February 04, 2013
WASHINGTON, D.C., Jan. 29 – TCG announced today that the Neuroimaging Informatics Tools and Resources Clearinghouse Computational Environment (NITRC-CE) is now available on the Amazon Web Services Marketplace. NITRC-CE offers neuroscience researchers the convenience, speed, and savings of cloud-based computing against public and private neuroinformatics data sets.
TCG’s NITRC team developed NITRC-CE to support neuroscientists wishing to pay only for the computational power needed to do their research, and scale the computational resources needed to the size of the research challenge at hand. Using the computational power of the Amazon cloud, NITRC-CE helps minimize the digital divide between researchers at institutions with high performance compute services and those with more modest resources and budgets.
For example, in real-world processing tests, the NITRC-CE team found that a representative computation that would have taken 24 hours on a high-powered desktop took 25% of the time (8 hours) at a cost of only $4.
Funded by the NIH Blueprint for Neuroscience Research, National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering, National Institute of Drug Addiction, National Institute of Mental Health, and National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, NITRC is an award-winning, user-friendly collaboration environment for the neuroinformatics community. NITRC gives researchers around the world easy access to software tools and data. Most of the resources are free, and many have communities of interest associated with them, allowing researchers to share advice and ideas for use of the data and tools, and to collaborate in improving them.
NIH awarded the contract to design, develop, and operate NITRC in 2006. Since then, two enhanced services have been added: NITRC Image Repository (NITRC-IR), which offers a select set of community-generated neuroimaging data sets, and now NITRC-CE.
One of 11 listings in the Business Software, High Performance Computing category, NITRC-CE (built using NeuroDebian) is an on-demand, cloud based computational virtual machine pre-installed with popular NITRC neuroimaging tools such as ants, mrtrix, r-base-R statistical package, neurodebian-popularity-contest, mricron, and over a 35 FSL, AFNI, and Python packages. In addition to the Amazon Web Services Marketplace, NITRC-CE is also available via public Amazon Machine Interface (AMI).
“NITRC-CE represents a very important step in expanding NITRC’s capability,” said TCG president Dan Turner. “I’m proud of our team’s effort in developing a service that capitalizes on the power of cloud computing to allow the research community to save time and money, and help accelerate neuroinformatics research.”
David N. Kennedy, Ph.D., who is a member of TCG’s NITRC team and serves as NITRC’s Customer Liaison noted, “I am really excited about the potential for cloud computing enabled by the NITRC Computational Environment. This is a new computational paradigm that has the potential to bring high-performance computing to everyone in the field.” Dr. Kennedy is Director of the Division of Neuroinformatics at the Child and Adolescent Neurodevelopment Initiative (CANDI) and Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Massachusetts Medical School.
Although the Amazon Web Services Marketplace is set up for companies to mark up their compute time for profit, the NITRC team will not be doing so as the development of NITRC-CE was funded in whole or in part with Federal funds from the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering, National Institutes of Health, Department of Health and Human Services, GSA contract No. GS-00F-00F-0034P, Order Number HHSN268201100090U.
About TCG
TCG is an award-winning small business that specializes in tailored information technology solutions and consulting services with a particular focus on grants management, collaboration platforms, and budget formulation and execution. TCG transforms information technology infrastructures and inconsistent processes to integrated environments built on reusable functionality, consistent business processes, and interoperable infrastructures. The multiple awards that TCG and its clients have received demonstrate the benefits of using best practices such as CMMI, ITIL, and PMBOK to meet complex technology and management needs.
-----
Source: TCG
Contributing commentator, Andrew Jones, offers a break in the news cycle with an assessment of what the national "size matters" contest means for the U.S. and other nations...
Read more...
Today at the International Supercomputing Conference in Leipzing, Germany, Jack Dongarra presented on a proposed benchmark that could carry a bit more weight than its older Linpack companion. The high performance conjugate gradient (HPCG) concept takes into account new architectures for new applications, while shedding the floating point....
Read more...
Not content to let the Tianhe-2 announcement ride alone, Intel rolled out a series of announcements around its Knights Corner and Xeon Phi products--all of which are aimed at adding some options and variety for a wider base of potential users across the HPC spectrum. Today at the International Supercomputing Conference, the company's Raj....
Read more...
Jun 18, 2013 |
The world's largest supercomputers, like Tianhe-2, are great at traditional, compute-intensive HPC workloads, such as simulating atomic decay or modeling tornados. But data-intensive applications--such as mining big data sets for connections--is a different sort of workload, and runs best on a different sort of computer.
Read more...
Jun 18, 2013 |
Researchers are finding innovative uses for Gordon, the 285 teraflop supercomputer housed at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) that has a unique Flash-based storage system. Since going online, researchers have put the incredibly fast I/O to use on a wide variety of workloads, ranging from chemistry to political science.
Read more...
Jun 17, 2013 |
The advent of low-power mobile processors and cloud delivery models is changing the economics of computing. But just as an economy car is good at different things than a full size truck, an HPC workload still has certain computing demands that neither the fastest smartphone nor the most elastic cloud cluster can fulfill.
Read more...
Jun 14, 2013 |
For all the progress we've made in IT over the last 50 years, there's one area of life that has steadfastly eluded the grasp of computers: understanding human language. Now, researchers at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) are utilizing a Hadoop cluster on its Longhorn supercomputer to move the state of the art of language processing a little bit further.
Read more...
Jun 13, 2013 |
Titan, the Cray XK7 at the Oak Ridge National Lab that debuted last fall as the fastest supercomputer in the world with 17.59 petaflops of sustained computing power, will rely on its previous LINPACK test for the upcoming edition of the Top 500 list.
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.
Join HPCwire Editor Nicole Hemsoth and Dr. David Bader from Georgia Tech as they take center stage on opening night at Atlanta's first Big Data Kick Off Week, filmed in front of a live audience. Nicole and David look at the evolution of HPC, today's big data challenges, discuss real world solutions, and reveal their predictions. Exactly what does the future holds for HPC?
Join our webinar to learn how IT managers can migrate to a more resilient, flexible and scalable solution that grows with the data center. Mellanox VMS is future-proof, efficient and brings significant CAPEX and OPEX savings. The VMS is available today.