[Beowulf] Cloud / HPC

[Joe Landman]

On 04/14/2013 12:46 PM, James Cuff wrote:
>
> Finally a well balanced,hype free article by respected industry expert
> Jeff Layton:
>
> http://www.admin-magazine.com/HPC/articles/the_cloud_s_role_in_hpc

Just read it.  This is a very good article.

"I consider cloud computing a tool or technique for solving research 
computing problems. Nothing more or less. It’s not a panacea, not should 
it be ignored. Issues that must be addressed include data movement and 
security, but it also can save you money and make your traditional HPC 
resources stretch further. If you examine your workloads and their 
characteristics carefully, I think you will be surprised by how many can 
be run easily in the cloud."

I've been making the argument for a while that what is euphemistically 
called "Big Data" is an applied version of high performance computing 
... not in a traditional sense (e.g. MPI, ultra low latency 
interconnects, etc.), but focused upon analyzing huge swaths of data, 
and turning it from "data" with noise into usable actionable 
intelligence.  What Jeff outlines in this piece is that the way we 
implement these huge (less "traditional HPC" but rapidly becoming the 
norm in) research computing (RC) computations is also changing.  RC and 
Big Data are well interrelated, though I've been hearing people start 
talking about "Huge Data" and "Oh my gosh its coming this way -- Data", 
all of which is apropos to the mechanisms of how/where you perform these 
calculations.

Kudos to Jeff, and thanks to James for pointing this out!  Well worth 
the read!

-- 
Joseph Landman, Ph.D
Founder and CEO
Scalable Informatics, Inc.
email: landman at scalableinformatics.com
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