Groups.grid.org

Next week Univa will be at Oracle Open World demonstrating a policy-enabled, dynamically managed Oracle E-Business Suite private cloud. Why talk about what you can when you can see it?

http://www.univaud.com/hpc/products/oracle-demo.php

Special thanks to our partners Sun, Oracle and Zeus Technology

The second video from Intel. Univa again describes the value the program brings to us as a middleware vendor and our end-users and partners.

http://software.intel.com/en-us/videos/hpc-univa-ud-intel-cluster-ready/

Univa wins Honorable Mention at BioIT Best Practices Awards for our work with UniCloud and our partner (customer) Pathwork Dx.

UniCloud: HPC in the cloud info: http://www.univaud.com/hpc/products/unicloud.php

Customer Case Study: http://www.univaud.com/hpc/cs-data-processing-amazon-ec2.php

For more information and registration for Webinar on Monday, March 2, go to http://cloud.datasynapse.com

http://www.amazon.com/gp/html-forms-controller/ec2-request

here's the link for you!

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=422225

I think the meat of this post is actually in the well though out comments.  As they talk about not just the math but actual metric creation of "cost."

I like the expression "democratization of HPC" -- and the astute analysis of options including the recently launched UniCloud.

http://www.mathworks.com/programs/techkits/ec2_paper.html

This paper describes how you can configure MathWorks parallel computing
products – Parallel Computing Toolbox and MATLAB Distributed Computing
Server – for use with the Amazon EC2 service. 

http://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2008/10/23/amazon-ec2-exits-be...

So EC2 is all grownup now and out of beta!  with a SLA with 99.95% uptime?  hmm wondering if that applies to data accessiblility too?

Hi,
An issue is how to configure the network of master-ami and compute-ami instance nodes given EC2's current network.

The following project seems to have tackled the problem outside of an Globus/Nimbus software stack:
"ElasticWulf: Beowulf cluster run on Amazon EC2"
http://code.google.com/p/elasticwulf/

Discussed initially here:
http://www.datawrangling.com/mpi-cluster-with-python-and-amazon-ec2-part...

HTH?

Mark

Hi,

Some thoughts on EC2 clusters and UC.
Amazon may or may not alter their network configuration to be more cluster friendly out the box. Even if they do it will take a unknown time to happen.

It _appears_ that the Globus Nimbus project's cloudkit offers a way forward.
You could even tag the integrated stack "UniCluster Cumulo" ;)

Specifically, they seem to have an EC2 backend deployed as the "Teraport EC2 Gateway". This seems to have been running EC2 AMIs since late 2007.

So in existing deployments the GLobus-Nimbus front end machine is outside of the EC2.

Currently, the performance penalty on MPI jobs is pretty significant in the 'cloud'. (the communication layers...make it slow)

What wouldbe interesting to understand is if a solution that eased the degradation was available, would it be of value?

Comments welcome.

Hi,
In order for UC 4.0 to work out the box it would be useful to have multiple ethernet interfaces on the head/boot node.
UC workarounds might be possible. Nonetheless, it would seem to make the adoption of Grid head node oriented software less painful if this feature was added to Amazon's EC2.
If you also think so, perhaps you might add your voice to the following thread, or other related threads you come across?
http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/thread.jspa?messageID=102...

You can now download the recording of the webinar "Clouds and Clusters: Running UniCluster in Amazon's EC2"

Presenters:

- Jinesh Varia from Amazon Web Services

- Chris Dagdigian from BioTeam

- Gary Tyreman from Univa UD

http://jshurwitz.wordpress.com/2008/08/06/cloud-computing-a-work-in-prog...

I think what I like best about this article is her analyst Point of View.  She isn't completely sold and I find that refreshing.

Jinesh over on the Amazon Web Services Blog has posted a new article and link to a White
Paper he has authored.

A whitepaper/HOWTO document on deploying Univa UD's UniCluster Express product into the EC2 system has been attached to this post. It can also be downloaded at the bottom of the page.  Please login.

In addition, a series of video screencasts showing the integration process have been posted online here:

http://www.screencast.com/users/BioTeam/folders/UniCluster-in-Amazon-EC2

If you are looking for a simple overview video, we recommend this one: