Will the mountain come to the Mohammad or Mohammad go to the mountain? When we consider whether clouds can provide a suitable platform for high performance computing (HPC) we always talk about how cloud computing needs to evolve to suit the needs of HPC – in other words will the mountain come to Mohammad. But… Read more »
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Cloud Highlights from Supercomputing 2010
Happy Thanksgiving! Last week (Nov 13-19) was the annual Supercomputing (SC) conference. This year it was held in New Orleans, Louisiana. Cloud computing was featured by vendors and speakers throughout the conference. There were far too many cool products, talks, and papers to mention in a single post, however, a few of the highlights that… Read more »
Cumulus: Open Source Storage Cloud for Science
Amazon’s S3 is a great storage cloud service. It provides highly available access to highly reliable storage at a price. It has emerged as the data storage cloud de-facto standard for good reasons. Its REST API has allowed several 3rd party software vendors to make impressive clients, both GUI and command line. However, it is… Read more »
Sky Computing
I’ve been wanting to say a few words about sky computing for a while and eventually iSGTW forestalled me with a very nice article on the topic. It describes a cool work by Nimbus committer Pierre Riteau who created a virtual cluster of over a thousand cores over resources leased from six Nimbus clouds: three… Read more »
Get There Faster with Nimbus 2.6
Today we made open source Infrastructure-as-a-Service capabilities for science just a little bit better… The new Nimbus 2.6 makes your images get to the nodes a lot faster and provides capabilities allowing administrators to easily and dynamically shift resources between their tried-and-true batch scheduled cluster and a cloud — depending on where they need them… Read more »
Another Barrier Goes Down
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… Read more »
There is a New Supercomputer on the Block
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…. Read more »
Grids versus Clouds
The issue of how exactly cloud computing differs from grid computing was responsible for much controversy in the last year. Here are my two cents on how Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud computing and grid computing are different (also discussed in the Sky Computing paper) At some level, both cloud computing and grid computing represent the idea… Read more »
EC2’s boot from EBS capability
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… Read more »
Cloud Computing and Bioinformatics: Notes from a Workshop
I recently attended an immensely interesting workshop on using cloud computing for systems biology computations. The workshop was co-held with SC09. The agenda and the presentations are available online from the workshop pages and are well worth a look. Here are some impressions from the workshop. The workshop began with a discussion of current challenges… Read more »
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