[Today’s Internet 2 announcement of brokering commercial cloud
services from HP, Box and SHI is the start of a major trend that will
transform computing at universities and eventually businesses.
This is
likely to be the first of many announcements on “above the net” services
from Internet 2. Moving university IT departments and researchers from
the traditional “client-server” mindset to delivering services from the
cloud will enable new applications and services at much lower cost.
This will create new business opportunities for NRENs and small
businesses. The NSF XSEDE announcement of spending $35m per year to
develop these services and applications for researchers is a great
example of this approach. Not only will this provide a potential new
service revenue for NRENs, but it has the potential to significantly
reduce overall costs to universities by several millions of dollars per
year per institution. A CANARIE funded study undertaken by IISD,
demonstrated that the energy savings alone could pay for the retirement
of thousands of servers on campuses in favor of clouds. Even traditional
research computing users are also starting to move clouds as more and
more computation becomes data intensive. HPC, has long been dominated by
the “modeling” community of astrophysics, computational chemistry,
fluid dynamics, etc. But now the biggest growth in research computing is
data analysis and knowledge extraction in fields such
astro-informatics, computational biology and (yes) even computational
history. This type of research computing is orders of magnitude larger
than traditional HPC modeling and is ideally suited for commercial
clouds. Some excerpts – BSA]
IISD study on how energy savings can pay for the move to cloud computing
http://www.iisd.org/publications/pub.aspx?id=1341
XSEDE – Accelerating science by outsourcing the mundane
http://www.slideshare.net/ianfoster/rpi-talk-foster-september-2011
Accelerating Scientific Discovery for Research via the Cloud
http://www.hpcdan.org/reeds_ruminations/2011/09/it-is-fall-there-must-be-clouds.html
[….]
Throughout
the history of science, data has been scarce and precious. Indeed, the
modern scientific method is defined by a careful cycle of hypothesis and
experiment, which gathers experimental data to test the hypothesis. In a
few short years, scientists and engineers have gone from scarcity to an
incredible richness, necessitating a significant change in how they
manage and extract insight from all this data. In a parallel shift, many
of our scientific, engineering and societal questions increasingly lie
at the intersections of traditional disciplines.
Increasing data
volumes and the complexity of collaboration on interdisciplinary
problems are challenging our historical approaches to discovery and
innovation via computing. Most researchers and research institutions are
ill-prepared for the large-scale computing infrastructure management
challenges posed by large data sets and complex models. The cloud and
associated applications and tools offer a possible solution to this
challenge by letting scientists be scientists.
The U.S. government
can accelerate this transition by encouraging the purchase of cloud
services, in addition to the acquisition of local IT infrastructure, and
by supporting new tools that facilitate distributed collaboration and
simplify access to multidisciplinary scientific data. As I have noted
before, Microsoft is acting on this belief, working in partnership with
the National Science Foundation.
Fostering Continued Support for Computing Research and Education
Today’s
cloud technology is derived from basic computing research conducted
over the past four decades. To ensure that the U.S. continues to remain
at the forefront of cloud technology, continued investment in basic
research is critical. There are deep and open questions in areas as
diverse as the future of silicon scaling and system-on-a-chip design,
energy-efficient systems, primary and secondary storage, data mining and
analytics, wired and wireless networks, system resilience and
reliability, privacy and security, and user interfaces and
accessibility, to name just a few. Insights and innovations from this
research will spawn new companies, create jobs and reshape our future.
In
addition to continued research investment, it is critical to support
the pipeline that produces researchers, and others who will able to
invent new uses of the cloud and information technology. The U.S. Bureau
of Labor Statistics estimates that the computing sector will have 1.5
million job openings over the next 10 years, yet the number of graduates
receiving Bachelors, Masters or Ph.D. computer science degrees is far
short of that. In addition, we must strengthen the quality of and access
to computing education at all levels. Consistent with these concerns
about the IT workforce and computing education, Microsoft is a founding
member of theComputing
Internet2 NET+ Services To Deliver Cloud Services To University Faculty, Staff and Students Nationwide
http://www.internet2.edu/news/pr/2011.10.04.net-services.html
New partnerships announced with HP, SHI International and Box
Raleigh,
N.C.—Oct. 4, 2011—Internet2, the world’s most advanced networking
consortium, today announced individual partnerships with HP, SHI
International and Box to deliver new Internet2 NET+ Services, including
cloud computing and infrastructure services, to Internet2 members’
faculty, staff and students nationwide. The announcement was made at
today’s Internet2 Fall Member Meeting.
“These partnerships
benefit our members by making secure and very affordable cloud computing
services available anywhere, anytime,” said Dave Lambert, President and
CEO, Internet2. “By leveraging existing community investments,
Internet2 provides seamless access to standard and customized offerings
from industry leaders for chief information officers in higher education
to consider in their technology plans. Internet2 NET+ Services are the
next generation of value from Internet2.“
Internet2 NET+
Services provide “above the network” services to Internet2 member
organizations, including higher education, government, and industry.
Cornell University; Indiana University; Penn State; University of
California, Berkeley; University of Michigan; University of Notre Dame;
University of Utah; and other Internet2 participating campuses will
immediately begin testing and validating some of the specific offerings
and services. The new services will create a platform tailored to the
needs of the Internet2 community, and will leverage Internet2’s 100G
network and InCommon identity management services. Higher education
members who are InCommon subscribers may purchase Box and HP services in
early 2012, as part of their annual membership.
Based on the HP
Converged Infrastructure and HP Cloud System solutions, HP, in
conjunction with SHI, will provide a “private community cloud” suite of
infrastructure services that are designed to meet required levels of
security, performance and availability for higher education. HP and SHI
will operate these services for the Internet2 community. SHI Cloud
combines best-of-breed technologies to create the most secure,
high-performance, and industrial grade cloud offering with private,
dedicated, managed or multi-tenant options. Indiana University; Penn
State; University of Notre Dame; and the University of Utah will
participate in a pilot program after which the service will be made
broadly available.
“Top research institutions require flexible,
affordable cloud services to be able to conduct some of the most
important, compute-intensive research in the world,” said Rich Geraffo,
senior vice president and managing director of HP Enterprise business.
“HP and SHI are teaming up to deliver Internet2 members the reliability,
performance and scalability required to further advance these
innovative efforts.”
“Academic communities are driving
innovation in every industry, and they require a cloud platform that’s
powerful, secure, and scalable to support their computing needs,” says
Thai Lee, president and CEO of SHI. “By joining forces with HP and
Internet2, we’ll be able to deliver and manage an affordable private
cloud that will let research teams focus on their work, not their IT
department. Further, our robust industrial-grade cloud platform will
support the core mission of Internet2 by delivering technology that goes
beyond today and meets future needs of the computing world.”
Supercomputing center targets big, fast storage cloud at academics, industry
http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2011/09/supercomputing-center-targets-55-petabyte-storage-at-academics-students.ars
By Jon Brodkin | Published about 2 hours ago
A
storage cloud with 10 Gigabit Ethernet speed and scalability to
hundreds of petabytes has been launched to provide virtually unlimited
storage capacity to supercomputing customers.
Built by the San Diego
Supercomputer Center at UC San Diego, the SDSC Cloud has 5.5PB to begin
with, but “is scalable by orders of magnitude to hundreds of petabytes,
with aggregate performance and capacity both scaling almost linearly
with growth,” the SDSC says.
The supercomputing center believes this
is the largest academic-based cloud storage system in the United States,
and said it is designed for researchers, students, academics and
industry users who need secure and cost-effective storage for data sets
of any size. Each object stored will have a unique URL for sharing.
SDSC’s
project is another example of cloud computing expanding the
accessibility of high-performance computing(HPC) functionality once
reserved for an exclusive set of institutions. Instead of being forced
to build out huge clusters inside your own data centers, customers can
outsource supercomputing needs to cloud vendors. Amazon offers special
cluster compute instances for just such a purpose, and even built a
supercomputer on the Elastic Compute Cloud that ranked among the Top 500
supercomputing sites in the world. Another project recently featured by
Ars used the Amazon compute cloud to build a 30,000-core cluster for a
pharmaceutical company that ran for about seven hours at a peak cost of
$1,279 per hour.
http://gizmodo.com/5843899/the-largest-cloud-server-in-all-of-academia
The Cloud Server So Large They Should Call It “Hurricane”
As
computational-heavy research gains momentum, the amount of data
researchers generate is exploding—a single sequencing of DNA requires as
much as 28 terabytes. So where do American researchers store their most
ginormous data sets? In the largest academic cloud server in the US, at
the San Diego Supercomputer Center.
The SDSC Cloud has an initial
capacity of 5.5 petabytes—roughly 250 billion pages of text—and
achieves sustained read rates of 8-10GB/s—that’s 250GB every 30 seconds.
And that’s just to start. The Cloud is scalable, on-demand, up to
hundreds of petabytes. “We believe that the SDSC Cloud may well
revolutionize how data is preserved and shared among researchers,
especially massive datasets that are becoming more prevalent in this new
era of data-intensive research and computing,” said Michael Norman,
director of SDSC said in a press release. “The SDSC Cloud goes a long
way toward meeting federal data sharing requirements, since every data
object has a unique URL and could be accessed over the Web.”
——
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