December 11, 2008
Dec. 12 -- European researchers have developed a suite of tools that make it simple, safe and secure to deploy grid computer systems across corporations and throughout the supply chain. The work means that virtual organisations can become a reality.
Virtual organisations are entering the real world thanks to the work of the SIMDAT project, which leveraged the power of grids to seamlessly and securely deliver services and data across organisational boundaries.
It has meant, in just one small example of the team's work, that setting up partnerships in the pharmaceutical industry now takes weeks or even days instead of months. It is helping to create enormous savings and enabling far higher levels of co-operation among companies.
Business in the 21st century is one of the most involved and complex enterprises on the planet, and nowhere is business more complicated than in R&D and product development. Product development involves partnerships across individual corporations and beyond, embracing most of the supply chain.
It immediately throws up three issues. It is a technical challenge in itself. It is an organisational problem among disparate partners. And it is a security and management problem, linking players together in an act of innovation and creation -- domains dominated by commercial and intellectual property issues.
Fraught business
Information technology promised to solve the bulk of these problems by creating virtual organisations (VOs), individuals and companies that could seamlessly come together to achieve business objectives, and then separate easily and securely once the task ends. But VOs have proven difficult to establish and fraught with technical and organisational issues.
That is set to change. The EU-funded SIMDAT project uses grids to enable VOs. In the process, they extended and matured grid technology.
"SIMDAT is the first project that really brought grid technology to industry," notes Professor Dr Ulrich Trottenberg, director of Fraunhofer SCAI, coordinating partner of SIMDAT. "When we started the project, in 2004, there was the idea of grid tech in industry in principle but all the activities were more or less academic."
SIMDAT, Swiss Army Knife for grids
Grids are famous for leveraging computer processing resources from scattered computers to tackle big, complex problems like weather simulation or signal analysis.
The most famous early example was the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) which borrowed CPU cycles from volunteer computers owned by the general public to analyse signals from space. But that was just the beginning.
The technology moved on, and used resources like hard disk space to create vast, distributed databases.
SIMDAT goes even further and, with their work, grids have become a mature system. The SIMDAT portfolio of tools can not only link processing power, databases and different operating systems and platforms, it can also call upon applications and services from across the grid.
Crucially, it can do this while applying the service level agreements, management and especially security that are vital to achieve goals in business environments dominated by Intellectual Property Rights (IPR).
And it can manage the entire process so that the underlying complexity and technology remains completely transparent to the user. In the SIMDAT model, the system gives the user whatever resources are required, from whatever the source, to do the job. It enables connections with any partner in a simple, safe and secure way.
And once the job is done, it separates the individual players or companies. It is an incredibly complex process but, as far as users know, they are just working with their own computer.
Open standards
SIMDAT created the system by adapting and improving the open standard software platform GRIA from IT Innovation, a middleware that can link all the different systems, services, applications and data together.
Next, they adapted well-known, industry standard 'problem solving environments' (PSEs) like MSC SimManager. PSEs are tools required to perform a certain design task within certain industries.
The SIMDAT team interlinks these PSEs from different host systems in order to provide secure access to all tools and all data directly using workflow tools. This is a key aspect of the system because it establishes the links in the chain from different partners and resources. It establishes the steps, or workflow, that need to be taken and when they need to be taken.
The team had impacts on dozens of levels, helping to define new standards, develop on old ones, and to create new links between companies. In just one example, a workflow tool, KDE from InforSense, was taken from the pharmaceutical sector and adapted to automotive applications.
Big, difficult task
It was a big, difficult task and SIMDAT showed no lack of ambition by choosing four big, difficult industries to test the system: aerospace, meteorology, pharmaceutical and automotive. The project has been a phenomenal success, with many results already in commercial applications.
In the pharma sector alone, it has made enormous contributions. GlaxoSmithKline is reported to spend $300,000 every hour to find new cures. The SIMDAT work means that setting up collaboration with outside partners now takes weeks or even days. In the past, it took months.
In the meteorology application, it is well on the way to creating, for the first time, a gold standard information exchange system for weather data, with the possibility of linking all of the world's national weather agencies into one system!
And these sectors are just the beginning. Even before the project ended, some of the partners looked at other potential applications.
"We are also interested in applying this generic technology to other application areas like the media industry or the shipbuilding industry," reveals Clemens-August Thole, Fraunhofer SCAI, SIMDAT project coordinator.
SIMDAT will bear a large part of the responsibility for creating the era of virtual organisations, but there is nothing virtual about their results.
The SIMDAT project received funding from the ICT strand of the Sixth Framework Programme for research.
This is part one of a three-part series on SIMDAT. Part two will appear on 15 December.
-----
Source: ICT Results -- http://cordis.europa.eu/ictresults
The Xeon Phi coprocessor might be the new kid on the high performance block, but out of all first-rate kickers of the Intel tires, the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) got the first real jab with its new top ten Stampede system.We talk with the center's Karl Schultz about the challenges of programming for Phi--but more specifically, the optimization...
Read more...
Although Horst Simon was named Deputy Director of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, he maintains his strong ties to the scientific computing community as an editor of the TOP500 list and as an invited speaker at conferences.
Read more...
Supercomputing veteran, Bo Ewald, has been neck-deep in bleeding edge system development since his twelve-year stint at Cray Research back in the mid-1980s, which was followed by his tenure at large organizations like SGI and startups, including Scale Eight Corporation and Linux Networx. He has put his weight behind quantum company....
Read more...
May 16, 2013 |
When it comes to cloud, long distances mean unacceptably high latencies. Researchers from the University of Bonn in Germany examined those latency issues of doing CFD modeling in the cloud by utilizing a common CFD and its utilization in HPC instance types including both CPU and GPU cores of Amazon EC2.
Read more...
May 15, 2013 |
Supercomputers at the Department of Energy’s National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) have worked on important computational problems such as collapse of the atomic state, the optimization of chemical catalysts, and now modeling popping bubbles.
Read more...
May 10, 2013 |
Program provides cash awards up to $10,000 for the best open-source end-user applications deployed on 100G network.
Read more...
May 09, 2013 |
The Japanese government has revealed its plans to best its previous K Computer efforts with what they hope will be the first exascale system...
Read more...
May 08, 2013 |
For engineers looking to leverage high-performance computing, the accessibility of a cloud-based approach is a powerful draw, but there are costs that may not be readily apparent.
Read more...
05/10/2013 | Cleversafe, Cray, DDN, NetApp, & Panasas | From Wall Street to Hollywood, drug discovery to homeland security, companies and organizations of all sizes and stripes are coming face to face with the challenges – and opportunities – afforded by Big Data. Before anyone can utilize these extraordinary data repositories, however, they must first harness and manage their data stores, and do so utilizing technologies that underscore affordability, security, and scalability.
04/15/2013 | Bull | “50% of HPC users say their largest jobs scale to 120 cores or less.” How about yours? Are your codes ready to take advantage of today’s and tomorrow’s ultra-parallel HPC systems? Download this White Paper by Analysts Intersect360 Research to see what Bull and Intel’s Center for Excellence in Parallel Programming can do for your codes.
In this demonstration of SGI DMF ZeroWatt disk solution, Dr. Eng Lim Goh, SGI CTO, discusses a function of SGI DMF software to reduce costs and power consumption in an exascale (Big Data) storage datacenter.
The Cray CS300-AC cluster supercomputer offers energy efficient, air-cooled design based on modular, industry-standard platforms featuring the latest processor and network technologies and a wide range of datacenter cooling requirements.