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

Grid Computing News : Cloud Computing: Hot Air or Killer App?

Cloud computing has become a huge buzz-phrase in the past few months, but you'd be forgiven for not knowing what the term really means. Both imply data centers filled with computing resources available over the network, so are they, in fact, the same thing. You pay for what you consume, without worrying about how where it comes from or how much is available. Customers create their own Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) containing an operating system, applications and data, and they control how many instances of each AMI run at any given time. "Cloud-based computing is a type of IT service usually delivered over the Internet, but the defining characteristic is scale — the ability to service millions of users," said Matt Cain, a research vice president at Gartner.... read more

Grid Computing News : Peer Network Tests 'Real World' Site Performance

The new e-commerce site you launched looks great and you got great comments from beta testers. So why isn't it getting the traffic you expected. There are many Web site performance measurement tools, but they don't all measure the so-called "last mile" or performance at specific endpoints, i.e. Enter Gomez, which has quietly grown its peer network measurement solution to over 40,000 users worldwide. Like other Web performance companies, Gomez has a distributed set of test nodes that measure Internet backbone performance, but the company said its additional Gomez Peer Community is the only global Web site monitoring network made up of real online users.... read more

Grid Computing News : 3Tera Reaches for the Clouds

3Tera is putting its grid operating system to work in a new cloud computing offering. The company says its Cloudware architecture for Cloud Computing without Compromise lets customers build and run large-scale applications in the cloud without regard to operating system, middleware, security, location, architecture or vendor. Based upon 3Tera's AppLogic grid operating system, the Cloudware architecture incorporates storage, computing, connectivity and security "in a far-reaching architecture for building an open cloud computing system." Cloudware is vendor-agnostic, so any third-party vendor's software can be incorporated in a Cloudware-enabled system. Many hosting providers — and several enterprises — are building clouds using 3Tera AppLogic, a grid engine that has evolved into full-blown cloud computing infrastructure software. This technology works across physical and virtualized servers (sitting below the OS) and has built-in high availability, virtualized storage and per-use reporting." "3Tera's AppLogic gives us cost-effective agility and control of our computing infrastructure so we can move at the speed of the teachers and donors we serve," stated Oliver Hurst-Hiller, CTO of DonorsChoose.org, a nonprofit Web site where teachers and donors connect to help public school students in need.... read more

Grid Computing News : 10gen Unveils Cloud Computing Platform

10gen Inc., an AlleyCorp company, has developed a new cloud computing platform that it is releasing on a limited basis. The platform was developed by Kevin Ryan, Dwight Merriman and Eliot Horowitz, the former CEO, CTO and software developer, respectively, of DoubleClick. It is an object-oriented application server that helps developers build, test and deploy Web applications hosted on large, managed grid computing environments. "The development and deployment of large-scale, high-availability Web sites traditionally has been a costly proposition requiring sophisticated engineering," AlleyCorp and 10gen CEO Ryan said in a statement. "We offer a turnkey solution that provides all the building blocks needed to create complex, high-volume sites at drastically reduced costs with considerably less time and effort." Architected for cloud computing deployments, 10gen said the technology lets developers write Web applications that scale automatically as demand increases.... read more

Grid Computing News : Univa UD's Cluster Software Ready for Prime Time

Univa UD's open source cluster software is now generally available as a free download at the company's Grid.org Web site. The company, formed last year by the merger of United Devices and Univa, capitalizes on its open source and public grid computing roots through a strategy that combines open source and proprietary software and services. Its base offering is the free UniCluster Express offering, version 3.2 of which is now available. UniCluster Express 3.2 is "a fully integrated, community-enabled, open-source cluster software stack with unrestricted support for all its components," the company says. "The end result is an extremely robust open cluster solution that integrates exactly the components and features this market wants." Sun Grid Engine provides the scheduling component for UniCluster Express, and customers who are already running a Sun Grid Engine cluster environment can upgrade to UniCluster Express and add configuration, monitoring, management, security and remote access tools to their original Sun Grid Engine implementation at no charge.... read more

Grid Computing News : 3Tera Makes Grid Apps Go

3Tera is advancing its grid application technology with partnerships with Layered Technologies and Nirvanix. 3Tera and Layered Technologies have partnered to support the new Woopra Web analytics platform, and the company has also teamed up with "cloud storage" provider Nirvanix on cloud computing services. 3Tera and on-demand infrastructure provider Layered Technologies are providing 100 grid-based servers to help Woopra meet its initial launch demand. Using 3Tera's AppLogic OS , Layered provides on-demand processing power, bandwidth and storage capacity. Partnering with Layered Technologies has allowed us to deliver true utility computing solutions and help hundreds of companies scale their application with the growing demand." 3Tera and Nirvanix, meanwhile, are working on new cloud computing solutions, including global distributed storage, content distribution and remote backup capabilities for Web application developers.... read more

Grid Computing News : Websense Catches Security Threats With 'HoneyGrid'

Websense is using grid computing technology to speed detection of internet security threats. The company has launched a global network of adaptive security technologies and processes to monitor the internet for changes and emerging threats. The results are then incorporated into the company's Web security, messaging security and data loss prevention solutions. The system uses more than 50 million real-time data collection systems worldwide to monitor and to classify Web, messaging and data content, which the company claims allows it to adapt to emerging threats faster than traditional security and Web filtering solutions. The new offering is targeted at Web 2.0 applications in particular.... read more

Grid Computing News : SES: The Cloud And The New Utility Companies

In a keynote address here at the Search Engine Strategies conference, journalist and author Nicholas Carr outlined a vision of an IT economy that stands on the cusp of a transformation more sweeping than the introduction of the mainframe or even the personal computer. "I think we are at a major turning point in the history of computing," Carr said. "The change we're starting with today is even broader than the PC revolution." That change, Carr said, is the fundamental redefinition of computing power as a utility, rather than as an asset that companies produce and manage internally. Technology is the mechanism, but, as in any shift in business, the driver is economics. Before companies were wired into the electric grid, they producing their own energy at great cost and with tremendous inefficiency.... read more

Grid Computing News : Digipede Opens Up Windows

Digipede Technologies has rolled out the latest version of its grid software solution for the Microsoft Windows platform. Digipede Network 2.1 is certified for Windows Server 2008 and allows single-threaded software to take advantage of multicore processors. Digipede also unveiled two optional packages for the Digipede Network 2.1 Professional Edition. The latest version lets multiple departments share resources and create pools of resources on the fly and use different work queues, 451 Group analyst William Fellows wrote in a report last week. Five-year-old Digipede is self-funded and profitable, with more than 40 customers.... read more

Grid Computing News : GridGain Gains Grid Traction

GridGain Systems has released version 2.0 of its open-source Java grid computing platform. The company bills GridGain 2.0 as powerful, easy to use and built for enterprise use. "GridGain demonstrated that when grid computing is done right, it will be used by a wide range of applications," GridGain founder Nikita Ivanov said in a statement. "Fundamental concepts of grid computing such as data and processing parallelization are extremely appealing to enterprise developers. GridGain employs these fundamental concepts that make grid computing a simple reality that can be easily harnessed right now." New features in version 2.0 include advanced MapReduce implementation; better early and late load balancing capabilities; automatic and dynamic data partitioning and processing co-location; native support for data caching products such as JBoss Cache and Oracle Coherence; advanced scheduling management; and improved runtime metrics, monitoring and management.... read more

Grid Computing News : Medical Center Turns to Grid Archiving

Richardson Regional Medical Center in Texas is using a grid-based medical archiving product from Bycast and IBM to keep up with the growth of medical images. When Richardson's Picture Archiving and Communication System (PACS) started running out of room, the medical center turned to IBM's Grid Medical Archive Solution (GMAS), which uses Bycast's StorageGRID storage management software to protect critical data and meet federal HIPAA demands. Richardson is using the Bycast management features within IBM GMAS to configure information lifecycle management policies to automatically store data in the right place and time as needs change, creating a more cost-effective storage solution. "The automatic and efficient replication of images to our second campus and the long-term data integrity that StorageGRID provides were extremely important to us," stated Ron Franquiz, Richardson's chief information officer. "Leveraging existing storage resources was also a key financial factor in our decision." In addition to using its current storage infrastructure, Richardson also purchased 18 terabytes of additional online protected storage, all of which will be managed by GMAS.... read more

Grid Computing News : Grid Forum Goes to Europe

The Open Grid Forum (OGF) is taking its grid computing standards work to Europe, with a little help from the European Commission. OGF-Europe , funded by the European Commission for Mobilizing and Integrating Communities on Grid Standards and Best Practices Globally, will help "capitalize on European Commission investments in Grid technologies by driving grid adoption and innovation across Europe in research, government and industry," OGF said in a statement. OGF-Europe was launched in keeping with OGF's mission of "pervasive grid adoption through interoperable software standards." The new group will offer outreach seminars and workshops, adoption challenges and recommendations reports, community surveys, best practice reports and tutorials. Silvana Muscella, technical coordinator of OGF-Europe and director of OGF.eeig, said OGF-Europe "will be essential in bringing enterprise and e-science communities together to break down barriers and foster mainstream grid adoption." OGF-Europe's first Community Outreach Seminar will be held in the UK this spring. The formation of the new group is well timed; OGF23, the Grid Forum's quarterly international meeting, will be held in Barcelona in June.... read more

Grid Computing News : Sun Expands Grid Application Offerings

Sun Microsystems has added 14 new applications to its Network.com Application Catalog of online grid-enabled applications available from the Sun Grid compute utility service on a pay-per-use basis. Sun also launched a new partner program, Sun Network.com Connection, for independent software vendors (ISVs) to create on-demand service offerings at lower risk and cost, with access to new sales channels. The latest additions bring the grid service's total number of "Click and Run" applications to 39. Mark Herring, Sun's senior director of software marketing, said Network.com "is evolving into a virtual on-demand data center that allows businesses of any size to leverage compute infrastructure without the cost of ownership and with the flexibility of scaling up or down compute resources in real time as business demands change." The latest applications include Blender, open source tools for modeling, rendering, animation, post-production, creation and playback of interactive 3D content. Sun is sponsoring Blender Foundation's open movie "Peach," a short 3D animation by artists and developers in the Blender community, with grants of CPU hours in Network.com.... read more

Grid Computing News : Aspeed Gets Acquired

Aspeed Software, which made a name for itself with technology for grid-enabling applications, has been acquired by SIMtone Corp. SIMtone, a desktop virtualization and utility computing firm, said it will use Aspeed's application acceleration and optimization solutions to get the most out of server and hardware platforms and virtualization platforms from VMware, Microsoft and XenSource. Aspeed Software is used by financial firms to boost compute-intensive risk management applications in multi-core, cluster, grid and virtualized environments, and to transition from shared memory Unix systems to Linux- and Windows-based platforms. SIMtone CEO and chairman Mario Dal Canto said in a statement that "Aspeed technology broadly applied to the SIMtone end-to-end Virtual Cloud Computing platform will deliver an unparalleled virtual desktop user experience and expand the scalability and availability of the applications and servers." SIMtone's virtual desktop services use the company's universal dialtone technology to let users access their virtual desktops from PCs, terminals and mobile devices, helping organizations to save on technology infrastructure costs typically associated with distributed computing environments. We were delighted to see the number of clients that we have in common." SIMtone will continue to support and expand the Aspeed customer base and relationships with Intel, Microsoft and other business partners.... read more

Grid Computing News : Project Makes Grids Work Together

Researchers from Europe, the U.S. and China are developing software that will make compute grids interoperable, which could boost computing power and collaboration on critical research projects. The two-year-old EU-funded OMII-Europe (Open Middleware Infrastructure Institute) project aims to unite the gLite, Globus and UNICORE grid computing platforms, which are widely used in major European Grid projects. The researchers, led by Alistair Dunlop of the UK's University of Southampton, will give a demonstration later this month at Open Grid Forum (OGF) 22 in Cambridge, Mass. The OMII project is built around five components — a Basic Execution Service, a Data Integration Service, a Virtual Organization Membership Service, an Accounting Service and Portal Capability.... read more

Grid Computing News : IBM Grid Helps Improve Cancer Treatment

IBM is taking its World Community Grid cancer research project to the next level with a new effort to develop diagnostic tools. Big Blue, The Cancer Institute of New Jersey (CINJ) and Rutgers University have launched a collaborative effort to develop diagnostic tools to better predict patients' response to treatment. By using advanced computer and imaging technologies to compare cancerous tissues, cell and radiology studies, researchers and physicians are hoping for more accurate prognoses, more personalized therapy, and, eventually, the discovery and development of new cancer drugs. IBM called the new project "a natural extension" of the Help Defeat Cancer (HDC) project, which used IBM's World Community Grid ( worldcommunitygrid.org ) to characterize different types and stages of disease based on the underlying staining patterns exhibited by digitally imaged cancer tissues. Thanks to the experimental results gathered in the HDC project, the team has received a $2.5 million grant from the National Institutes of Health, which will be used to build a "deployable, grid-enabled decision support system" to help researchers, physicians and scientists automatically analyze and classify imaged cancer specimens with better accuracy.... read more

Grid Computing News : Tapping PC Resources for Storage Needs

Take a good look at any desktop fleet and consider how many, if any, PCs are using or even require all the available capacity. Then imagine corralling all that unused space and tying it together like a grid to create a needed storage pool. That's exactly the road many small to midsize businesses (SMBs) are traveling in building out data storage. "This emerging approach is a dispersed strategy dependent on the LAN," said Andrew Reichman, an analyst with Forrester Research. All the office manager was concerned with was getting a more reliable data backup system that could scale as needed once electronic health records started flowing into the network.... read more

Grid Computing News : DataSynapse Puts Applications At Your Service

DataSynapse has released the latest version of its enterprise application virtualization platform, which the company bills as "the only commercially available software that configures, activates and scales applications based on business demands and policies." DataSynapse said FabricServer 2.5 lets customers "create real-time infrastructure environments that dynamically allocate computing resources to enterprise applications" as needed, lowering operational costs and increasing resource utilization. The fast-growing grid computing and virtualization vendor grew revenues by more than 50 percent last year and is moving toward an IPO this year (see DataSynapse Goes Virtual ). Version 2.5 contains DataSynapse Studio software, a developer tool that automates and standardizes testing, deployment and packaging of enterprise applications. The new release has been integrated with DataSynapse's VersaVision software, the company's business reporting and analytics platform, for greater visibility into infrastructure and applications. The new version also includes support for the Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0, Internet Information Server and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, on top of existing support for Java, J2EE, Legacy and COTS/ISV applications.... read more

Grid Computing News : IBM Annexes XIV

IBM started the new year on the acquisition trail, picking up Israel-based storage startup XIV Ltd. XIV makes Nextra, a storage system based on a grid of commodity hardware that includes features such as thin provisioning , snapshots and remote mirroring. The company, founded by former EMC chief engineer Moshe Yanai, has shipped about 4 petabytes of high-performance storage in the last couple of years. But rather than adding another general storage line, IBM plans to target the company's technology at next-generation digital content. "IBM’s goal is to provide the leading technologies and solutions at every layer of the data center — storage, servers, software and services — to address these new realities IT customers face." IBM said it was impressed by Nextra's ability to scale dynamically, heal itself and self-tune while eliminating the management burdens associated with rapid growth environments.... read more

Grid Computing News : Platform Takes Aim at Grid Apps

Platform Computing is adopting a standard that makes it easier to use applications in grid computing environments. The company announced an agreement with FedStage Systems to distribute FedStage's Distributed Resource Management Application API (DRMAA) with Platform LSF. The FedStage DRMAA library for LSF is an open source implementation of the Open Grid Forum's DRMAA 1.0 specification, a standard interface that makes it easier to adopt and write applications for grid environments. "FedStage Systems is a significant player in bringing standards to the high-performance computing industry and providing our ISV partners and customers the core capabilities necessary for greater interoperability." For more information and a download link, visit http://www.fedstage.com/wiki/FedStage_DRMAA_for_LSF . And 3Tera has announced the alpha release of what it claims is a new concept in data center operations, Dynamic Appliances , "where elements become so simple to manage that they can be configured to manage themselves." Dynamic Appliances are packaged data center operations like backup, migration or SLAs that users can add to their applications to provide functionality.... read more