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