The Leading Source for Global News and Information Covering the Ecosystem of High Productivity Computing
November 20, 2008
AUSTIN, Texas, Nov. 20 -- SC08 -- The National Center for Data Mining (NCDM) at UIC and the Open Cloud Consortium were awarded the 2008 SC08 Bandwidth Challenge award at SC08 today in Austin.
Their entry was titled "Towards Global Scale Cloud Computing: Using Sector and Sphere on the Open Cloud Testbed" and was led by Dr. Yunhong Gu of the University of Illinois at Chicago and Dr. Robert Grossman of the University of Illinois at Chicago and Open Data Group.
Although cloud computing is common today, processing data by clouds today is almost always done within a single datacenter due to the technical challenges processing data across multiple datacenters. The team today demonstrated technology for the first time that enables cloud computing to utilize high performance networks and spread cloud computing across datacenters to create wide area clouds. The technology that makes this possible is the open source Sector storage cloud and Sphere compute cloud developed by the NCDM.
NCDM used the Open Cloud Testbed, which is a testbed managed by the Open Cloud Consortium for this challenge. The Open Cloud Consortium develops standards for computing within clouds and frameworks for interoperating between clouds.
"A whole new generation of cloud computing is now possible using the open source Sector storage cloud and the Sphere computing cloud and standards developed by the Open Cloud Consortium. For the first time, developing applications that span multiple distributed clouds is now possible," according to Robert Grossman.
According to Joe Mambretti, director of the International Center of Advanced Internet Research at Northwestern University and co-director of the Open Cloud Testbed, "These innovative technologies provide unique capabilities that will enable new generations of applications based on extremely large scale data streams."
During the Bandwidth Challenge at SC08, the team demonstrated three applications that used the Sector/Sphere cloud. The application transported bioinformatics data using Sector from the conference floor in Austin to Kitakyushu in Japan at over 8 Gb/s.
The second application demonstrated was Creditstone, which is a benchmark for financial services applications. The Sector/Sphere implementation of Creditstone processed about 53.5 billion synthetic credit card transaction records in less than 1 hour.
The third application was TeraSort, which sorted 1 terabyte of data within 30 minutes. The average data moving rate was about 4.8Gb/s in the Open Cloud Testbed, with a peak speed reaching 10Gb/s.
One of the key achievements of the Sector and Sphere software is that it is very easy to use. For example, the TeraSort code only requires about 50 lines of C++ code. This is critical, as it allows researchers to use their time to focus on research problems, rather than spending time dealing with distributed programming.
Page: 1 of 2(Digg, Technorati, more)
PGI Accelerator™ Fortran 95/03 and C99 compilers for x64+NVIDIA
Accelerate applications on x64+GPU platforms by adding OpenMP-like compiler directives to existing Fortran and C programs. Available now for Linux, MacOS and Windows. Download a free 15 day trial.
Platform HPC Workgroup Manager
Platform HPC Workgroup Manager integrates all the cluster productivity tools you need to deploy, run and manage your HPC environment.
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...
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...
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...
Mar 19 | OfficialWire | New super to support intelligence work Down Under. Read more...
Mar 18 | ChannelWeb | Westmere parts already showing up in HPC machines. Read more...
Mar 17 | The Register | But what about the tier ones? Read more...
Mar 17 | Cadalyst Magazine | A new generation of workstations is changing the nature of technical computing. Read more...
Mar 17 | Linux Magazine | Latest iteration of Sun Grid Engine able to tap into Cloud. Read more...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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