making processes. In every step of the data life cycle workflow (i.e. curation, discovery, access, and analysis), NASA faces tremendous challenges.”
Video: EUDAT and Big Data in Science
In this video from the 2013 National HPCC Conference, Wolfgang Gentzsch presents: EUDAT and Big Data in Science.
Big data science emerges as a new paradigm for scientific discovery that reflects the increasing value of observational, experimental and computer-generated data in virtually all domains, from physics to the humanities and social sciences. Addressing this new paradigm, the EUDAT project is a European data initiative that brings together a unique consortium of 25 partners — including research communities, national data and high performance computing (HPC) centers, technology providers, and funding agencies — from 13 countries. EUDAT aims to build a sustainable cross-disciplinary and cross-national data infrastructure that provides a set of shared services for accessing and preserving research data. The design and deployment of these services is being coordinated by multi-disciplinary task forces comprising representatives from research communities and data centers.”
View the slides on Slideshare.
DDN – Big Data Evolution
In this video from the HPC Advisory Council Switzerland Conference, James Coomer from DDN presents: Big Data Evolution.
DDN has developed a Hadoop solution that is all about time to value: It simplifies rollout so that enterprises can get up and running more quickly, provides typical DDN performance to accelerate data processing, and reduces the amount of time needed to maintain a Hadoop solution.” said Dave Vellante, Chief Research Officer, Wikibon.org. “For enterprises with a deluge of data but a limited IT budget, the DDN hScaler appliance should be on the short list of potential solutions.”
Video: Accelerating Big Data with Hadoop (HDFS, MapReduce and HBase) and Memcached
In this video from the HPC Advisory Council Switzerland Conference, D.K. Panda from Ohio State University presents: Accelerating Big Data with Hadoop (HDFS, MapReduce and HBase) and Memcached. Download the slides (PDF).
