August 23, 2010
Microsoft is readying its Dryad/DryadLINQ distributed computing framework for a commercial debut. The software is currently available for evaluation purposes, but according to a ZDNet article published last week, Microsoft is transferring the technology from its research division to its technical computing group. A "Community Technology Preview" of the software stack is scheduled for release in November 2010, with a product launch to follow sometime in 2011.
Dryad is a MapReduce-like distributed computing runtime that Microsoft Research has developed for coarse-grained parallel applications. It is designed as a general-purpose engine for parallelizing applications across a cluster or even an entire datacenter. The runtime handles job creation and management, resource management, job monitoring and visualization, fault tolerance, re-execution, scheduling, and accounting. DryadLINQ is layered on top of Dryad to generate computations via LINQ (Language-Integrated Query).
The stack also includes front-ends for machine learning, data mining, eScience, as well as Azure-flavored cluster services and data management layers on the backend. The product being released next year is designed to run atop Windows HPC Server.
The Azure-HPC linkage reflect's the company's aim to generalize deployment of data-parallel applications from small clusters all the way to ultra-scale cloud infrastructure. It also reflects Microsoft's propensity to invent its own software frameworks, with the aim of attracting application software to its existing HPC platform and its nascent cloud business.
Full story at ZDNet
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...
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.