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