November 29, 2005 | Comments: (0)
I have become obsessed with grid-ifying massive Excel models that we use for financial analysis. This is a very real business problem in financial, retail and anywhere you are doing serious data analysis. We have models that take hours to run thanks to Excel's single-threaded design and we at the point of bringing down servers. Consider this a plea for help-and don't give me the "you should cluster the servers" response. It's not that easy, I need some kind of conversion mechanism.
I am ready to start an open source company to tackle the need to go from Excel to something else in a grid-in-a-box type of situation. The goal would be to make it all hidden from the end-user who just wants to increase processing horsepower. I figure you make it open source and you'll get people to use it and add extensions to other apps. I think it could be built on Globus.
Let's start a company. I know lots of VCs. Email me if you are interested.
Comments and ideas are welcome.
Here are a few things that I have come across so far and why none of them really work for me:
Platform Computing and Data Synapse: Too expensive and require mucho pro services to get up and running-but they do solve the problem, essentially acting as a plug-in to Excel that distributes the workload.
Excel Grid: A .Net plugin that processes file onto a Grid with Gridbus middleware. A few problems: runs on Windows; development seems to have stalled; many other grid components needed.
Turbo Excel: Haven't tried it yet, but could be helpful. Turns excel into C++ so that computers can process faster. Seems like the best idea-now to do it on a Grid.
Clustering/Beowulf etc: Unfortunately requires developers (defeats my hidden from end-user goal) to redo applications.
Azul Systems: Love the idea of a compute appliance, but don't need Java processing.
Posted by Dave Rosenberg on November 29, 2005 08:04 PM
October 25, 2005 | Comments: (0)
Sun's attempt at a true utility computing model appears to be struggling out of the gates. According to The Register (read at your own risk) Sun has confirmed that they are having a hard time getting customers in general, and failing at getting the few they have to go on record in marketing programs.
"It has been harder than we anticipated," said Aisling MacRunnels, Sun's senior director of utility computing in an interview. "It has been really hard. All of this has been a massive learning experience for us a company. I am not embarrassed to say this because we have been on the leading edge."
I am a big believer in Grid, and the outsourced utility model, so I do find this disappointing. I think that while the market circumstances may indicate that the world may not be ready for the utility model, Sun itself is largely to blame for the lack of customers. Sun's utility model requires many elements to come together that are far more complicated than Grid computing alone-which is already hard. For most organizations, even large scale enterprises, it's just not practical to develop applications to run on an outside system. There are too many variables and ROI questions regarding the development expense. Add to that the fact that Sun has been Sybil-esque in its focus and the equation simply doesn't add up.
I do appreciate Sun's vision for utility computing, and in fact I subscribe to it. I just won't pay Sun for the subscription.
Posted by Dave Rosenberg on October 25, 2005 01:43 PM
October 12, 2005 | Comments: (0)
The Globus Consortium announced that Cisco has joined as a contributor to the open source Globus Toolkit. This could be big news if you consider how important networking is to Grid, and the fact that Cisco already has such an enormous installed base. Also makes me wonder if Cisco will finally move into full-scale systems management applications, which seems to be missing for them.
"Grid will continue to push more intelligence into the network," said Ian Foster, Board Member with the Globus Consortium. "There will also be a blurring of the boundaries between the network, the operating systems and the middleware."
This month's Globus Journal features several Cisco guys talking about the importance of networking in Grid.
Posted by Dave Rosenberg on October 12, 2005 11:08 AM
August 24, 2005 | Comments: (0)
Sun's Utility Grid actually works
Sun software partner CD02 completed a trial of its financial services software on Sun's grid utility platform. More than an endorsement for Sun, this shows that Grid can be accessible and viable for enterprises of various sizes. This also underscores the importance of companies like Univa who support the open source Globus Toolkit, giving enterprises a support mechanism for building Grid apps regardless of where they get deployed.
I like Sun's utility model and it speaks to the general enterprise application and infrastructure story, unlike the DRM announcement this week which I am still puzzled by.
IT Architect has an article on the strategy behind Sun's utility play.
Posted by Dave Rosenberg on August 24, 2005 08:56 PM
August 22, 2005 | Comments: (0)
Univa lands $8 million VC Funding
Univa, founded by Grid computing pioneers Ian Foster, Greg Tuecke and Carl Kesselman, announced an $8 million Series A investment.
Univa delivers vendor-neutral, enterprise-hardened Grid infrastructure software for next-generation datacenters. Univa's products are based on the open sourceGlobus Toolkit.
"Univa is at the intersection of two exploding markets -- open source and Grid infrastructure software," said Patrick Ennis, managing director at ARCH, and Univa board member. "By using open source and open standards, companies are able to extract more value from existing IT investments, while ensuring long-term agility and competitiveness. As a result, enterprises are pulling Globus into the corporate datacenter to take advantage of these business benefits."
The investment will allow Univa to accelerate development of its Grid infrastructure software and grow its sales, engineering, business development and marketing operations. It will be used to attract new talent, helping Univa keep pace with market demand from independent software vendors (ISVs) and corporate customers.
Posted by Dave Rosenberg on August 22, 2005 07:59 AM
August 17, 2005 | Comments: (0)
The National Science Foundation (NSF) awarded $150 million to operate and enhance the Extensible Terascale Facility (ETF)—aka "TeraGrid." Researchers and educators around the country can now access a range of computing resources that will accelerate advances in science and engineering TeraGrid has been used for complex data modeling tasks such as seismic modeling and understanding dark energy.
The $150 million award includes $48 million to provide overall architecture, software integration, operations and coordination of user support. An additional $100 million will provide for operation, management and user support of TeraGrid resources at eight resource provider sites.
TeraGrid uses the open source Globus Toolkit as part of it's infrastructure design.
In other Grid news, IBM is donating Blue Gene Supercomputer resources to Argonne's Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE)
Posted by Dave Rosenberg on August 17, 2005 12:11 PM
August 16, 2005 | Comments: (0)
Ian Foster on Research and Enterprise Grid
In the latest Globus Consortium Journal, Ian Foster presents the case that Grid has fallen victim to vendor FUD and specifically to the notion that proprietary solutions are somehow more enterprise ready than open source solutions developed in eScience and academia (such as the Globus Toolkit.) While it seems logical that a Grid research lab would have different requirements for production needs, it doesn’t make much sense that researchers would be less concerned with security or performance than proprietary vendors would.
From Foster's conversation with Charlie Catlett of Teragrid:
"It's an unfair oversimplification to say that the enterprise has somehow more constraining requirements than universities do," said Charlie Catlett, TeraGrid's director, and former chair of the Global Grid Forum. "We certainly are in different businesses, and we have more freedom to experiment with some things, but that is not to say that we don't also have production requirements that we have to meet just as industry does. By not focusing on trying to differentiate between research and enterprise Grid requirements, and by not creating that sort of divisiveness... we're going to make much better progress with Grid."
Foster's sentiment is also reflected in an excellent CIO mag article Grid Held Hostage
The landscape is further cluttered by the conflicting claims that vendors make about their grid offerings in this hot, new market, says Carl Claunch, a vice president at Gartner Research. He says grid computing has been "hijacked by the marketing folks." And even some vendors agree (about other vendors): "What all the vendors have done is to put grid under their umbrellas, [regardless of whether their solutions really qualify]," says Ken King, IBM's vice president of grid computing. "That has created hype around grid, and confusion."
Posted by Dave Rosenberg on August 16, 2005 11:34 AM
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