Tuesday, March 23, 2010

The Rise of Research-driven Cloud Computing

[Of course another big advantage of moving to cloud computing is the reduction in energy costs at a university. A modern computing data center can represent a significant fraction of a university’s energy and carbon costs. If more researchers used cloud computing this would have a big impact on direct and in-direct costs of computing and energy at a university. For those R&E networks that are planning to experiment with bundling network services as a component of the energy bill, adding cloud computing to the service bundle increases the attraction of this approach – BSA]


To Space and Beyond: The Rise of Research-driven Cloud Computing
http://bit.ly/bA9YjL

I remember attending the inaugural GridWorld conference in 2006 and hearing Argonne National Laboratory’s Ian Foster discuss the possible implications of the newly announced Amazon EC2 on the world of grid computing that he helped create. Well, 2010 is upon us, and some of the implications Foster pondered at GridWorld have become clear, among them: For many workloads, the cloud appears to be replacing the grid. This point is driven home in a new GigaOM Pro article by Paul Miller, in which he looks at how space agencies are using the cloud to do work that likely would have had the word “grid” written all over it just a few short years ago.

Miller cites a particularly illustrative case with the European Space Agency, which is utilizing Amazon EC2 for the data-processing needs of its Gaia mission, set to launch in 2012. The 40GB per night that Gaia will generate would have cost $1.5 million using local resources (read “a grid” or “a cluster”), but research suggests it could cost in the $500,000 range using EC2. The demand for cost savings and flexibility isn’t limited to astronomy research, either.

Research organizations that need sheer computing power on demand are looking at EC2 as the means for attaining it. Several prominent examples come from the pharmaceutical industry, where companies like Amylin and Eli Lilly have publicly embraced the cloud, as has research-driven Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute. A related case study comes from CERN’s Large Hadron Collider project, which is using EC2’s capabilities as a framework for upgrading its worldwide grid infrastructure. So high is demand cloud for resources, in fact, that even high-performance computing software vendors, such as Univa UD (which Foster co-founded), are building tools to let research-focused customers run jobs on EC2.
Unlike HPC-focused grid software, however, the cloud opens up doors beyond crunching numbers.

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