Avastu Blog: Sustainable Global Clouds

Platform Computing, the global leader in High Performance Computing (HPC) management software, has announced the next version of its virtual environment management product for the enterprise data center, Platform VM Orchestrator (VMO) 4. Platform VMO 4 provides faster delivery of virtual computer environments to end users while optimizing resource utilization, availability, and power consumption, to improve an enterprise’s return on investment from its virtualization environment. The solution offers a cost-effective enterprise virtualization management solution for Citrix® XenServer™, with support for virtualization platforms from other vendors to be delivered in the coming months. Effectively managing virtualization environments can be a challenge facing IT organizations today. Subsequently administrators need tools specifically built for managing virtualization deployments, optimizing computer resources, and removing performance bottlenecks in order to meet escalating business dema...

Santa Clara, Calif. — April 29, 2008 — Woven Systems™ Inc., the leading innovator of Ethernet Fabric switching solutions based on its patented vSCALE™ technology for data centers and high-performance computing (HPC) clusters, today announced that the prestigious Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (Albert Einstein Institute, Hannover, Germany) is using Woven’s EFX 1000 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10 GE) Fabric Switch and TRX 100 Ethernet Switch in a large HPC cluster to search for gravitational waves predicted by Albert Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity. The Woven’s Ethernet Fabric provides access to more than one petabyte of data supplied by a worldwide network of gravitational wave detectors. The data is distributed to compute cluster nodes via the Woven all-Ethernet solution. “Gravitational wave research is one of the most exciting fields of science. It will open a complete new window to the universe, and requires very large-scale and sophisticated computing tech...

WALTHAM, Mass., Jan. 29, 2008 – In the fourth quarter of 2007, data virtualization middleware solutions provider xkoto Inc. , reported significant revenue growth of more than 150 percent over the same period in 2006. The company's growth and momentum was fueled by the increasing demand from enterprise customers requiring highly reliable and scalable solutions capable of ensuring continuous access to corporate data. Highlights of the quarter and full year include the significant expansion of xkoto’s management team, distribution channel and partner programs, as well as new customer adoption in North America and Europe and a major new release of xkoto’s flagship product, GRIDSCALE ® . “Customers and prospects in virtually all data intensive segments require high performance, highly reliable, scalable access to data for mission-critical systems. As a result, we’re witnessing the rapid adoption of xkoto’s proven data virtualization technology,” said David Patrick, President and CE...

I had a great conversation with Jerry, the CTO of Marathon Technologies, a couple of days back. What I really find very interesting is that they are committing to Open Source and Xen technology. They are teaming up with Citrix to bring virtualization and the HA (High Availability) to the masses. Jerry's profile (from the site): Jerald H. Melnick, Chief Technology Officer Jerry is responsible for Marathon’s technology roadmap that is driving the convergence of high availability and virtualization technologies. Under Jerry’s leadership, Marathon is developing the first-ever fault tolerant-class software solution for virtual environments. Built in partnership with XenSource, this cutting edge product was awarded “Best New Technology” at VMworld 2007. Before joining Marathon, he held executive positions at PPGx, Inc. and Belmont Research as well as management and technical roles at Digital Equipment Corporation, where he was responsible for the development and deployment of mission-cr...

Got this from our AMD community. Check out the video, it speaks for itself!

Windows HPC Server 2008, the successor to Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003, is based on the Windows Server 2008 operating system and is designed to increase productivity, scalability and manageability. Windows HPC Server 2008 has been renamed to reflect its readiness to tackle the most challenging HPC workloads. Key features are new high-speed networking, highly efficient and scalable cluster management tools, advanced failover capabilities, a service oriented architecture (SOA) job scheduler, and support for partners’ clustered file systems. The beta is now available for download at http://www.microsoft.com/hpc ; the final version will be generally available in the second half of 2008. “With the new advancements, Windows HPC Server 2008 can allow customers to achieve the levels of scalability and performance of the most efficient clusters in the Top500 benchmark while making it dramatically more productive to deploy, utilize and integrate the advanced HPC clusters within their envi...

SGI has combined its expertise in helping enterprises work with massive amounts of data and complex business processes using Oracle(R) applications with that of SWsoft(R), the world's second largest virtualization software company, to provide a landmark solution for optimizing the Oracle database with negligible data center overhead. The solution will be demonstrated at Oracle OpenWorld, November 11-15 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. The demonstration features SWsoft(R) Virtuozzo(TM) operating system virtualization software, running on an SGI(R) Altix(R) server and includes a cluster of large Oracle databases. The joint solution will run the databases inside the Virtuozzo virtual environment, moving the data from one physical server to another without losing information or connectivity to the database. CNNMoney reporting.

To see how virtualization might play in HPC, let's consider how programs operate on a cluster. A parallel MPI program is basically a collection of individual programs (processes) running on the same or different node. Messages are essentially a way to copy memory from one program to another. Programs are "placed" on specific idle nodes/cores by a scheduling program (such as PBS, Sun Grid Engine, or Torque). The programs are managed by the all-knowing scheduler and once placed on a node, stay there until complete. Communication takes place over an interconnect, but as far as the scheduler is concerned, what you do with your nodes is your business. This model has worked well for HPC clustering although it is not the only one. Virtualization allows the OS instance (and subsequent programs) to be run on top of a hypervisor. Because the hypervisor insulates the OS instance from the hardware it allows the OS and running programs to be migrated from one hypervisor to another. Th...

Commoditization of HPC is just about beginning. This is the next wave that is going to come at us. when I said, in a previous post where I commented over "overwhelming innovation", I meant this as well. HPC is on its way to reach out to consumers. We look today, for advice and counseling, to big firms like Gartners, Forrsters etc. But the tomorrow, which is today, is in all of our hands. HPC just happens to be that for us. Think of genome research, power issues, geographic and tectonic researches, meteorology, mining, oceanography, etc will happen in homes tomorrow. Look at this news by RapidMind , where they are moving aggressively towards the regular x86 boxes. News from Rapidmind: Over a thousand developers of high-performance computing (HPC) and enterprise software are using RapidMind to realize the performance benefits of new multi-core processors. The RapidMind platform is being successfully leveraged in developing applications for database transactions, image/video ma...