Grid Computing News : Oracle Focuses on Grid, Developer Tools

SAN FRANCISCO -- Oracle's harnessing the power of the grid. Today here at Oracle OpenWorld 2008 at the Moscone Convention Center, the company unveiled a revamped edition of BEA's WebLogic application server designed for the latest trends in application development and deployment: virtualization, resource consolidation and a focus on efficiency. The upshot is that switching to a grid infrastructure can help cut costs, better use power and capacity and more effectively scale applications, according to Thomas Kurian, senior vice president of Oracle Middleware Fusion. On top of the WebLogic Application Grid, Oracle will "build open and best of breed middleware for [service oriented architecture (SOA)], transaction processing, content management, business intelligence, user interaction with identity management and a common way to manage these," Kurian said. It also includes Oracle WebLogic Server, which is built on top of JRocket, and Coherence data management and caching technology for computing clusters, which "can pre-fetch data into the in-memory data grid" for better performance and throughput," Kurian said.... read more

Grid Computing News : 3Tera Goes Global

is rolling out new cloud computing services based on its AppLogic grid operating system . The company's new global cloud services will be offered by partners on four continents, with redundant online resources worldwide and more to come. 3Tera and its partners are running data centers in the U.S., Japan, Singapore, Argentina, the UK, the Netherlands and Serbia, with additional resources planned for South America and Australia. 3Tera says the global offering lets customers choose their location and expand or move to different regions as business demands, without having to change a single line of code in their applications. "On-demand services, offered from a single data center, lack many of the benefits of cloud computing," stated 3Tera CEO Barry Lynn.... read more

Grid Computing News : DataSynapse, Cisco Connect at VMworld

DataSynapse used this week's VMworld conference in Las Vegas to announce that its FabricServer software platform has been integrated with Cisco's VFrame data center provisioning and infrastructure orchestration technology. DataSynapse said data center architects will now be able to "dynamically scale a complete application service stack as virtualized application and hardware infrastructure objects." FabricServer and VFrame treat the application and infrastructure as service components, the grid computing pioneer said, adding that the products can "dynamically apply or remove these services in unison. Customers benefit from right-sized hosted infrastructures and enhanced capacity with real-time utilization policies." FabricServer manages service levels of complex enterprise applications and their platforms by configuring, activating and scaling applications based on business policies and demand. VFrame can then reprogram the underlying hardware to meet service requirements as defined within each application group. "Many customers want to deploy virtualized infrastructures all the way from the infrastructure up to the application layers," Bill Erdman, senior marketing director for Cisco's Data Center Technology Organization, said in a statement.... read more

Grid Computing News : Univa UD Makes Cluster Management Easier

Univa UD has overhauled its open source cluster software to make HPC management tasks easier. UniCluster 4.0 Test Drive, available at grid.org , includes new systems management functionality that "helps to automate repetitive and homegrown administrative tasks that significantly reduce time to value and total cost of ownership for cluster owners," the company said. "UniCluster 4.0 sets a new standard for high performance computing systems software," Gary Tyreman, vice president and general manager of Univa UD HPC, said in a statement. That goes far beyond what a scheduler alone can provide." UniCluster is a "fully integrated, community-enabled open source cluster software stack with unrestricted support for all its components," the company said. It simplifies cluster deployment, configuration and management, from installation and job scheduling to monitoring and remote access.... read more

Grid Computing News : Saving a Bundle with Grid Computing

Grid computing can save companies a lot of money, and not just in hardware and software costs, according to a new report. A white paper published by The FactPoint Group, a Silicon Valley-based research and consulting firm, said an unnamed top five global pharmaceutical giant using Univa UD's Grid MP software to accelerate its high-performance computing (HPC) applications saved more than $3.7 million in the first year of implementation and another $3.3 million annually after that. The cost savings didn't include Grid MP licensing costs, the report said. All the data came from the customer, and the analysis results were approved by the customer's grid team." The study found significant savings in hardware, software and associated costs, but the biggest savings were in areas like improved drug screening and time to market that continued long after the initial cost savings. But it actually goes way beyond that.... read more

Grid Computing News : Grid-X Quietly Collects Cash

Grid-X has nabbed additional funding — but the stealthy startup still isn't saying much about what it's up to (see Grid-X Grabs Cash ). The 100GigE grid company has added more than $800,000 "in new government contracts, customer contributions, and seed investments," bringing total funding to more than $2 million. Grid-X is using the money to develop its series of offload engines, which the company says "uses patent-pending algorithms and coding to implement what will be the lowest cost, fastest offload engine on the market." Beta sites include aerospace firms, government laboratories and defense firms that need "ultra high-speed offload and networking within their data centers, clusters, and grid computing systems." Grid-X "is being developed in stealth mode by engineers, computer scientists and seed investors from the grid computing community." For more information, visit Grid-X.com . Gridbus Makes Sensors Work Harder The GRIDS Lab at the University of Melbourne and National ICT Australia have released SensorWeb 2.0 software, which unites sensor networks and grid computing with the Web so users can access sensors using Web services. The software allows sensor networks to off-load heavy processing activities to the grid and allows grid-based sensor applications to create advanced services for smart-sensing.... read more

Grid Computing News : Survey Claims HPC Trumps Virtualization, Green IT

A new survey claims that high-performance computing is the top IT priority, at least for a few industries. Surprisingly, 'green' IT initiatives ranked last in the survey. The IT execs also said they face a couple of major challenges on their cloud computing initiatives. The respondents overwhelmingly said that four key areas would be the most helpful to their IT processes: the ability to tie business metrics to services; policy-driven server provisioning capabilities; dashboards and real-time reporting; and the ability to dynamically scale applications to meet peak service levels. Nearly half the respondents said cost reduction is the primary motivation in choosing a data center technology, and a quarter of them said the biggest issue with data center operations is aligning IT with business objectives.... read more

Grid Computing News : Platform Manages Virtual Environments

Platform Computing has released the next version of its virtual environment management product, Platform VM Orchestrator 4. Platform says VMO 4 offers "faster delivery of virtual computer environments to end users while optimizing resource utilization, availability and power consumption," helping users get more from their virtualization environments. For now, the offering helps manage Citrix (NASDAQ: CTXS) XenServer environments, with support for virtualization platforms from other vendors — including VMware (NYSE: VMW) — coming later. Platform said VMO is built to manage virtualization deployments, optimize computer resources and remove performance bottlenecks. In other news, Platform also acquired the Scali MPI business from Norway's Scali AS.... read more

Grid Computing News : Grid Duo Boosts Amazon EC2

Grid Dynamics and GridGain have teamed up to boost the power of Amazon EC2, and they have the numbers to prove it. The two recently conducted what they said was the "largest publicly known grid scalability test" for Amazon's (NASDAQ: AMZN) Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), which demonstrated linear scalability up to 512 nodes on a Monte Carlo simulation problem when GridGain's middleware and Amazon EC2 were used together. DataSynapse Adds FabricServer Support for VMware DataSynapse unveiled FabricServer 2.6 software, which now includes support for VMware (NYSE: VMW) Virtual Center for faster adoption of virtualization. FabricServer automates the deployment and provisioning of enterprise applications in a VMware-based virtual infrastructure, boosting server utilization rates and enabling virtual applications to be dynamically assembled at run-time from reusable operating system, middleware and applications templates, which reduces the storage needed for virtual images by up to 80 percent. Xeround Nabs Funding Round Xeround, which claims to have developed the "first distributed data grid with virtualization capabilities," has closed a $16 million round of Series B funding led by Ignition Partners and Trilogy Partnership.... read more

Grid Computing News : Univa UD Launches HPC Management Project

Univa UD is collaborating with Sun Microsystems (NASDAQ: JAVA) and others to ease management of high-performance computing (HPC) systems. Launched on Univa UD's Grid.org open source community site, the Open HPC Management Interoperability Project's goal is "to simplify the challenges of managing HPC Systems and to reduce the associated costs," the partners said in a press release. "These non-standard aspects impact how effectively a system administrator integrates and manages the system." The project, he said, will "significantly reduce the amount of customized systems integration work" and "remove business costs associated with vendor lock-in." When HPC system elements such as distributed resource management (DRM) systems are not standardized, organizations experience increased overhead and complexity in their HPC environments, leading to reduced flexibility in migration and the introduction of costs and barriers for maintaining code and wrappers that are written around a DRM, the companies said. The project is focused on creating separation between job submission, operations management and resource management environments by building a reference implementation that unifies existing standards, best practices and migration tools. In other news, Univa UD announced general availability of Grid MP 5.6, the company's product for non-dedicated distributed computing.... read more

Grid Computing News : A Grid for Every Application

Introduction What can I tell you about the attributes of the perfect application for a Grid environment. As much as you would like these two questions to lead you to the same answer, they rarely, if ever, do. In this article, I will discuss what I like to call the Application Grid—the perfect Grid setup for your application. You don't really need to worry about where in your code you connect to the database, how you manage the connection, and so forth. Well, it's simple; because it is in a distributed environment and by definition, you may not and most likely, do not have instant accessibility and control over all the distributed pieces.... read more

Grid Computing News : Univa UD Puts Its Cluster Software in the Cloud

Univa UD has published a white paper that gives users step-by-step instructions for using its open source cluster product in Amazon's Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2) web service. Univa UD sponsored BioTeam Inc., a life sciences informatics consultancy and systems integrator, to document the process and publish the tools for implementing its UniCluster product in EC2. UniCluster is an open source cluster software stack that integrates widely used open source components, such as Sun Grid Engine, into a free download that simplifies cluster deployment, configuration and management. UniCluster is available for download at Grid.org, the online open source cluster and grid community launched by the company last year. "Often there are core, company-operated systems handling authentication, data staging and workflow, while the remote systems operating across Metro or WAN-scale networking distances are merely used as engines for computation." "The best practices published as a result of this project extend Univa UD's cluster software management capability securely to the cloud, a key step in the operational aspect of the HPC lifecycle management," stated Gary Tyreman, Univa UD's vice president and general manager of HPC.... read more

Grid Computing News : 3Tera Announces Cloudware and AppLogic 2.3

Aliso Viejo, Calif.-based 3Tera announced that its eye-catching application building platform has gone through a major upgrade. The company calls its new platform an "infrastructure delivery network." At the highest level, that means that the company can deliver remote backup on its grid-based technology platform, which is called AppLogic. In the past, AppLogic could not deliver remote backup because it could not co-ordinate applications in multiple data centers and also because of a relatively low-level feature added in AppLogic 2.3: the ability to monitor the state of an application and the number of instances of it that are running. "What's new in cloud computing is the ability to leverage it for general purpose computing, and not have to write for a specific platform," said Bert Armijo, 3Tera senior vice president of sales, marketing, and product management. "As long as the application runs on Linux (and now Solaris too), we can move between data centers with a single command." In addition, AppLogic users can now use other software too.... read more

Grid Computing News : Univa UD Moves Into Data Center Automation

In the latest sign that grid and virtualization technologies are getting closer , Univa UD is launching a data center automation business and has hired two industry veterans to lead it. The pioneering grid computing company will make its new Reliance product the centerpiece of the new business. Reliance offers what the company calls "service-level management of application delivery environments" by helping application providers such as managed service providers and internal IT groups guarantee that capacity will meet demand. The product helps provisioning across physical and virtual infrastructures by working within an application provider's environment to dynamically respond to load changes. To run the new division, Univa UD named Alex Brown and Kent Purdy to lead the new data center automation business and retool its product suite.... read more

Grid Computing News : Platform, GemStone Boost Financial Apps

Platform Computing and GemStone Systems are combining their grid computing and data management software to help financial services companies speed up data-intensive applications. The new offering combines Platform's Symphony financial services application offering with GemStone's in-memory distributed data management software. The result, GemFire for Platform Symphony, "combines data-on-demand capabilities with fast real-time low latency response in a single solution," the companies said. The combination "delivers vastly improved results for accelerating compute and data-intensive applications" for financial services organizations, the firms said. Platform Symphony helps financial services firms "develop and deploy service-oriented HPC applications that can run five to ten times faster than other solutions." "The combination of GemFire and Platform Symphony will offer customers a best-of-breed solution that will be able to scale to manage the exponential growth of enterprise data," stated Juan Menendez, GemStone's senior vice president of business development and alliances.... read more

Grid Computing News : Grid Trends Highlight Barcelona Conference

Several grid computing trends came to the fore this week at the BEinGRID Industry Days event in Barcelona, Spain. The conference -- held in conjunction with the Open Grid Forum’s OGF23 meeting – was attended by more than 500 participants. BEinGrid, Business Experiments in GRID, is the European Union’s largest project funded by the Information Society Technologies (IST) research body. Other highlights of the conference included:
BEinGRID coordinator Santi Ristol, from Atos Origin, put in perspectives the BEinGRID project’s central goal to foster the adoption of grid technology in commercial situations and described the project’s strategy of “catalyzing the grid market through the findings of our business consultants, technical specialists, and the Gridipedia website, as well as promoting a knock-on effect of each of the 25 pilots run as part of the project. ”
Charles Brett, principal analyst at Forrester discussed the latest trend for what he called “Ultra Modular Computing” -- the prediction of Forrester for a cloud-like infrastructure offered within the organization -- eliminating problems such as security concerns and the ignorance of the actual environment the virtualized instance is running on.... read more

Grid Computing News : Grid Goes to the Movies

Sun Microsystems' (Nasdaq: JAVA) Network.com grid computing service played a key role in a new open source animated film. The 3D animation film "Big Buck Bunny" was rendered using the Sun Grid compute utility service, and the movie was created using the open source 3D software suite Blender, available from blender.org and the Network.com Application Catalog, a collection of on-demand grid-enabled applications. Network.com is also one of the hosting locations for the online release, which can be downloaded here . Ton Roosendaal, producer and Blender Institute director, said the point of the movie "was to stimulate the development of open source 3D software, but the quality of Big Buck Bunny on an artistic level as well as on technical ingenuity is what you would expect from large animation studios." The movie promotes open content creation by the use of open source software, and it is also distributed under an open license that gives artists free access to the entire studio database of assets and files used to make the movie. "Even though the Blender team did not have the support of a big studio, they succeeded with the community support, an open source rendering software and an on-demand computing platform," stated David Folk, group manager of Network.com marketing.... read more

Grid Computing News : QuIC Uses Grid to Speed Up Financial Apps

QuIC Financial Technologies is using grid technology to accelerate its risk management, pricing and financial analytics solutions. Using technologies from Intel and DataSynapse, the company said it boosted the performance of its Integrated Market and Credit Risk solutions. By running Quad-Core Intel Xeon 5400 series processors on GridServer software from DataSynapse, QuIC said it "achieved extremely fast calculation time" for its Unified Market and Credit Risk Solution. The portfolio benchmark, which included credit derivatives, interest rate derivatives, equity derivatives and FX options, was calculated within 40 minutes, and performance metrics based on accuracy, reliability and interoperability were improved. Incorporating the technologies from both Intel and DataSynapse allowed us to accelerate the calculation time without sacrificing the end results." To improve the reliability of the large-scale calculations, QuIC ran the tests on DataSynapse's GridServer software, a service execution platform that dynamically scales enterprise application services based on performance and business requirements.... read more

Grid Computing News : Platform Overhauls HPC Management Strategy

Platform Computing has been busy honing its high-performance computing management strategy with a suite of products aimed at cluster and grid computing environments. The Platform Manage suite includes Platform Manager (formerly known as Scali Manage), Platform RTM, Platform Analytics and Platform VM Orchestrator (VMO). The company's existing suite of products, now called Platform Accelerate, includes Platform LSF and Platform Symphony for accelerating compute and data-intensive applications. Platform says the two suites "comprise the fundamental HPC management software needed by enterprise users to develop and run applications and manage HPC environments." The offerings help customers deploy, administer, track, report, monitor, provision and manage compute resources and applications, the company said, adding that it plans to offer a range of software aimed at industries such as electronics, industrial manufacturing, financial services, life sciences, oil and gas, and government and education. Platform Manage and Platform Accelerate are integrated solutions, but individual products can be adopted separately or in combination to meet customer requirements.... read more

Grid Computing News : Euro Researchers to Showcase Grid Projects

The BEinGRID initiative is drawing attention from top businesses interested in the use of grid solutions, utility-like models, and enterprise computing. It’s the European Union’s largest project funded by the Information Society Technologies (IST) research body. The project, which has been running since June 2006, is organizing an event that will be attended by big names from both sides of the Atlantic. The research project will be showcasing the most relevant results from 18 pilot implementations that are employing grid technologies in practical, innovative and profitable ways within a number of economic sectors -- including those not traditionally associated with grid, such as filmmaking and architecture, as well as advancing capabilities in the industries already associated with the technology, such as finance, chemistry and computational fluid dynamics. The opening keynote presentation will be delivered by Werner Vogels, vice president and CTO of Amazon.com, together with Diego Pavia, CEO Atos Origin Iberia.... read more