Melvin Koh's Weblog
I'm just a contractor
I'm just a contractor
Tuesday November 28, 2006
Interoperability - Open Standards
This morning I had my breakfast at macdonald. The macs in spore offers free wifi access, so I connected my Nokia E61 PDA phone to the free wireless network and read my mail as i sipped my coffee. A mail contain a link to a podcast, so I downloaded it to my phone. Then after breakfast, on my way in the MRT train to my office, i listened to the podcast i downloaded earlier and watched the mp4 video of an interview of andy bectolshiem, which I downloaded yesterday. After I reached office, I was able to sync my phone with my laptop thru bluetooth.
Its amazing how technology has improved over the years, but all these mean little if they cannot interoperate. Now I'm a strong advocate of open standards and software, which is why i was a little annoyed that, after typing this entry on my phone, i realized that it only suport msword format. Guess there's still some way to go before reaching full interoperability...
Posted by melvin ( Nov 28 2006, 11:13:37 AM SGT ) Permalink Comments [1]
Thursday November 23, 2006
Supercomputing 2006, Tampa
The 5days SC'06 conference last week was my first time, and I had a great time there. The exhibition was huge, and you can find many HPC vendors and research institutes demoing their products and projects. So obviously, I've learnt many new technology and met a lot of friends, old and new. Also not forgetting to mention that I collected many free gifts from the booths as well. ;-)
As I'm very much a software guy, I won't comment on the new and cool hardware stuffs. Sun made several announcements during the event, one of which is the opensourcing of 3 Grid Engine modules in Dec - ARCo, Windows Execution and the new Service Domain Management modules. The Service Domain Management module should be very useful, especially to those who run multiple Grid Engine clusters in their environment. Goto here for the announcement.
There are also many other interesting projects. Nortel had a demo that perform automated migration of VMs across different datacenters based on sensors. For example, you can have temperature sensors that monitor the heat of the servers. The workload on the servers can be migrated to other datacenters on the event that servers are overheating. Slides on the demo are available here. The Korean reseach lab, KISTI, also has two interesting projects: Grid ASP and Grid-based online Game Service. There are too many interesting stuffs for me to comment on, so if you do not want to miss out, be sure to attend next year SC in Reno.
HPC Consortium 2006, Tampa
I attending Sun HPC consortium and the Supercomputing 2006, both held in Tampa, last week. This time, the HPC consortium was held in a very wonderful golf resort, but too bad I don't play golf. As usual, we had many great presentations by our Sun folks, customers and partners. Josh Simons gave a very nice summary of the 3 days on his blog, but I just want to highlight something that I find very interesting, which is the Secure Grid Portal by HPCVL.
The Secure Grid Portal (SGP) is based on the integration of Sun Java Portal Server, Sun Secure Global Desktop (previously known as Tarantella) and the certificate authority system by Entrust. The neat thing about SGP is that being integrated with Secure Global Desktop, it is able to remotely launch GUI applications with the need to install any additional software other than a modern web browser. There is a public demo of the Secure Global Desktop for everyone to test. Perhaps the Sun Grid Compute Utility can do something like this for launching interactive applications.
Wednesday October 25, 2006
Project Blackbox
I just got back from my 2 weeks of annual army reservist training. I belong to the Signal vocation, you know, the people who carry radio sets with long antenna sticking out and aways the first sniper's target :p. Anyway, I realized that today, technology plays a vital role in modern warfare. I believe many modern army are using technology to speed up information update, e.g. monitor the battle progress in real time by the command center; command your troops using point and click like playing Command & Conquer (well, not quite there yet, but not totally impossible).
Now that I'm back, I came across something new in several of the blogs. I find it such a cool idea that I have to put it here: Introducing the "world's first virtualized data center", Project Blackbox. I say put it on a truck with a satellite connection and you got a moving command center! Well, probably not for the military, but what about a disaster recovery coordinating center? Think Katrina and Tsunami...
Posted by melvin ( Oct 25 2006, 02:19:05 PM SGT ) Permalink Comments [3]
Monday October 02, 2006
TACC Supercomputer
A great news to share with everyone, but seeing that this news has appeared in several other blogs in here, I guess this is old news by now. TACC has been awarded $59M by NSF for a huge Sun supercomputer that will consist of over 13,000 AMD opteron processors and 1.7 petabyte of storage. For more details, stay tune to Marc's Blog.
After reading all the news and blogs about this win, I was kind of a little disappointed. Not that I'm disappointed with the news, but rather on the fact that most of the info and questions people asked are mainly on the hardware. What is the processor? What network interconnect? How much memory/storage space? What about power and cooling? etc. Of course I won't deny the fact that the hardware architecture is the most important factor, but I just don't think that Sun is chosen just because of that, and also because Sun is able to offer much more in terms of HPC Solution -- software included. We have great management tools like N1 Grid Engine and N1 System Manager. Our development tools, Sun Studio compilers and performance analyzer etc, are excellent for HPC. Also not to mentioned that Sun has many partners, CoEs, collaborators who are well-known experts in their own HPC fields, experts who can help Sun to value-add to our customers.
Posted by melvin ( Oct 02 2006, 02:09:53 PM SGT ) Permalink Comments [0]
Wednesday August 30, 2006
Sun Grid: The next evolution?
In one of his blog entry, Marc wrote about the next version of the Sun Grid with many new and cool technology to be added to the infrastructure. In APSTC, we are working on this project call "Grid Market Framework" which is our vision of the what the future Sun Grid will look like. To explain what is this vision about, let me give an analogy:
In Singapore, we have eating places which we call hawker centers. These hawker centers are food centers which have different food stalls offering many variety of food in a single location. The typical business model is that each food stall owners lease the space from the hawker center owner for a fix price, they are largely free to choose their own menu and set their own prices (with certain guidelines). These hawker centers are hugely popular among the locals because there are many food to choose from and it's cheap because of competition.
So how does this relate to our vision? Imagine that the hawker centers are the compute resources, owned by Sun, the food stall owners are ISVs and the food the application. Our vision is a Grid Market where ISVs can sell their applications as services and leasing the compute resources from the Sun Grid. Customers of the Sun Grid can select the services they want to buy, and using our cool Sun technology, the purchased service will be provision to the compute resource with the required OS, patches, packages etc. and ready to use almost immediately. Customer pays ISV for the service, ISV pays Sun for the compute resource.
Too far-fetched you say? To a certain extend I do agree, there are still alot of gaps to fill, but as we've seen from saleforce.com and google, I don't think it will be too long until we see something like this. So if there is anyone who can do it, surely Sun can.
Posted by melvin ( Aug 30 2006, 03:36:29 PM SGT ) Permalink Comments [0]
Thursday June 22, 2006
APSTC new project websites
We have created a new project websites for our two research projects
under the Sun Grid Developer Network. For those who are still unaware,
the Sun Grid Developer Network is a project management website for
hosting all the cool projects that are related to the Sun Grid.
Our two project websites:
Grid Market Project
Grid Search Project
Visits the URL and take a look at what we're doing. :-)
Sunday February 13, 2005
Sun Opening Global Grid
For those who still haven't heard, Sun has announced that it will be launching pay-as-you-use service - $1 per hour of CPU usage. Although Sun has termed it as "Grid" computing, but IMHO I think that it's more Utility computing than Grid, but I'm just being picky. Other than compute cycles, Sun will also be offering storage, development tools and the Java Enterprise System suites.
Read more about it here: http://www.thechannelinsider.com/article2/0,1759,1758805,00.asp
I'm extremely curious as to what software infrastructure is employed on these "Grid" systems, as the essence of Grid computing is about virtualization of resources. How about issues of usage accounting, security, privacy and repudiation?
Anyway, enough about that. There is another interesting article on the interview of Wolfgang Gentzsch, who was the lead in our N1 Grid Engine team, but has left Sun since a year or so ago. In the article, Wolfgang gave a very accurate description of the 4 types of Grid application in a compute Grid.
The article can be found here: http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9584_22-5572380.html
Posted by melvin ( Feb 13 2005, 01:46:10 PM SGT ) Permalink Comments [0]
Monday November 01, 2004
First Web Log
Hello all, this is my first log, so I guess I'll first do some introduction. My name is Melvin Koh, from the tiny island call Singapore. I'm currently part of the team call Asia Pacific Science and Technology Center, or APSTC for short. So what does APSTC do, you wonder? Well, checkout our website and find out!
APSTC Website
My role in the team is basically focus on research in the Grid Computing area. I believe many of you will claim that you know what is the Grid about, how how many REALLY understand what is Grid. Many people have misconception about what Grid can or cannot do. The comparison of Grid Computing to the power grid, where compute cycles can be drawn like electricity from a power socket does not help. Yes, maybe the power grid concept will be the ultimate vision, the Nirvana of Grid Research, but in reality, we are far from achieving that. In fact, lightyears away.
There is still a lot of problems to be solve, which makes the research so challenging. With many of the current open source/specification effort, most of which Sun is involved in, I believe that we are taking steps, albeit small ones, in the correct direction.
Posted by melvin ( Nov 01 2004, 02:53:02 PM SGT ) Permalink Comments [3]
This is a personal weblog, I do not speak for my employer.
