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Is the Future Of High- Performance Computing For Life Sciences Cloudy? |
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FEBRUARY, 2010 LIFE SCIENCE LEADER High-performance computing (HPC) has come a long way for life sciences. Twenty years ago, expensive parallel supercomputers were required to render proteins in three dimensions (3-D) and run software that helped researchers understand their shape. Now 3-D rendering can be done on graphics cards in workstations, laptops, and even phones. Compute clusters using many commodity servers have replaced expensive parallel supercomputers, but the data and problems being solved have grown to demand increased compute capacity. This leaves companies with large capital investments of fixed-size clusters that have all the traditional challenges of maximizing utilization, minimizing operational costs, and shortening time-to-result for users. »Read full article |
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Purdue University’s DiaGrid, a Cycle Computing Customer, Honored as One of the Top 100 IT Projects of 2009 by the InfoWorld 100 Awards |
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DECEMBER 15, 2009 NEW YORK, NEW YORK
Cycle Computing, providing proven, secure and flexible high performance computing (HPC) and open source solutions in the cloud, today announced that Purdue University’s DiaGrid project was selected by IDG’s InfoWorld as one of the top 100 IT projects of 2009 in its InfoWorld 100 Awards. DiaGrid, which utilizes the Condor distributed computing system and Cycle Computing’s CycleServer management tool, aggregates the idle compute power of nearly 30,000 processors across Purdue University and other North American campuses. Generating 177 teraflops of power, DiaGrid contributes more than two million hours to research projects each month – the equivalent of a $3 million supercomputer that would require several thousand square feet of data center space.
Companies around the world rely on technology to enable and enhance their business operations and deliver on their business strategies. The InfoWorld 100 Awards recognize each year the 100 most innovative uses of IT initiatives to further business goals. Selections are based on the excellence and quality of the work environment. The entire list of winners can be found here.
“This year’s recipients of InfoWorld’s highest honor are shining examples of IT projects undertaken by tech leaders committed to pushing their organizations forward,” said Jason Snyder, features editor, InfoWorld.
Led by Dr. John P. Campbell, Purdue’s associate vice president of information technology, DiaGrid is the largest research- and education-focused Condor pool in the world. Driving compute idle time to an unprecedented 1-2 percent, DiaGrid benefits faculty, researchers and students who can perform demanding engineering, science, bioinformatics and social science research and computationally intensive tasks like rendering high-resolution pictures and video. DiaGrid also is available internationally through the NSF TeraGrid and Open Science Grid. To learn more about DiaGrid visit www.itap.purdue.edu/diagrid. An animated video about the project is available at www.youtube.com/watch?v=CH_YHGYQl2g.
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2010 Preview – Virtualization |
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DECEMBER 15, 2009 THE 451 GROUP »View research report |
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Amazon Web Services Announces Spot Instances for Amazon EC2 |
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DECEMBER 14, 2009 SEATTLE, WASHINGTON Amazon Web Services LLC, an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ: AMZN), today announced Spot Instances, a new option for purchasing and consuming Amazon EC2 compute resources. With Spot Instances, customers bid on unused Amazon EC2 capacity and run those instances for as long as their bid exceeds the current Spot Price. The Spot Price changes periodically based on supply and demand, and customers whose bids exceed it gain access to the available Spot Instances. Spot Instances are complementary to On-Demand Instances and Reserved Instances, providing another way to obtain Amazon EC2 compute capacity. »Full Press Release |
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The Year Ahead in Information Management: Smarter, Cloudier and Greener |
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DECEMBER 14, 2009 DATABASE TRENDS & APPLICATIONS
Cloud will extend data analysis. "The continued explosion in data volumes and the vast increase in compute power for data analysis will shape the data center as we enter 2010," Jason Stowe, CEO of Cycle Computing, tells DBTA. "As a result of these demands, IT will continue to look to cloud computing to manage and execute computations quickly and easily. In the cloud, using one processor for 1,000 hours costs the same as running 1,000 processors for one hour-therefore utilizing this type of technology speeds the time to result for calculations." »Read full article |
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The Green Side of Cloud Computing |
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DECEMBER 14, 2009 ebizQ
Cloud computing promises a lot: access to large-scale virtualized computing and storage, 24/7 availability and costs associated solely with the resources used.
The cloud is recognized to have started in 2006 with Amazon Web Service's (AWS) introduction of the Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). Incredibly innovative, this service, when combined with the Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), enabled developers to start virtual machine images and consume storage as a service, where billing was done on per-hour and per-gigabyte rates.
These services were the start of what is now recognized as Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS). Currently, managed hosting companies, including GoGrid and Rackspace, are integrating IaaS capabilities to provision external resources dynamically. It's expected that more providers will follow Amazon's lead. »Read full article |
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Amazon Launches Spot Instances for EC2 |
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DECEMBER 14, 2009 eWeek"Spot Instances and the Condor scheduler will enable a 'no compute cycle left behind' policy for running scientific and financial calculations on Amazon EC2," said Jason Stowe, CEO of Cycle Computing, in a statement. "Our CycleCloud service provides secure, elastic compute clusters on Amazon EC2, helping our customers, including Eli Lilly, Varian Inc. and Pfizer, run molecular modeling, next-generation sequencing and risk-analysis calculations. With Spot Instances, CycleCloud can execute calculations when the price is right, resulting in real cost management for our clients." »Read full article |
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Real Benefits from Internal Clouds |
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DECEMBER 9, 2009 IT BUSINESS EDGEEven though it might seem like a misnomer, there are some actual benefits to a private cloud beyond simply providing a test bed for eventual third-party cloud services. In fact, says Cycle Computing's Jason Stowe, the chief benefit is that it allows you to leverage that other major investment of the past five years or so: virtualization. If done right, he argues, a private cloud can help you take virtual infrastructure beyond simple consolidation and into areas like peak load management, application efficiency and lower-cost backup and redundancy. In short, by shifting application workloads to dynamically available resources, you no longer have to maintain overly large, disparate infrastructures to ensure service is available where it's needed. »Read full article |
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Utilizing Cloud Computing for Data Center Efficiency |
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DECEMBER 8, 2009 THE DATA CENTER JOURNAL
Traditional internal data centers are grappling with record-high energy prices, fueling the demand for efficiency within an organization’s infrastructure. According to statistics from the Uptime Institute, a 451 Group company, the average data center is 10 percent utilized, and therefore 90 percent idle. Additionally, only about 3 percent of a data center’s electricity consumption is spent crunching data. The remainder is spent on idleness, redundancy and other energy overhead. »Read full article |
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Amylin, Amazon, and the Cloud |
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NOVEMBER 30, 2009 BIO-IT WORLD »Read Full Article |
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InfoWorld Top 100 IT Projects of 2009 |
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NOVEMBER 23, 2009 INFOWORLD Purdue University www.purdue.edu
Multi-Campus Supercomputing Initiative
Project lead: John P. Campbell, Associate Vice President of IT
Project description: Purdue built DiaGrid to pool unused compute cycles across several campuses using the open source Condor distributed computing system developed by the University of Wisconsin and Cycle Computing CycleServer compute management functionality, pushing the total capacity of its supercomputing system to 177 teraflops.
Industry: Education »Link to InfoWorld |
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Cycle Computing's Tour de Cloud |
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NOVEMBER 20, 2009 BIO-IT WORLD Despite the enormous appeal of cloud computing, making practical use of resources such as Amazon’s EC2 is not straightforward. One key issue is scheduling. Jason Stowe, the founder and CEO of Cycle Computing, says that his firm’s service, the CycleCloud, attempts to solve a very straightforward problem: “Amazon allows you to provision 1000 servers. Now what?... How do you make it so the submission you just did 5 minutes ago starts running sooner than the submission yesterday, because its higher priority?” »Read full article |
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Supercomputing centers acknowledge Amazon influence |
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NOVEMBER 19, 2009 COMPUTER WORLD Amazon.com's Electric Cloud Computing service is helping to boost the visibility of supercomputer centers to business users. »Read full article |
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Cloud Computing Fuels Rapid Growth for Cycle Computing |
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NOVEMBER 17, 2009 APACHE Cycle Computing, providing proven, secure and flexible high performance computing (HPC) and open source solutions in the cloud, today announced that the increasing enterprise demand for HPC and cloud computing is fueling its rapid expansion across industries »Read full article |
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Live from the show floor with Cycle Computing |
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