Video: Sun Grid Engine and Cloud Computing

Sun envisions a world of many clouds, both public and private, that are open, compatible, and designed for all types of applications—including high performance computing. Sun is extending cloud computing to High Performance, building not just a cloud, but an entire Cloud eco-system. Through this narrated demonstration, learn how Sun Grid Engine fulfills the promise of cloud computing in HPC. Full Story

Oracle To Keynote Cloud Computing Expo

In a keynote address to be given at SYS-CON's 4th International Cloud Computing Conference & Expo, Richard Sarwal, SVP of Development for Oracle Enterprise Manager, will explore how enterprises are likely to adopt public and private cloud computing, building on a foundation of virtualization infrastructure and management systems. Full Story

Other talks of interest include a Cloud Security presentation by Sun's Chief Security Architect Glenn Brunette and a session by Sun Alum Victoria Livschitz that examines several types of HPC applications deployed on various clouds.

Whitepaper: Architectural Strategies for Cloud Computing

Those guys over at Oracle have just published a white paper on Architectural Strategies for Cloud Computing:

"For IT departments in larger enterprises, developing a private cloud often makes the most financial and business sense. When developing the architectural vision, an enterprise architect should bear in mind the characteristics of cloud computing as well as consider some of the organizational and cultural issues that might become obstacles to the adoption of the future state
architecture. When moving ahead, decisions must be made on whether the future-state technical architecture should emphasize compatibility with the current standard or start from scratch to minimize cost. Future state systems architecture designs involve trade-offs between lower cost/operational efficiency and greater flexibility. Using an Enterprise Architecture framework can help enterprise architects navigate these trade-offs and design a system that accomplishes the business goal." Download White Paper

Sun hails rise of self-scaling software

At this week's CloudWorld conference, Lew Tucker described Sun's vision of a world in which web applications can scale up their own hardware resources:

"As we look into the future, we're going to see that applications are going to be increasingly responsible for self-provisioning," Sun's cloud-computing chief technology officer told a sparsely attended CloudWorld conference in downtown San Francisco this morning. "As a computer scientist, I think that is an area of cloud computing that's most interesting. Full Story

Sun Guide to Cloud Computing

Cloud computing is a popular buzzword—but what does it really mean, and why should you care? Get this free guide to cloud computing and let us help you make sense of the hype. You probably know generally how cloud computing provides an economical, scalable and flexible approach to your IT infrastructure, but you probably don't know exactly how it works. We'll take you inside the cloud and show you how virtualization and software deployment work in this environment. We'll explain the differences between public, private and hybrid clouds. We'll walk you through a variety of ways to take advantage of cloud computing and help you identify key questions you should be asking to figure out the best approach for your business. Full Story

Sun Cloud Truly RESTful

William Vambenepe's blog compares four public Cloud APIs including the RESTful goodness that is the Sun Cloud:

"I have commented before on the Sun Cloud API (though the increasing richness of their model is starting to make my comments less understandable, maybe I should look into changing the links to a point-in-time version of Kenai). It shows that at the end it’s the model, not the protocol that matters." Full Story

Posted by Rich Brueckner [Cloud Computing] ( August 03, 2009 05:00 AM ) Permalink | Comments [0]

Develop in the Cloud with Project Kenai

Want to start developing in the cloud? Project Kenai is the onramp for Sun's developer "cloud" efforts. Having gone live back in September of 2008, it now exceeds over 7,000 members and surpassed 500 publicly hosted open source projects.



Project Kenai currently offer an integrated suite of productivity services for developers to host their open source code or connect with peers of like mind, and will be enable additional cloud services and collaboration features very soon. Today, every project started at Kenai.com gets the following:

• Evolving integration with NetBeans


• (5) Source Code repositories (Subversion, Mercurial, and Git in any combination of 5)


• (2) Issue Tracking systems (Jira or Bugzilla)


• (1) Wiki


• (5) Forums


• (5) Mailing Lists


• (1) Download facility for documents

Video: Sun HPC Software, Linux Edition

In this video, Makia Minich, Lead Architect of Sun HPC software, presents at Sun's HPC Consortium in Austin, Texas, November 2008.

Video: Distributed Grids Around the World

This video might be a little dated, but Ian Foster of Argonne National Laboratory does an excellent job of describing how distributed grids are being used to advance research around the world. Recorded at the Globus State of the Union at the Open Source Grid & Cluster Conference, Oakland, CA, May 2008.

To download for iPod, click the Menu button in the lower right corner of the video.

Filmed by Deirdré Straughan and edited by Jay Claussen

OpenMP Book now offers code downloads

Ruud van der Pas, one of the authors of the book Using OpenMP - - Portable Shared Memory Parallel Programming by Chapman, Jost, and van der Pas, has made 41 of the examples in the book available for download and your use. Full Story

Webcast: Sun Grid Engine - Fulfilling the Promise of Cloud Computing

This webcast describes how Sun Grid Engine is fulfilling the promise of cloud computing. Sun envisions a world of many clouds, both public and private, that are open, compatible, and designed for all types of applications -- including high performance computing (HPC). Through this narrated demonstration, learn how Sun Grid Engine fulfills the promise of cloud computing in HPC. Launch Webcast

Interview: Open source success through cloud and HPC platforms

In this interview, Sun's vice president of Americas systems practice, Marc Hamilton, states that Sun is better placed than rival vendors to weather the current economic turmoil:

"Over the past three to four years, customers realised that there were fewer and fewer applications that needed proprietary systems or mainframes that could not also use HPC clusters for the same purpose. Sun initially missed out on part of that, but the opportunity is not just around faster computers, but also networking and storage. People still go out and buy expensive proprietary storage: x86-based server clusters, disk drives and RAM, and pay for proprietary software for Raid and backups. We say that all of those storage features can be implemented on HPC servers with open-source operating systems and Flash disk technology, with storage services wrapped in." Full Story

Q&A with Dave Douglas: World of Many Clouds

Cloud Computing Journal interviews Dave Douglas on his pending keynote in New York:

"Sun's strategy is to become the leading provider of technology for both public and private clouds," declares Sun's Sr. Vice President of Cloud Computing, David Douglas, in this Exclusive Q&A with the Conference Chair of Cloud Computing Expo in New York, Jeremy Geelan. "We bring a wealth of technology and experience in systems, software, and datacenters," Douglas continues, "as well as the ability to reach the two major customer segments we address on a daily basis: our large community of developers and our enterprise customers." Full Story

Video: Announcing the Sun Cloud

In this video, Sun Cloud Computing executives Dave Douglas and Lew Tucker preview the Sun Cloud - the industry's most flexible, open and portable public cloud platform.

Just Out: Sun HPC Newsletter March 17, 2009

The latest edition of the Sun HPC newsletter is out. With feature stories, event listings and more, it's the best way to keep up to date on the latest HPC technologies from Sun and our partners. Subscribe today!

Sun to Keynote on "A World of Many Clouds" in NYC

An increasing number of Cloud events are on the horizon:

Sun is joining Amazon and IBM in the top industry keynote lineup for SYS-CON's 2nd International Cloud Computing Conference & Expo in New York, March 30-April 1, co-located with the 5th International Virtualization Conference & Expo. Sun's Cloud SVP Dave Douglas will be joining Amazon's CTO Dr Werner Vogels and IBM's Cloud Computing CTO Kristof Kloeckner. Full Story

Video: SSD Speed Stunts

Download: Sun Grid Engine 6.2 Update 2

Sun Microsystems today announced the availability of Sun Grid Engine 6.2 Update 2. This feature update release delivers a few much requesed features, scalability improvements, and memory foot print reductions in huge HPC clusters, in addition to bug fixes.

What's New:

* GUI Installer. Sun Grid Engine 6.2u2 comes with a new GUI installer to simplify the installation process. The GUI installer enables you to easily install a whole cluster interactively. To install a cluster, you need to set up the environment in a similar way to an automatic installation.

* Microsoft Windows Vista Support. New support for 32-bit and 64-bit editions of Microsoft Windows Vista (Enterprise and Ultimate Edition), Windows Server 2003R2 and Windows Server 2008.

* Job Submission Verifiers (JSVs). JSVs allow users and administrators to define rules that determine which
jobs are allowed to enter into a cluster and which jobs should be rejected immediately. A JSV is a script or binary that can be used to verify, modify, or reject a job during the time of job submission or on the master host.

* Consumable Resources Per Job. Consumable complex attributes can now be configured as per job. Such consumables are consumed as requested and are no longer multiplied by the requested slots. This makes resource requests for parallel jobs much easier to define, especially when using slot ranges.

* jemalloc Library. Linux distributions (x64 platforms) come with a default memory allocator library which is not as efficient as the open source jemalloc memory allocator library also used by the Firefox browser. SGE 6.2 Update 2 replaces the native Linux malloc library with the jemalloc library. This has a positive effect on the master host performance in large and high throughput Sun Grid Engine clusters on Linux and reduces the memory footprint up to 20%. This will lead to a significant performance increase.

Release Notes and Download page

Why Sun's New Cloud CTO Is Targeting Migration of Legacy Apps First

Eweek is reporting that Sun Microsystems' new cloud computing division is focusing on converting older enterprise data centers first because that's where the migration problems are cropping up.

"You can't just take some prepackaged legacy application running somewhere
and just throw it into the cloud," Tucker told eWEEK in a separate
interview. "With virtualization, over time, we will be almost able to do
that. In time, we'll be able to virtualize basically the old data center, and
therefore you'll be able to move your applications over into it."
Full Story

Webinar: HPC Storage and the Lustre File System

Although most of the focus of high performance computing (HPC) has traditionally centered on CPU performance, as computing requirements have grown, HPC clusters are demanding increasingly higher rates of aggregate data throughput. Today’s clusters feature larger numbers of nodes with increased compute speeds. The higher clock rates and operations per clock cycle create an increased demand for local data on each node. In addition, InfiniBand and other high-speed, low-latency interconnects increase the data throughput available to each node.

Please join our educational eSeminar and meet the senior technical architects from Sun Microsystems to learn the latest on creating high performance storage solutions for high performance computing. Full Story

Schwartz Scopes Out Future for Sun's Cloud

On his blog last week, Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz laid out his vision for Java and stressed the new role that Cloud Computing is beginning to play at Sun:

"At Sun, we're planning on maintaining Java's ubiquity as the number one runtime environment, backed by the world's most price performant datacenter infrastructure, all powered by Sun's cloud."  Full Story

Stimulus package has HPC inside

The new economic stimulus package has some HPC goodness inside:

"Members of the computing research community today praised Congress for passing an economic stimulus package that includes substantial investments in the nation’s science and engineering enterprise. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 includes just over $7 billion in supplemental funding for several key federal science agencies, including the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology."  Full Story 

Virtualization for HPC?

Is virtualization coming to HPC? Shai Fultheim looks at High Performance Computing's roots and writes that the answer is yes:

"There is a new emerging, third kind of computing virtualization: high-end virtualization in which multiple physical systems appear to function as a single logical system. This virtualization paradigm is known as aggregation and it is basically the opposite of partitioning. The building blocks of this approach are the same x86 industry standard servers used in the scale-out (clustering) approach, preserving the low cost. In addition, by running a single logical system, customers manage a single operating system, and take advantage of large contiguous memory and unified I/O architecture."  Full Story

The Cloud Equation

Cloud Computing has all the buzz these days, but what is it really? I had some foggy descriptions in my head, and then one of the folks I've been following on Twitter put up this equation that made it crystal clear:

Cloud Computing = Datacenter + API

For more on Sun's plans in this area, check out our new Cloud Computing page.

YouTube: Cloud Computing for Dummies

This video does a nice job of explaining what Cloud Computing is all about. For more information, check out Sun's Cloud Computing page.