High-Performance Computing News

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2006-01-06T21:39:00.000+07:00

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The most recent post is about Grid Computing Deal of EMC and Acxiom and Sneak Preview SAP NetWeaver 04 SP15 Full Java Edition.

Grid computing can aid complex applications

2006-01-04T21:02:00.000+07:00

The next level, and biggest payback, is often referred to as "fine grain" parallelization. This is more difficult than coarse grain because it requires that the application itself be modified.

This challenge is especially significant for applications that drive critical decision-making. Examples include R&D strategies in the pharmaceutical and biotech industry, risk and portfolio balancing decisions in the investment industry, and exploration choices in energy development.

In all cases, these models tend to be intensely complex and algorithm-specific. Simply splitting the inputs is not enough to meet elapsed time reduction goals. At this level of complexity, chunking the application may significantly reduce the elapsed time -- and may even give different results.

To take advantage of grid computing, these complex applications require more sophisticated analysis and an implementation toolkit. This is especially true for Monte Carlo-based algorithms that use very specific random number generators; non-linear (quasi-Newtonian calculations) such as non-linear mixed effect models; and linear algebra-based calculations, or geometric calculations used for molecular dynamics. For these, the answer lies in a new concept: the application grid, the latest evolution on the road to more effectively exploiting the capacity made available by the processor grid.

The application grid is independent of the processor grid; it not only parallelizes the computation, enabling it to run across multiple CPUs -- it also retains the mathematical integrity and provides the necessary granularity to achieve the reduced elapsed time results and scalability.

By enabling even the most complex, mission-critical business applications to leverage the resources made available by the processor grid, while avoiding any costly and time-consuming "application surgery" and retaining all algorithms and underlying logic, the application grid offers companies the best of both worlds -- faster and better decisions.

IT Manager’s Journal | Grid computing can aid complex applications

IBM and Universities Launch Latin American Grid Computing Initiative

2006-01-04T20:47:00.000+07:00

Building upon the company"s effort to foster world class research and create leadership opportunities for Hispanic students in information technology and engineering, IBM today announced it is teaming with Florida International University, University of Puerto Rico at Mayaguez, University of Miami, Barcelona Supercomputing Center and Monterrey Tech to invest in the Latin American Grid initiative.

The LA Grid (pronounced "lah grid") program will link faculty, students and researchers from the world renowned IBM T.J. Watson Research Centers across the United States, Latin America and Spain to collaborate on innovative industry projects for applications in areas such as health care, life sciences and nanotechnology; and in regionally-specific concerns like hurricane mitigation. The use of a shared research and educational platform based on grid computing technology is made possible through Shared University Research awards intended to foster collaborative research and innovation between academia and industry.
Hispanic Business - IBM and Universities Launch Latin American Grid Computing Initiative

Grid Adoption in Business Sector

2005-12-28T21:56:00.000+07:00

For CIOs looking for a success story of grid in business sector, Bank of America could be the best story. This success story was mentioned in Taking the Right Angle on Grid Computing. Currently, Bank of America has 300-node grid for risk-analysis project.

Technorati Tags: Grid Computing, Success Story, Bank of America, Risk Analysis

UE researchers explore concept of a grid for Southwest Indiana

2005-12-26T16:24:00.000+07:00

Researchers at the University of Evansville are trying to find out if Evansville area businesses and institutions are interested in participating in a computer grid that could be used to help solve extra-large computational problems.

The Institute for Global Enterprise at the university is in the early stages of exploring the concept of a grid, said Kristina Setzekorn, assistant professor of management information systems, director of the Global Assistance Program.

Setzekorn said if there is interest, the university may use student groups to study the proposal further and see how it could be organized and work in Southwestern Indiana.

The establishment of a grid in Southwest Indiana could be used to attract high-technology development to this area, Setzekorn said.

CourierPress: Business

Murex Integrates Platform Symphony grid computing solution

2005-12-22T21:14:00.000+07:00

Platform Computing, the world’s largest grid computing software provider, and Murex, a leading provider of cross-asset trading, risk management and processing solutions, today announced a technology partnership that will allow common customers to significantly improve the efficiency of complex risk calculation models. Through the integration of Platform Symphony, Murex will be able to offer customers broad compatibility for grid environments, lowering latency and overhead, while increasing overall efficiency in pricing calculation restitution. The announcement marks a collaboration agreement between two leaders in their respective space, combining to offer a best-of-breed of grid computing solution for the financial services market. "Platform’s grid system provides common customers the ability to better run their complex valuation and risk management models, by providing the underlying foundation needed to create a scalable IT infrastructure that promotes the efficient use of all resources," said Maroun Eddé, Managing Partner of Murex. Chris Purpura, vice president of new ventures and alliances at Platform Computing added, "We share a number of customers with Murex and look forward to enabling those customers to improve performance of their pricing systems. This relationship also introduces us to many new companies around the world that would benefit from the power of grid computing technology."
Bobsguide News item

Media Grid

2005-12-22T15:54:00.000+07:00

The Media Grid is a computational grid platform that provides digital media delivery and processing services for a new generation of networked applications. Built using Internet and Web standards, the Media Grid combines Quality of Service (QoS) and broadcast features with distributed parallel processing capabilities. Together these features create a unique software development platform designed specifically for networked applications that produce and consume massive quantities of digital media.
Media Grid : Home Page

Unfortunately, development details are available for members only.

CFP: 20th International Conference on Supercomputing (ICS 2006)

2005-12-21T21:46:00.000+07:00

ICS is the premier international forum for the presentation of research results in high-performance computing systems. Now in its 20th year, the conference also includes invited talks, tutorials, workshops, panels, and exhibits. Cairns, Australia---the sunny garden city where the Great Barrier Reef meets the Wet Tropics Rainforest---will host the conference in 2006.

Papers are solicited on all aspects of research, development, and application of high-performance computers and computation:

Architectures including power-aware, parallel I/O, grid-based, web-based, continuous monitoring, self-healing, fault-tolerant, embedded;
Productivity including benchmarks, performance evaluation studies, specialized languages, program development tools;
Software including compilers, operating systems, schedulers, runtime optimization;
Applications including numeric and non-numeric, scientific, biological, industrial, massive sensory processing;
Theoretical underpinnings of any of the above topics as well as analysis and experimental evaluation of systems.

Important Dates

Abstracts due February 6, 2006
Papers due February 13, 2006
Final papers due May 3, 2006

Technorati Tags: Call for Papers, Internation Conference, Supercomputing, ICS

Grid Adoption in Singapore

2005-12-21T12:33:00.000+07:00

The dearth of business applications has been described as “the biggest show stopper” in promoting grid adoption amongst enterprises.

“People say: ‘Show me!’ And that is the most challenging part,” says Lee Hock Soon (left), partner development manager with Oracle Asean. To address this, Oracle, Sun and AMD recently teamed up to establish a Business Grid Showcase aimed at presenting grid-enabled applications to independent software vendors and businesses.

Grid computing comprises multiple levels such as the storage grid, data grid, computational grid, application server grid as well as provisioning and management tools.

According to Dr Lee Hing Yan, project director, Pilot Platform, National Grid Office (NGO), given the current state of computational grids, certain applications are more readily suited and amenable to harness the technology. Users include pharmaceutical companies (for example, for drug discovery), oil exploration firms (for the analysis of geological data), financial companies (for undertaking value-at-risk calculations for a complex set of portfolios using Monte Carlo simulation techniques), and other commercial ventures with huge computing jobs.

Laurence Liew (left), chief technology officer of Scalable Systems, also points out that enterprises doing engineering design and research are already making use of software that is already running on cluster grids. These include applications such as Fluent for computational fluid dynamics, Cadence for electronic circuit design and simulation and many others. And in the peer-to-peer world, technologies such as Skype are also based on PC grids.

But it is the area of data grids that presents the most potential for business applications. Data grids or data virtualisation provides a layer of abstraction between databases and users, allowing transparent access to data residing in multiple physical databases at different geographical locations, says Lee of NGO. “The flexibility and ease-of-access will enable firms to manage their data sources without modifying the applications.”

Computerworld Singapore - The elusive business grid

Grid Computing has been promoting extensively in Singapore leading by National Grid Office. Many vendors are adopting Grid into their products, e.g., Oracle, Sun, AMD, IBM, SAP, and many more.

Technorati Tags: Grid Computing, Globus, Univa, Oracle, Sun, AMD, IBM, SAP, Singapore, National Grid Office

Mining biotech's data mother lode

2005-12-20T17:31:00.000+07:00

The BioGrid project brought together six partners from the UK, Germany, Cyprus and The Netherlands to address one of the key problems facing the life sciences today.
IST Results - Mining biotech’s data mother lode

This project is sponsored by EU.

Technorati Tags: Biology, BioTech, BioGrid, Grid, DataGrid, Life Science

Univa Globus Enterprise 4.0

2005-12-20T15:22:00.000+07:00

Univa Corporation today announced the beta release of Univa Globus Enterprise (UGE) Release 4.0, the first shipment of its enterprise-ready, commercially supported software based on the Globus® Toolkit, the industry"s most widely deployed open source grid infrastructure software. UGE includes new, simplified installers and security configurations that facilitate rapid deployment of enterprise grids. General availability of UGE is expected in early 2006.
Univa Ships Beta Release of Enterprise Globus Software: Financial News - Yahoo! Finance

UGE has been released the beta version of release 4.0. Unfortunately, it is available for customers and partners only. For more information, please go to Univa.

Technorati Tags: Univa, Enterprise, Grid, Globus, Beta

Purdue, Notre Dame Develop Computer Grid For Northwest Indiana

2005-12-19T16:38:00.000+07:00

Congress has passed a bill that will earmark $5 million for Purdue University and the University of Notre Dame for a high-performance computer grid for northwest Indiana.
Newsroom - Inside INdiana Business with Gerry Dick

Sound file is also available at the source.

Technorati Tags: Grid Computing, HPC, Purdue University, University of Notre Dame, Indiana

Hispanic IT Students Get Boost from Latin American Grid, IBM Awards

2005-12-18T14:08:00.000+07:00

IBM is investing in the Latin American Grid initiative, a cooperative research effort that helps stimulate local economies and prepare students for IT leadership positions. Hispanics currently represent 4% of U.S. computer science graduates.
InformationWeek | IT Education | Hispanic IT Students Get Boost from Latin American Grid, IBM Awards

Technorati Tags: Grid, Latin, Award, IBM

IBM Unveils WSDM Tools for SOA Management

2005-12-17T00:16:00.000+07:00

IBM has released a new Web Services Distributed Management (WSDM) development kit which includes the IBM Autonomic Manageability Endpoint Builder and Endpoint Simulator. The builder tool allows developers to build WSDM interfaces for resources such as servers, applications and printers while the simulator tool creates a WSDM-based testing environment.

"This Eclipse-based tool allows a developer to easily connect the WSDM standard format with the unique capabilities of the resources to be managed. The Manageability Endpoint Builder then creates the XML definitions, on which the endpoint run time can operate in a WSDM-compatible manner. The manageability endpoint run time is a Web services-based run-time environment for WSDM- and AC -compliant touchpoints and can run on any platform with a SOAP engine (Apache Axis and OSGI )."

The toolkit is freely downloadable from IBM’s alphaWorks site.
jax magazine :: The Premier Online Resource for Java, Apache, XML, and Web Services

SCE 1.7.0 Roll for ROCKS 4.1 released

2005-12-16T11:47:00.000+07:00

Changes in this new ROLL

Support ROCKS 4.1 (i386 and x86_64)
All components from SCE 1.7.0, plus some updates and bug fixes.
Support for SGE 6 in Job Monitoring of SCMSWeb
Pre-configure GT2.x Grid job submission (require Grid Roll)
Almost everything automatically configured according to your ROCKS configuration (including Job Monitoring and Accounting. Will use PBS->SGE->SQMS, in that order.)
Web service support for SCMS and SCMSWeb

Quick installation guide

Just use the normal ROCKS installation for install/upgrade
If you installed Grid ROLL. Please do the following
- edit /opt/globus/etc/globus-job-manager.conf
- Change "-save-logfile on_error" to "-save-logfile always". This will enable Grid job detection for SCMSWeb job accounting.

You can download the rolls from http://download.opensce.org/pub/sce/current/binary/ROLL/.

Technorati Tags: OpenSCE, SCMS, SCMSWeb, SQMS, SGE, Rocks, Roll, Cluster, Grid

The role of networking vendors in Grid Computing

2005-12-16T01:32:00.000+07:00

As we try to understand networking vendors" role in the Grid computing evolution, in particular, we have to start thinking of the network more anatomically and less like hardware.
Grid Meter | InfoWorld | more thoughts on networking vendors’ Grid opportunity | December 15, 2005 08:54 AM | By Greg Nawrocki

Not just bandwidth, QoS is the next major step for Internet and Grid. The result is an Application-oriented Networking.

Technorati Tags: Grid Computing, Router, Cisco, Nortel, QoS

World Community Grid heads to AIDS

2005-12-14T12:35:00.000+07:00

COMPUTER giant IBM has introduced a "World Community Grid," a new research initiative using millions of computers worldwide as one virtual supercomputer devoted to AIDS research.The World Community Grid is the first initiative using grid computing focused on AIDS research - an Internet-based project, dubbed FightAIDS@Home.IBM is collaborating with the Scripps Research Institute, a private, non profit research organization engaged in basic biomedical science based in San Diego.Using the World Community Grid to harness the computing power of millions of computers around the world, the research project aims to find new AIDS therapies to derive chemical strategies effective in the treatment of HIV-infected individuals vis-a-vis evolving drug resistance in the virus.The Scripps Research Institute Olson Laboratory has been focused on developing new therapies to prevent the onset of AIDS in individuals infected with HIV.
IBM joins fight against AIDS with grid computing initiative - INQ7.net

CFP: Cluster 2006

2005-12-13T15:04:00.000+07:00

In less than a decade , clusters of commodity PCs have become the most cost-effective computing platforms for executing a wide range of High performance applications from molecular biology to search and indexing on the internet.

In spite of countless deployed platforms and resounding applications successes, many research and development challenges remain for achieving better cluster performance, scalability, and usability. The IEEE TCSC sponsored International Conference on Cluster Computing 2006 provides a open forum for researchers, practitioners, and users to present discuss issues, directions, and results that will shape the future of cluster computing.

As cluster architecture is becoming a more mature field of application it remain particularly important to maintain an event that links academic interest and new ideas to experience report of practitioners and applications developers.

Important Dates

Paper due April 28, 2006
Conference September 25-27, 2006

For more details, please go to official website.

CFP: The 2nd IEEE International Conference on e-Science and Grid Computing

2005-12-13T14:44:00.000+07:00

Scientific research is increasingly carried out by communities of researchers that span disciplines, laboratories, organizations and national boundaries. These activities involve geographically distributed and heterogeneous resources such as computational systems, scientific instruments, databases, sensors, software components, networks, and people. Such large-scale and enhanced scientific endeavors are carried out via collaborations on a global scale in which information and computing technology plays a vital role and are thus popularly termed as e-Science.

Grid computing has emerged as one of the key computing paradigms that enable the creation and management of Internet-based utility computing infrastructure, called Cyber-infrastructure, for realization of e-Science and e-Business at the global level. Many national and international projects around the world have been initiated to carry out research and innovation activities that transform the vision of e-Science and Grid computing into reality.

The e-Science 2006 conference, sponsored by the IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Scalable Computing (TCSC), is designed to bring together, developers, and users of e-Science applications and enabling IT technologies from leading international and interdisciplinary research communities. The conference serves as a forum to present the results of the latest research and product/tool developments, and highlight related activities from around the world.

Important Date

Papers Due Aug 1, 2006
Conference Dec 4-6, 2006

For more information, go to official CFP.

CFP: The 2006 IFIP International Conference on Embedded And Ubiquitous Computing (EUC'2006)

2005-12-12T15:33:00.000+07:00

Embedded and Ubiquitous computing are emerging rapidly as exciting new paradigms and disciples to provide computing and communication services all the time, everywhere. Its systems are now invading every aspect of life to the point that they are disappearing inside all sorts of appliances or can be worn unobtrusively as part of clothing and jewelry etc. This emergence is a natural outcome of research and technological advances in embedded systems, pervasive computing and communications, wireless networks, mobile computing, distributed computing and agent technologies, etc. Its explosive impact on academics, industry, government and daily life can be compared to that of electric motors over the past century but promises to revolutionize life much more profoundly than elevators, electric motors or even personal computer evolution ever did. Important Dates

Workshop Proposal 22 January, 2006
Paper Submission due 22 February, 2006
Conference 1-4 August, 2006

CFP: Special Issue on Security in Grid and Distributed Systems (JPDC)

2005-12-12T15:12:00.000+07:00

The proliferation of services and applications in both Internet-based and ad-hoc based environments has been bringing network and system security issues to the fore. The past few years have seen significant increase in cyber attacks on the Internet, resulting in degraded confidence and trusts in the use of Internet and computer systems. We also expect to see more attacks and threats on the coming wireless ad-hoc and sensor networks soon because of their resource constraints.There is a consensus that a key contributing factor leading to cyber threats is the lack of integrated and cohesive strategies that extend beyond the network level, to protect the applications and devices at system level as well. There is an increasing demand for measures to guarantee the privacy, integrity, and availability of resources in networks and in distributed systems, such as Grid, P2P systems, andwireless sensor networks. This special issue will cover various topics on security in Grid and distributed systems.

Submission deadline has been extened to December 16, 2005.

For more information, click here.

Technorati Tags: Call For Paper, Journal, Security, Grid, Distributed System

Utility Computing is coming

2005-12-11T15:26:00.000+07:00

IBM is the first vendor which offers Utility Computing in the name of On Demand Business. Sun is the next one that clearly offered $1/cpu-hr or $1/GB-mo. This month, HP has jumped to Utility Computing with offerring to test 20 CPUs for 48 hours.

Who is the next?

Note that Utility Computing is a kind of service that might satisfy need of finanicial business or animation rendering sector to temporarily boost up computing speed.

Technorati Tags: Utility Computing , IBM, Sun, HP

ThaiGrid launched Education Working Group

2005-12-11T12:36:00.000+07:00

ThaiGrid has just launched Education Working Group for promoting Grid Computing and related technologies in Thailand.