Category Archives: Cloud Computing

“Social Shopping for Servers” has Begun!

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Image of our Stellar Deal Campaign
We hope everyone has thus far had a great start to 2012! To help launch us further into the new year, we are running a special “social servers” campaign through the end of February to help bring everyone together for fantastic savings! The Stellar Deal on our 5017C-MTF 1U Single Xeon E3 “Sandy Bridge” server takes the form of social shopping for servers where a special discount of 20% will be applied if the campaign goal of 50 servers is met. If we reach our campaign goal, everyone gets the deal and benefits! If we don’t meet the goal, you won’t be charged but nobody gets the deal.

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Future Trends in HPC, part 2

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This is a continuation of our look at future trends in high performance computing. In part 1 we covered the first five of the top ten trends. In this installment we’ll wrap up with the remaining five.

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Future trends in HPC, part 1

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As we near the end of 2011, we take a moment to reflect on the past year. It’s been a busy year for IT across virtually all verticals, from mobile and search to enterprise servers and cloud computing. When we attended HPC360 a few weeks ago, we had the pleasure to attend a keynote presentation by Addison Snell, CEO of Intersect Research in which he discussed the most important trends in high performance computing (HPC).

HPC is an exciting and growing industry that ICC has been moving into the past couple years. The traditional HPC space revolved around high-end research facilities particularly in science and engineering. However, with each year technological innovations and tailored systems such as our Supermicro GPU Simcluster have brought the realm of HPC closer to reality for many small/medium-sized business and organizations.

In this 2-part series we will look at the top 10 future trends in HPC from Intersect360′s research, coupled with our own analysis and thoughts. No better way for us computer nerds to close the year right? Let’s get started.

Top 10 HPC Trends for 2012 and Beyond

Future Trends for High Performance Computing Image

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New Green Server Competitor Emerging?

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There has been a decent amount of chatter on all the media channels over some of Facebook’s efforts to move forward with innovative technology. The other day I wrote about its new “green” European data center based in Sweden. In addition, at the recent Open Compute Project Summit, Facebook announced its intention to contribute to greater standardization at the system level for data center server and hardware equipment. For some, minimizing heat and energy consumption is as high a priority as performance.

A potential competitor to Facebook is emerging in HP, who is launching a new effort Project Moonshot. HP intends to utilize this program to develop:

…a new server development platform, “customer discovery lab” and partner ecosystem brought together with the purpose of reducing the complexity and energy consumption of environments that have thousands of servers along with all the network, storage, power, cooling and management technologies needed to support them.

But Facebook as a player in the world of enterprise IT is a newbie. Data centers are not their primary focus. So while HP may butt heads with them, their real game appears to be Intel.

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Switching to the cloud? Advantages and disadvantages

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Cloud computing graphic (courtesy of Sam Johnston, accessed on Wikipedia)With tougher economic times, companies are reducing IT budgets but are still finding the need to replace legacy systems. Because of this, claims a Gartner report released earlier this year, many CIOs have turned to cloud computing as a way to save on IT costs.

Cloud computing, for all of its recent publicity, is not new. In the decades before PCs, companies purchased computing resources on mini-mainframes that were accessed through end-user terminals. Cloud computing’s recent re-emergence is a result of companies again considering the cost savings of having someone outside the company handle IT infrastructure and maintenance.

But the companies that have arguably the most to gain from cloud computing, small and medium sized businesses (SMBs), are still unconvinced. According to a recent Newtek survey, 48% of small businesses owners do not see a switch to the cloud as a cost-reducing move. Continue reading →

Advanced Manufacturing Partnership (AMP) to spur innovation

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Photo of sun behind a factoryOn June 24, President Obama announced the Advanced Manufacturing Partnership (AMP) between the federal government, academia, and businesses to help stimulate the manufacturing sector of the U.S. economy. We have been following the so-called “Missing Middle” of small- to medium-sized manufacturers (SMMs) on this blog, and I’d like to describe some of the recent initiatives to engage this high-potential segment of our economy.

Speaking at Carnegie Mellon University, Obama described that AMP would allocate $500 million of federal money to help make U.S. manufacturing more competitive around the world.

Inspired by a report drafted by the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), which found that there are market failures in the advanced manufacturing space that need to be overcome by government intervention, AMP will focus on five initiatives:

  1. Manufacturing for national security
  2. Materials science
  3. Robotics
  4. Energy efficiency
  5. Developing partnerships and consortia between government, universities, and industry Continue reading →

Cloud computing security

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Image of computing cloudTom’s Hardware featured an article last week which sought some general answers to the question of how to maximize security in the cloud. As more and more companies migrate their IT resources towards cloud-computing vendors such as Amazon Web Services, the issue of securing one’s data on somebody else’s machines has been rightly generating much attention.

The article delineated four main areas of focus when it comes to cloud security:

  1. Data Encryption – There are various ways to ensure that company data stored in the cloud is encrypted. SSL and other VPN (virtual-private network) connections are the standard offering by cloud providers, which allow for encryption of data when it is transported across network channels.The safest option, though, is to extend your internal security to cover the resources stored on the cloud. This can either be done, as the article notes, by either establishing a public and private hybrid cloud or by using something like Amazon’s Virtual Private Cloud, which directs cloud-based application traffic through your internal security tools before it goes online.
  2. Fine-Grained Access Controls – The ability to restrict access to various resources located on the cloud based on user type is one of the least developed areas of cloud computing security. This feature is more of a protection from accidental internal damage rather than from malicious attacks outside one’s organization. Developers who are working on one project whose resources are located in the cloud should not necessarily have access to the entire company cloud files, where negligence or ignorance could cause inadvertent damage. This is an area that is being rapidly developed and these features will be in place for most serious cloud providers “in the near future”, according to Tom’s Hardware. Continue reading →

HPC and the life sciences

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Connected network cablesThis week, a team from our company visited a large laboratory located in the Chicago area. IT representatives there told us how a major focus for them has been migrating their computing resources from a model of individual workgroups using separate clusters to a shared private cloud that all research teams in the facility can access for running their jobs. This shift to private clouds for getting the most out of dedicated clusters is a hot topic of conversation in the HPC world.

HPC in the Cloud recently published an article responding to a case study written by Platform Computing about the implementation of a private cloud at the Harvard Medical School. Both are worth a read if you are interested in the challenges encountered by small- and medium-sized life sciences organizations when they try to adopt HPC clusters.

HPC holds much promise for organizations such as the Harvard Medical School. With middleware such as Platform Computing (we are biased, I must admit, since this is what HPC clusters by ICC deploy as well) it is getting easier to operate an HPC cluster with hosts running different operating systems and applications. It used to be that this multiplicity of software on the same cluster would cause extensive compatibility and usability problems, but not so much anymore. End-users in the life sciences (such as medical researchers) are benefiting from computing applications that are productive and easy to use.

So Harvard Medical School, as the HPC in the Cloud article describes, has migrated from an inefficient computing model of unshared individual computers scattered across various laboratories to a centralized private cloud that can be accessed by any of those users and managed as one unit. Simplifying maintenance while maximizing accessibility to HPC resources by medical school staff is most likely going to save money and increase the pace of innovation in the long run.

While this is a hopeful case study that sheds light on how other organizations can pool their computing resources to great effect, challenges remain for spreading this model to other small- and medium-size laboratories and businesses. For one, private medical companies are heavily regulated by the government and their IT infrastructure has to incorporate many time-consuming applications to store detailed records.

HPC is becoming more affordable and easier to use, but software has to continue evolving to accommodate the particular context of each industry. Only then will the life sciences (not to mention other markets) have a truly turn-key HPC solution that can benefit labs and private companies of every size.

Microsoft HPC Server 2008 R2 – cool new features

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Yesterday, at an HPC conference for the financial industry, Microsoft announced an update (R2) for Windows HPC Server 2008. Aside from offering new features that will take advantage of innovations in cloud computing, Microsoft claims that this update will make HPC Server 2008 less expensive to operate than Linux.

The reasoning, according to Microsoft, is that Linux requires much expensive expertise to use while the Windows interface is familiar to just about anybody in computing. Moreover, as Computer Reseller News reports, a Microsoft-funded study found that Windows HPC Server is 32-51% less expensive in the long-term than a Linux HPC solution.

There are several other features about which the new update of Microsoft HPC Server 2008 can boast. First, number crunching large data sets in Excel (a popular method with the financial computation industry) has become a lot more efficient.

This is partly due to a second major innovation: the ability to outsource computing to more powerful clusters from one’s Windows workstation. A series of calculations that would have taken two hours to complete before, writes HPC Wire, can now take less than two minutes.

Finally, the new update also takes advantage of cloud computing from the other direction: not one powerful HPC cluster assisting individual workstations, but rather many PCs volunteering their time to help compute a few data-intensive calculations.

This is the same idea as SETI@home or Einstein@home: any PC user can allow their computer to be used as part of a cloud to perform others’ calculations when it is not needed by the user herself.

With these impressive additions to Windows HPC Server 2008, Microsoft seeks to chip away at Linux’s lead in the HPC market.

Platform Computing – innovator in cloud computing software

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When Platform Computing began as a company in 1992, computers were used by large organizations much like they had been for several previous decades. If a complex computing job needed to be run, it would be run on one machine, often only during certain times in the day. There was no widespread use of clusters or computing clouds. Computational research that now takes several days or weeks to complete used to take many months or years.

The first commercial project that Platform Computing undertook, according to an interview on HPCintheCloud.com with Platform CEO Songnian Zhou, was to help the engine manufacturer Pratt & Whitney design the engines for the new Boeing 777 airliner. Zhou describes how supercomputers were used back then:

At that time, they were using one Cray supercomputer rather than IBM mainframes to do it — and every night they would run one job. One job! Per night! Using that one Cray they had to explore all the parameters — how big or small, how many blades, and so on — all the design alternatives; that takes dozens and dozens of runs. They had to run half a year, which is of course a big problem for their product cycle to serve the airlines and their customers.

Platform Computing sought to change the way organizations such as Pratt & Whitney used supercomputers. Instead of running one job on one computer at a time, Platform pioneered the use of software to break up complex jobs to be performed on many computers connected together in one computer cluster. The airline and automotive industries, according to Zhou, were the early adopters of this technology and used it to speed up and simplify their design simulations.

Today, cloud computing and clustering have become industry standards, and there are now many companies that offer software and other services to facilitate them. Platform Computing still specializes in private clouds (a network of computers in the same facility most likely owned by the same organization) and community clouds (a network of computers owned and shared exclusively by a few organizations) which means that they cater towards large corporations and organizations that can afford purchasing large clusters.

Public clouds, the type most people think of when they talk about cloud computing, is facilitated mostly by other companies, although Platform has made an effort to reach out to smaller businesses and organizations in 2010.

If you are interested in Platform Computing software for clustering or private clouds, feel free to contact ICC and we can talk to you about the different options they have available to take full advantage of your computing hardware resources.