Happy New Year!

To get it off to a new start check out the call for papers for the ScienceCloud 2010 workshop – announced right before Christmas!

The last year’s Science Cloud workshop was a great venue for anybody interested in cloud computing for science. The program covered everything from scientific cloud platforms (and how to set them up), through standards and middleware, to case studies of scientific applications on commercial cloud platforms such as Amazon and Azure. The latter were perhaps the most interesting of the workshop – and in fact one of them, a performance study of a cosmology application on Amazon from Lawrence Berkeley National Lab won the best paper award. The slides and papers can be viewed online – still a great reference to see what’s happening in cloud computing for science.  Some of the papers will also appear in the Scientific Programming Journal’s special issue on science-driven cloud computing.

Right on the heels of Amazon’s groundbreaking news on the Cluster Compute instances a couple of days ago, comes this announcement about a partnership between CENIC, Pacific NorthWest GigaPoP (PNWGP), and Amazon: two 10 Gigabit per second (Gbps) connections to Amazon S3 and EC2. This connection will be available to CENIC and PNWGP member institutions (educational and research institutions on the West Coast and in the Pacific North-West) — among others, the many ocean scientists of the Ocean Observatory Initiative (OOI) who we are working with to develop cloud-based scientific infrastructure.

We all woke up to a game-changing announcement today: Amazon announced Cluster Compute instances designed to support the kinds of closely coupled workloads that high performance computing (HPC) relies on. The Cluster Compute instances consist of a pair of quad-core Intel “Nehalem” processors with 23 GB of RAM, and 1690 GB of local instance storage. But by far the best part of the offering is the 10 Gbps network that connects Cluster Compute instances — essential for HPC applications.

Amazon AWS recently announced that EC2 instances can be configured to launch from EBS volumes instead of bundled disk images.

Science users launching heterogeneous clusters can possibly take advantage of this in order to streamline the bundling of images. Those clusters often share a base image layout. Because these AMIs can now reference any number of EBS volumes in their external description including for the root disk, you can now work on customizing each partition and “mix and match” root disks and partitions more easily to make a cohesive cluster. That’s more convenient than maintaining such a partition organization separately and bundling images for each cluster node type, which is traditionally time consuming.