November 27, 2006 | Comments: (0)
Deepak Singh of Washington State offers a very public-spirited and forward-looking vision of HPC in his recent post on his blog Supercomputing 2006 - A vicarious look.
"We need to be in a situation where the average person who wants a specific task done should not be hardware limited (within reason). This includes the scientist who wants to visualize complex scientific data as well as the researcher who wants to run massive MD (molecular dynamics) simulations."
A new Google Earth mashup for Grid Interoperation Now (GIN), which was unveiled at Supercomputing '06, captures the global ambitions and achievements of the grid community nicely. In fact, I found no less than five interoperable grids within 20 miles of my office here in the Chicago area. Granted I live between two National Laboratories, and I'm not sure how two of Fermi's Grids wound up just west of Joliet, but I would be willing to bet that most readers also have at least one grid outpost nearby.
...which leads me to one of the concerns I hear most about grid adoption trends. Deepak Singh puts it this way.
"While community grids probably work well for the kinds of projects listed above, I have always wondered how useful they really are for more specific applications, e.g. a drug discovery effort at a pharma company."
There's that "applications" word again.
At the risk of beating the proverbial dead horse, it's great that I live a stone's throw from five Grids, but at this point that's all I know. If I could drill down and discover what types of applications are available on them and what I need to do to run them I'd be a whole lot more interested.
Posted by Greg Nawrocki on November 27, 2006 09:47 AM
November 20, 2006 | Comments: (0)
Long-time PC Magazine and InfoWorld editor Michael Miller has seen a lot in his twenty-plus years of journalism. This week, he announced he is moving on, and he took the opportunity to reminisce about all the progress he has seen since he started in the eighties.
But where does Miller think we are today? Miller's latest (and last?) column for PC Magazine offers the following conclusion: "In the world of business technology, 2006 was the Year of Virtualization."
I've been thinking recently about what 2006 represented for Grid technologies, too. Back in January I suggested that the coming year would be a make-or-break milestone for Grid. In the most recent edition of The Globus Consortium Journal , we put this proposition to some top analysts. There was plenty of disagreement, as the following excerpts demonstrate:
"I really agree. I think Grid is on the cusp. The promise of Grid has always been in the enterprise, and while we certainly see enterprise customers using Grid, the applications have been very traditional, in high-performance computing and parallel processing-places where it makes perfect sense."
- John Humphreys, IDC
"I don't agree, because I think Grid is already well established as a valuable tool that's used by any number of firms in financial services, manufacturing, life sciences, and on and on, for a growing number of applications. ... I believe Grid is losing its niche status as it continues to gain applicability. I just don't see any evidence that Grid is lacking some critical mass that could make it a make-or-break year."
- Carl Claunch, Gartner
One common thread in all of the interviews was the view that the future of Grid lies in a number of fields beyond traditional Grid computing. In retrospect, I think 2006 was the year that saw "a break" - but not in the sense of a bust. What we saw this last year was an incredible proliferation of many different Grid-derived technologies, including Grid 2.0. SOA, and, of course Virtualization. So Miller is onto something, I think, when he says that this last year was "The Year of Living Virtually." But that's not the whole story, because all of Grid's offspring are now coming into their own.
Posted by Greg Nawrocki on November 20, 2006 08:51 AM
November 20, 2006 | Comments: (0)
Long-time PC Magazine and InfoWorld editor Michael Miller has seen a lot in his twenty-plus years of journalism. This week, he announced he is moving on, and he took the opportunity to reminisce about all the progress he has seen since he started in the eighties.
But where does Miller think we are today? Miller's latest (and last?) column for PC Magazine offers the following conclusion: "In the world of business technology, 2006 was the Year of Virtualization."
I've been thinking recently about what 2006 represented for Grid technologies, too. Back in January I suggested that the coming year would be a make-or-break milestone for Grid. In the most recent edition of The Globus Consortium Journal , we put this proposition to some top analysts. There was plenty of disagreement, as the following excerpts demonstrate:
"I really agree. I think Grid is on the cusp. The promise of Grid has always been in the enterprise, and while we certainly see enterprise customers using Grid, the applications have been very traditional, in high-performance computing and parallel processing-places where it makes perfect sense." –John Humphreys, IDC
"I don't agree, because I think Grid is already well established as a valuable tool that's used by any number of firms in financial services, manufacturing, life sciences, and on and on, for a growing number of applications. ... I believe Grid is losing its niche status as it continues to gain applicability. I just don't see any evidence that Grid is lacking some critical mass that could make it a make-or-break year." –Carl Claunch, Gartner
One common thread in all of the interviews was the view that the future of Grid lies in a number of fields beyond traditional Grid computing. In retrospect, I think 2006 was the year that saw "a break" – but not in the sense of a bust. What we saw this last year was an incredible proliferation of many different Grid-derived technologies, including Grid 2.0. SOA, and, of course Virtualization. So Miller is onto something, I think, when he says that this last year was "The Year of Living Virtually." But that's not the whole story, because all of Grid's offspring are now coming into their own.
Posted by Greg Nawrocki on November 20, 2006 08:50 AM
November 20, 2006 | Comments: (0)
Long-time PC Magazine and InfoWorld editor Michael Miller has seen a lot in his twenty-plus years of journalism. This week, he announced he is moving on, and he took the opportunity to reminisce about all the progress he has seen since he started in the eighties.
But where does Miller think we are today? Miller's latest (and last?) column for PC Magazine offers the following conclusion: "In the world of business technology, 2006 was the Year of Virtualization."
I've been thinking recently about what 2006 represented for Grid technologies, too. Back in January I suggested that the coming year would be a make-or-break milestone for Grid. In the most recent edition of The Globus Consortium Journal , we put this proposition to some top analysts. There was plenty of disagreement, as the following excerpts demonstrate:
"I really agree. I think Grid is on the cusp. The promise of Grid has always been in the enterprise, and while we certainly see enterprise customers using Grid, the applications have been very traditional, in high-performance computing and parallel processing-places where it makes perfect sense." –John Humphreys, IDC
"I don't agree, because I think Grid is already well established as a valuable tool that's used by any number of firms in financial services, manufacturing, life sciences, and on and on, for a growing number of applications. ... I believe Grid is losing its niche status as it continues to gain applicability. I just don't see any evidence that Grid is lacking some critical mass that could make it a make-or-break year." –Carl Claunch, Gartner
One common thread in all of the interviews was the view that the future of Grid lies in a number of fields beyond traditional Grid computing. In retrospect, I think 2006 was the year that saw "a break" – but not in the sense of a bust. What we saw this last year was an incredible proliferation of many different Grid-derived technologies, including Grid 2.0. SOA, and, of course Virtualization. So Miller is onto something, I think, when he says that this last year was "The Year of Living Virtually." But that's not the whole story, because all of Grid's offspring are now coming into their own.
Posted by Greg Nawrocki on November 20, 2006 08:50 AM
November 17, 2006 | Comments: (0)
Today, the first IEEE/ACM International Workshop on Virtualization Technologies in Distributed Computing will be held. Back in July I covered the call for papers for this workshop (lots of good links in that blog as well) in the Grid Meter.
Today, HPC Wire posted an excellent interview with Kate Keahey the chair of this workshop.
Kate has promised me some follow up after the conference and I am really looking forward to that. But for now definitely give the HPC Wire interview a good read. It is a great primer on virtualization, virtual workspaces, and how they relate to Grid Computing.
Posted by Greg Nawrocki on November 17, 2006 10:31 AM
November 13, 2006 | Comments: (0)
I wonder if these two folks are talking: James Sarjeant and Mark Grren (they are both at the University of Buffalo). If so, we might soon be seeing a "Grid on the Grid"!
Posted by Greg Nawrocki on November 13, 2006 09:16 AM
November 10, 2006 | Comments: (0)
Yahoo Finance recently posted a press release from Altair stating "PBS Professional Selected as Standard HPC Workload Management Solution by U.S. Department of Defense".
The interesting thing was how the term "Standard" was used.
I'm all for standards. Standards promote new technology, ensure interoperability within a technical community, and guard against vendor lock in. However, standards that have no practical application behind them often remain just words on paper. It's an interesting "chicken and the egg" problem. Do the standards come before the applications, or do implementations within applications become standards given their acceptance as technical solutions. Sometimes these de-facto standards, regardless of who gives them that moniker, carry more weight.
This fits right in with a recent Globus Consortium Journal observation by William Fellows of The 451 Group .
When asked the question, "without standards, it is sometimes said, the adoption of grid in the data center will stall, which standards are going to make a difference?" He responded with the following:
Early adopters of grid computing have asked clearly and consistently for some pretty basic standards that would make their lives easier-things like having a common IO, a common way to get data in and out of a grid, and a common stack or interface that would allow their developers to use some common tools. We don't think it makes sense to really plumb the myriad and complex world of standardization, since most early adopters we speak with don't have any interest in it. They do not feel that their needs are being heard, and, consequently, they don't think any of it is practically useful.
We'd like to offer up a challenge to OGF, pick one or two of these key challenges and find a technical solution to these problems. If they don't, then how long before it becomes relevant or someone else does it instead?
Posted by Greg Nawrocki on November 10, 2006 09:49 AM
November 09, 2006 | Comments: (0)
Data Portability and Virtualization
A recent Network World article reports on Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, touting his company's efforts to ensure that data stored on their system is portable. Schmidt defines portability as a user being able to take their data and move it to another service should they become unhappy with their current provider, including his own company.
I'm wondering if Google happened upon this conclusion after making data portable within their own suite of hosted applications. And if data that can move around seamlessly in their own application suites just happens to be portable to other services then the inverse might be true as well. Data on other services with portability to Google might then be useable amongst the range of Google's hosted application suites. A powerful way to lure potential users.
The next step in data portability is data virtualization. And by that I mean data being equipped with the smarts to present itself differently to different applications depending on how it is accessed. This makes the accessing applications run more efficiently. I often use the example of insurance data. The ways in which, and the applications used to access data by an actuary and a claims adjuster are quite different, even though it may be the same quanta of data.
There are some pretty smart folks that work for Google, that's a given. I'm sure that under this new data portability paradigm they are working on some pretty cool data virtualization methodologies as well.
And BTW, I promise never to use the words "paradigm" and "methodologies" in the same sentence ever again.
Posted by Greg Nawrocki on November 9, 2006 09:32 AM
November 07, 2006 | Comments: (0)
Trends Changing Data Management
There was a recent article in Yahoo News regarding trends changing data management. It was a little "I've heard it before" in the sense that it started out with the line, "The data-management pendulum is swinging away from distributed 'islands' of individual line-of-business systems toward massive, consolidated systems..." and I though it was a pretty difficult read, but there were a few lines that caught my eye.
IBM's vision is ambitious. "They're bringing together information up and down the stack," says Connie Moore, a vice president at Forrester Research. "Whether it's metadata management or information quality, I don't think any vendor has the depth and breadth that IBM has in information infrastructure."
IBM executives still insist the company is not in the apps business, but the changes inherent in information management and SOA will inevitably draw IBM into the apps domain.
IBM, who doesn't consider themselves in the app business is starting to think "the application way" in this new Grid / SOA / Virtualization paradigm. I believe this adds credence to my "Grid Sandwich" view of getting people to approach the Grid / SOA world both bottom up AND top down.
Posted by Greg Nawrocki on November 7, 2006 02:02 PM
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