Sun Blades Power SunGard Iworks Grid

SunGard has added more than 500 cores to a grid computing cluster setup to host SunGard's iWorks Prophet actuarial solution, the enterprise risk management application in the iWorks solution suite. The grid uses Sun Microsystems' Sun Blade X6250 server modules, Intel's Quad-Core Xeon processors and software from Microsoft to achieve high-performance computing capacity that facilitates the development, execution and support of actuarial models. Full Story

A Storm of Cloud-Related Events

It's looking like Cloud Computing is indeed the Next Big Thing. In his excellent Thinking Out Cloud blog, Giva Perry writes of a whole slew of Cloud events coming up:

CloudConnect 2009 - January 20-22, Mountain View, CA
Cloud Camp Atlanta - January 20, Atlanta, GA
Cloud Camp Singapore - January 21, Singapore
Cloud Computing Innovation Day - January 27, Santa Clara, CA
Cloud Camp Indianapolis - January 28, Indianapolis, IN
Cloud Computing: An IT Paradigm Shift - February 11, Toronto, Canada
Cloud Camp Toronto - February 11, Toronto, Canada
Cloud Camp London - March 12, London, UK
Cloud Computing Expo New York - March 30 - April 1, New York, NY
Cloud Camp Minneapolis - April 18, Minneapolis
Cloud Slam 2009 - April 20-24, online conference
Enterprise Cloud Summit (part of Interop Las Vegas) - May 17-21, Las Vegas, NV
Velocity '09 - June 22-24, San Jose, CA
Structure '09 - June 25, San Francisco, CA

When Grid Became a Bad Word

I somehow missed that Tabor Communications shut down its On-Demand Enterprise publication site last month. If the name doesn't sound familiar, you may remember it by its former name of Grid Today.

Grid used to be the Next Big Thing. What happened?

I remember back when I joined Sun in 2000 and the company acquired Gridware and its successful Grid Engine Software. We open-sourced it and got thousands of downloads. Grids were springing up all over the world. HPC Wire spun off its hottest topic into a separate online publication called Grid Today.

Then there were conferences like the Grid Summit, Grid World, and the disastrous GT'04 in Philadelphia. Like other vendors, Sun continued to invest in Grid, vastly improving the Grid Engine code while we waited for the revenue to flow in.

Don't get me wrong; the grid has come a long way. Today, Sun Grid Engine software enables the folks at TACC to manage what was once unmanageable--60,000 processor cores running thousands of different NSF applications.

So when the Grid didn't turn into Gravy, we marketing people stopped using the G word. Instead, we started talking about N1, utility computing, cloud computing, and on-demand enterprises. Anything but grid.

What's your perspective? Was the Grid overhyped? Or is the coming wave of server-virtualization products from folks like Cisco the missing link where the Grid Road will finally end up delivering the Payload?

Here Come the Specialty Clouds

GigaOM writes on the rapidly changing Cloud Computing landscape:

"Jules Urbach, CEO of Otoy, tells me a GPU-based cloud could be used for gaming, creating virtual Blu-ray players and even transcoding. There seems to be demand for such clouds (I’ve heard folks in the movie industry talk about a desire for transcoding clouds) and Sun Microsystems executives have championed the idea of different hardware underlying different clouds. Yet, the idea is still a bit controversial, possibly because it’s hard to imagine achieving commodity pricing for specialty clouds." Full Story