HPCwire: Increasing Clouds

The Leading Source for Global News and Information Covering the Ecosystem of High Productivity Computing

HPCwire >> Blogs

Blog: From the Editor

November 06, 2008

Increasing Clouds

It seems hardly a week passes without some news of HPC being delivered as an on-demand service. That topic includes everything from in-house grids to commercial clouds, but it's the cloud element that's grabbing the attention of the supercomputing crowd.

Of course, the Sun Utility Grid (network.com) has been in operations for awhile, but, to date, has only managed to attract a handful of commercial software vendors to its platform. And IBM's Deep Computing On Demand service has slowly been collecting customers and expanding capabilies. But the latest trend seems to be individual ISVs arranging their own HPC on-demand services or just offering hooks into established grids. That's not to say new compute grids aren't popping up as well.

Here's a roundup of recent developments:

In April, Interactive Supercomputing (ISC) launched its on-demand service for its flagship Star-P offering. The Star-P platform allows MATLAB and Python users to parallelize their applications for HPC hardware. ISC's on-demand service uses Linux clusters from Tsunamic Technologies. The San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) also has made Star-P available to researchers and scientists on one of its modest-sized (128 processors) clusters.

Last month, the MathWorks came out with support for built-in support for running applications on the European EGEE grid (Enabling Grids for E-sciencE) and the ability to tap into Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). With a user base of around a million developers, The MathWorks could have a big impact on pushing HPC'ers into the cloud.

A couple of weeks ago, Singapore Computer Systems (SCS) launched its grid computing service -- called Alatum. The platform has already attracted at least one HPC customer: Vestas Technology R&D Singapore. Vestas' business involves harnessing wind power for energy and it is running HPC apps on the Alatum grid to support the company's research and development.

And finally, this week's cloud computing honors go to Wolfram Research, developer of Mathematica. The company is teaming with Nimbus Services and R Systems to provide Mathematica in the cloud. According to the press release, Nimbis Services will enable the Mathematica cloud service to access a range of HPC systems, including TOP500 supercomputers and the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud. This one looks like it's still in the development stage, but like the MATLAB offering, delivering Mathematica as a service has the potential to bring a lot of technical computing into the cloud.

While HPC in the cloud still feels more like a drizzle than a downpour, things seem to be picking up. In a couple weeks at SC08 in Austin, there are a handful of cloud computing presentations planned, including a panel on Friday, Nov. 21 with Ian Foster (Argonne National Laboratory), Gerrit Huizenga (IBM Corporation), Thomas Sterling (Louisiana State University), and Peter DeSantis (Amazon). If you're at all interested in this subject, that's probably the session to attend. Maybe I'll see you there.

Posted by Michael Feldman - November 6 @ 5:33PM

(Digg, Technorati, more)

Discussion

There are 0 discussion items posted.

Join the Discussion

You must be a registered user in order to comment on HPCwire stories.

Members enjoy:

	Access to Special Content, including Podcasts, Webcasts, and Whitepapers and more!
	Ability to take an active role in the discussions that are shaping the HPC technology discipline!
	Special offers available only to HPCwire members!

Become a Registered User Today!

Registered Users Log in Here to Comment

Email Address:	Password (case sensitive)

Remember me	Forgot Password?

Michael Feldman

Michael Feldman is the editor of HPCwire.

More Michael Feldman

Feature Articles

The Week in Review

C-DAC announces plans for a petaflop system; IBM researchers are working on vertical integration techniques to extend Moore's Law another 15 years. We recap those stories and more in our weekly wrapup.
Read More...

Moscow State University Supercomputer Has Petaflop Aspirations

The Moscow State University supercomputer, Lomonosov, has been selected for a high-performance makeover, with the goal of tripling its processing power to achieve petaflop-level performance in 2010. T-Platforms, who developed and manufactured the supercomputer, is the odds-on favorite to lead the project.
Read More...

Intel Ups Performance Ante with Westmere Server Chips

Right on schedule, Intel has launched its Xeon 5600 processors, codenamed "Westmere EP." The 5600 represents the 32nm sequel to the Xeon 5500 (Nehalem EP) for dual-socket servers. Intel is touting better performance and energy efficiency, along with new security features, as the big selling points of the new Xeons.
Read More...

Read more HPCwire features...

Top Headlines

Australia Commissions Cray Supercomputer

Mar 19 | OfficialWire | New super to support intelligence work Down Under. Read more...

Intel Partners See 'Easy' Upgrade Path With Xeon 5600 Chips

Mar 18 | ChannelWeb | Westmere parts already showing up in HPC machines. Read more...

AMD: OEMs primed for Opteron 6100s

Mar 17 | The Register | But what about the tier ones? Read more...

Arrival of the Desktop Supercomputer

Mar 17 | Cadalyst Magazine | A new generation of workstations is changing the nature of technical computing. Read more...

Scheduling HPC In The Cloud

Mar 17 | Linux Magazine | Latest iteration of Sun Grid Engine able to tap into Cloud. Read more...

Read more headlines...

Featured Whitepapers

Virtualization for Aggregation And The vSMP Architecture™

Jan 12 | | In-depth look at vSMP Foundation server virtualization technology, technical implementation, use cases and capabilities. The technical whitepaper provides an architectural overview and details on the three vSMP Foundation products: vSMP Foundation for SMP, vSMP Foundation for Cluster and vSMP Foundation for Cloud.

Copper Cable Technologies for High Performance Computing

Jan 18 | | This white paper discusses Gore’s copper cable assemblies, and how they continue to exceed the standards for providing reliable, cost-effective solutions for high-performance computer applications.

View the White Paper Library

Multimedia

Webcast: Virtualized Data Center Roundtable

Join this online panel discussion for live Q&A with leading industry experts, analysts, and end-users to discuss the latest innovations, best practices, barriers to implementation, and measurable benefits of server virtualization with a particular focus on today's real world solutions.

Webcast: Watch SC09 Birds of a Feather Video: Scalable Fault-Tolerant HPC Supercomputers

Learn about scalable fault-tolerant architectures and examples of energy efficient and scalable supercomputing clusters using dual QDR InfiniBand to combine capacity computing with network failover capabilities with the help of programming languages such as MPI and a robust Linux cluster management package.

Webcast: High Performance Computing for a Smarter Planet

LIVE@SCO9: The IBM team discusses new innovations in hardware, software and services that help clients better understand their workloads and get insight from their R&D efforts. Technology demonstrations include the soon-to-be-released Power7 HPC processor, the DCS990 system with 2.4 petabytes of storage, the xCAT management tool, secure HPC cloud computing and more. Winners of two HPCwire Readers' and Editors’ Choice Awards! Take the IBM virtual tour at SC09 or more information go online to: http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/deepcomputing/sc09.html