Melvin Koh's Weblog
I'm just a contractor
I'm just a contractor
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.
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