Radio HPC: The Rich Report

Univa Partners with Europe's science + computing to Bolster Digital Manufacturing

overheardinpdx@gmail.com (Rich Brueckner) — Fri, 24 May 2013 14:07:13 PDT

In this slidecast, Gary Tyreman from Univa describes the company's new partnership with Europe's science + computing.

Our customers operate technical computing environments where infrastructure software like Univa Grid Engine is a key component. This partnership allows us to support our customers on all levels, giving them more options to use their compute clusters in the most efficient manner," says Gerd-Lothar Leonhart, CEO of s+c. "Additionally, the possibility to integrate Univa Grid Engine with Hadoop systems opens up new opportunities to optimize the usage of Big Data installations."

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Debunking the Myths of SSL VPN Security

overheardinpdx@gmail.com (Rich Brueckner) — Wed, 22 May 2013 10:46:05 PDT

In this slidecast, Rainer Enders from NCP Engineering presents: Next-gen Network Access Technology.

The NCP Secure Enterprise Solution provides a set of software products that enable complete policy freedom, unlimited scaling, multiple VPN-system setup and control, and total end-to-end security. Practically speaking, one administrator is able to handle 10,000+ secure remote users through all phases."

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TwinStrata CloudArray 4.5 with DRaaS

overheardinpdx@gmail.com (Rich Brueckner) — Wed, 22 May 2013 08:27:53 PDT

In this podcast, Nicos Vekiarides from TwinStrata presents: TwinStrata CloudArray 4.5 with DRaaS. The new offering is an on-demand disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) for VMware users.

Whether your goals are to increase storage capacity, improve off-site data protection, implement disaster recovery or all three of the above, TwinStrata CloudArray is the most comprehensive storage solution available today,” said Nicos Vekiarides, CEO of TwinStrata. “TwinStrata has made great strides in delivering enterprise-class functionality at a fraction of the cost typically required of storage solutions. What’s exciting is CloudArray 4.5 enables organizations to enjoy a full business continuity plan without the need for backup software or a dedicated disaster site-- a once unthinkable proposition.”

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Technical Overview of Cloudera Impala

overheardinpdx@gmail.com (Rich Brueckner) — Sun, 12 May 2013 08:06:50 PDT

In this slidecast, Justin Erckson from Cloudera presents a technical overview of Cloudera Impala, an SQL-on-Hadoop solution that enables users to do real-time queries of data stored in Hadoop clusters.

To avoid latency, Impala circumvents MapReduce to directly access the data through a specialized distributed query engine that is very similar to those found in commercial parallel RDBMSs. The result is order-of-magnitude faster performance than Hive, depending on the type of query and configuration.

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ClusterStor 1500 Departmental Scale-Out Storage for HPC

overheardinpdx@gmail.com (Rich Brueckner) — Thu, 09 May 2013 07:34:24 PDT

In this podcast, Ken Claffey from Xyratex describes the company's new ClusterStor 1500 storage system. Designed for scale-out HPC storage solutions, the ClusterStor 1500 delivers HPC performance and efficiency with help from the Lustre file system.

Departments within larger organizations or medium-sized enterprises today, especially in the commercial, academic and government sectors, represent an underserved market. They need high-performance and scalable storage solutions that are cost-efficient, easy to deploy and manage and reliable even under heavy workloads,” said Ken Claffey, senior vice president of the ClusterStor business at Xyratex. “Growth in this market segment is being driven by the increasing adoption of simulation applications in a wide range of industries from car and aircraft design to chemical interactions and financial modeling. Traditional enterprise storage systems are simply not designed to meet the performance needs of these applications, so we engineered and built the affordable and modular ClusterStor 1500 to bring the performance power of Lustre to this underserved and growing market in the way that only ClusterStor can.”

With the ability to scale performance from 1.25GB/s to 110GB/s and raw capacity from 42TB to 7.3PB, ClusterStor 1500 is purpose-built to satisfy data intensive department level compute cluster needs, ClusterStor 1500 is designed to provide best in class scale-out storage for middle tier high performance computing environments. The ClusterStor 1500 solution features scale-out storage building blocks, the Lustre parallel filesystem and a comprehensive management platform that eliminates the guesswork usually associated with building and optimizing your own HPC storage solution. Read the Full Story * View the slides * Download the MP3 * Subscribe on iTunes * Subscribe to RSS

Get 2know - Big Data For The Shared Economy

overheardinpdx@gmail.com (Rich Brueckner) — Wed, 08 May 2013 08:32:10 PDT

In this podcast, Guy Fraker presents: get2know - Big Data for the Shared Economy. With shared rides, cars, bikes, and even rooms, the issue of trust is huge. The folks at get2know have a developed a "Trust Engine" that uses Big Data to help you decide who you trust to share your stuff. Amazing! "As we build out to scale, we’ll provide a playground for alliance partners to reward consumers who utilize shared services in postive ways. We will deliver a searchable aggregated view of shared economy providers WITH utilization incentives. By doing both in a single view, using single sign-on, we provide an economic reason to be scored. We believe that by partnering with the Collaborative Consumption community, a market is created where no user asks, “ok- I got my score- now what?” get2kno is about creating a market, not building a platform." Learn more at: http://get2kno.com

Teradata Intelligent Memory for Big Data

overheardinpdx@gmail.com (Rich Brueckner) — Wed, 08 May 2013 07:53:49 PDT

In this podcast, Scott Gnau from Teradata Labs presents: Teradata Intelligent Memory.

The introduction of Teradata Intelligent Memory allows our customers to exploit the performance of memory within Teradata Platforms, which extends our leadership position as the best performing data warehouse technology at the most competitive price,” said Scott Gnau, president, Teradata Labs. “Teradata Intelligent Memory technology is built into the data warehouse and customers don’t have to buy a separate appliance. Additionally, Teradata enables its customers to buy and configure the exact amount of in-memory capability needed for critical workloads. It is unnecessary and impractical to keep all data in memory, because all data do not have the same value to justify being placed in expensive memory.”

How does Intelligent Memory work? This animation video does a good job of making this advanced technology look simple. Read the Full Story * View the slides * Download the MP3 * Subscribe on iTunes * Subscribe to RSS

Hot Interconnects 2013 Conference Looks to the Future of Networking

overheardinpdx@gmail.com (Rich Brueckner) — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 14:05:59 PDT

In this podcast, the program co-chairs of the 2013 Hot Inteconnects Conference discuss how the annual symposium covers cross-cutting issues spanning computer systems, networking technologies, and communication protocols for high-performance interconnection networks. Program guests:

Madeleine Glick (APIC Corporation)
Torsten Hoefler (ETH Zurich)
Fabrizio Petrini (IBM TJ Watson)

Hot Interconnects takes place in San Jose, California on August 21-23. The conference Call for Papers has been issued, with abstracts due April 26, 2013. Download the MP3 * Subscribe on iTunes * Subscribe to RSS

Grid Engine State of the Union

overheardinpdx@gmail.com (Rich Brueckner) — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 06:40:34 PDT

In this podcast, Fritz Ferstl from Univa presents: Grid Engine State of the Union.

Univa Grid Engine is the next generation product that open source Grid Engine users have been waiting for. Our customers save time and money through increased uptime, and with our innovative feature and product evolution they can significantly reduce the total cost of ownership of running Grid Engine. We have improved the speed of several aspects of the product with new features and functionality designed to improve the speed of dispatching and throughput. The following features drive performance of Grid Engine to a new height. They are only available from Univa."

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Student Cluster Competition Comes to South Africa, Winners off to ISC'13

overheardinpdx@gmail.com (Rich Brueckner) — Mon, 04 Mar 2013 17:18:52 PST

In this podcast, Happy Sithole from CHPC and Gilad Shainer from Mellanox discuss the first-ever Student Cluster Competition in South Africa, which wrapped up in December. The winning team will be traveling to compete in the ISC'13 Student Cluster Competition in Leipzig this June. Download the MP3 or Subscribe on iTunes. In related news, you can now follow all the major worldwide Student Cluster Competitions at their new home site.

Violin Memory and Toshiba Team up for Mass Adoption of Memory Infrastructure

overheardinpdx@gmail.com (Rich Brueckner) — Mon, 04 Mar 2013 10:56:57 PST

In this podcast, Narayan Venkat from Violin Memory describes how the company's new alliance with Toshiba will help foster a whole new world of applications that perform at the speed of memory.

Our new focus on PCIe cards will allow both companies to drive radical new economics that lead to the mass adoption of memory-based architectures,” said Don Basile, CEO of Violin Memory. “NAND memory is now a requirement at every level from the smart connected device to the core of the cloud and the enterprise data center. Violin’s combined portfolios continue our leadership across the evolving memory-based solution market.”

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New DDN hScalar is World's First Enterprise Apache Hadoop Appliance

overheardinpdx@gmail.com (Rich Brueckner) — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 08:02:34 PST

In this podcast, Jeff Denworth from DDN describes the company's new hScalar storage system -- the World's First Enterprise Apache Hadoop Appliance.

DDN has developed a Hadoop solution that is all about time to value: It simplifies rollout so that enterprises can get up and running more quickly, provides typical DDN performance to accelerate data processing, and reduces the amount of time needed to maintain a Hadoop solution." said Dave Vellante, Chief Research Officer, Wikibon.org. "For enterprises with a deluge of data but a limited IT budget, the DDN hScaler appliance should be on the short list of potential solutions.”

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Excelegrade Digital Testing Platform Wins Startup Riot

overheardinpdx@gmail.com (Rich Brueckner) — Sat, 23 Feb 2013 17:18:13 PST

In this podcast, Sanjay Parekh from the Startup Riot discusses how the annual event brings entrepreneurs together with VCs and Angel investors. We also get a chance to talk to the most recent winner of the Riot competition, Lauren Miller from Excelegrade.

Excelegrade is a platform that allows teachers to focus on the art of teaching while we do the science. Teachers currently spend hours on administrative tasks, like test creation, grading, etc., leaving them with less time to focus on instruction. We aim to give teachers their time back without compromising the rigor of instruction and we do this with 21st century technology. Much like textbooks are going digital, Excelegrade makes K-12 classroom assessments digital by replacing paper-based tests with assessments on tablets, smart phones, and laptops."

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Examining Hadoop as a Big Data Risk in the Enterprise

overheardinpdx@gmail.com (Rich Brueckner) — Thu, 21 Feb 2013 16:53:09 PST

In this podcast, Brian Christian from Zettaset presents: Examining Hadoop as a Big Data Risk in the Enterprise.

While the open source framework has enabled Hadoop to logically grow and expand, business and government enterprise organizations face deployment and management challenges with Hadoop. Hadoop’s core specifications are still being developed by the Apache community, and thus far, do not adequately address enterprise requirements, such as support for robust security and regulatory compliance mandates such as HIPAA and SOX, for example."

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Infosys BigDataEdge Platform for Insight Management

overheardinpdx@gmail.com (Rich Brueckner) — Wed, 20 Feb 2013 09:02:31 PST

In this podcast, Vishnu Bhat from Infosys presents an overview of the company's all-new BigDataEdge platform for insight management.

Enterprises today cannot afford to spend an inordinate amount of time making sense of the data deluge that surrounds them," said Vishnu Bhat, VP of Cloud at Infosys. “Infosys BigDataEdge draws upon our deep research & development capabilities and proven expertise in Big Data and analytics to help clients turn data into revenues faster. This unique platform is already enabling ten global organizations to develop actionable insights in a matter of days and act on them from day one.”

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Ethernet Secrets of TCP

overheardinpdx@gmail.com (Rich Brueckner) — Tue, 19 Feb 2013 07:34:01 PST

In this podcast, Jeff Squyres from Cisco presents: Ethernet Secrets of TCP.

TCP? Who cares about TCP in HPC? More and more people, actually. With the commoditization of HPC, lots of newbie HPC users are intimidated by special, one-off, traditional HPC types of networks and opt for the simplicity and universality of Ethernet. And it turns out that TCP doesn’t suck nearly as much as most (HPC) people think, particularly on modern servers, Ethernet fabrics, and powerful Ethernet NICs. I’ll cut to the chase: I surprised myself by being able to get ~10us half-round-trip ping-pong MPI latency over TCP (using NetPIPE)."

Read the Full Story at the MPI Blog * Download the MP3 * Download the Slides * Subscribe on iTunes * If Dropbox is blocked, download audio from Google Drive.

AMD's John Gustafson on Three Common Misconceptions about HPC

overheardinpdx@gmail.com (Rich Brueckner) — Sun, 17 Feb 2013 14:06:36 PST

In this podcast, John Gustafson discusses how AMD is meeting customer challenges for energy efficient computing. He also shares three common misconceptions about HPC. Download the MP3 * Download the Slides * Subscribe on iTunes * If Dropbox is blocked, download audio from Google Drive.

Garantia Data Goes GA with Cloud-based Redis and Memcached Platform

overheardinpdx@gmail.com (Rich Brueckner) — Thu, 14 Feb 2013 08:41:41 PST

In this podcast, Ofer Bengal from Garantia Data describes the company's cloud-based Redis and Memcached high performance database platform, which went GA today.

We are excited to be the first to offer AWS' European users enhanced Redis functionality they never had before," mentioned Ofer Bengal, CEO of Garantia Data. "We have seen great demand in this region for scalable, highly available and fully-automated services for Redis and Memcached. Our Redis Cloud and Memcached Cloud provide exactly the sort of functionality developers look for."

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LUG 2013 Coming to San Diego, April 16-18

overheardinpdx@gmail.com (Rich Brueckner) — Wed, 13 Feb 2013 16:27:54 PST

In this podcast, Norm Morse from OpenSFS looks back on the past year's developments in the Lustre community and provides an preview of the upcoming LUG 2013 conference in San Diego April 16-18.

LUG is always about a real exchange of ideas. The LUG program committee would like to invite members of the Lustre community to submit presentation abstracts for inclusion in this year’s agenda. If you’ve considered it before, but put it off, we want to hear from you. We’ve made it easy; the first step simply requires one-page abstract of your proposed talk. We’re looking for deep-dives, new information, and controversial topics in all areas of Lustre development, application, or best-practices. The deadline to submit presentation abstracts is March 4, 2013.

Registration is now open. The call for presentations is online and there are many sponsorship opportunities. Download the MP3 * Subscribe on iTunes * If Dropbox is blocked, download audio from Google Drive.

Nevex Technology Powers Intel Cache Acceleration Software

overheardinpdx@gmail.com (Rich Brueckner) — Tue, 12 Feb 2013 16:34:29 PST

In this podcast, Andrew Flint and Carolyn Hanley from Intel present: Intel Cache Acceleration Software.

Intel CAS complements our SSD data center family by providing a total caching solution that delivers even more value and capability for our customers," said Chuck Brown, product line manager for Intel's Non-Volatile Memory Solutions Group. "Intel CAS delivers a multi-level cache across the SSD and DRAM for optimal performance. Compared to short-stroked hard-drive technology, we've seen up to 50 times the improvement in I/O performance throughput for read intensive workloads by adding Intel CAS with the Intel SSD 910 series1."

Read the Full Story * Download the MP3 * Download the Slides * Subscribe on iTunes * If Dropbox is blocked, download audio from Google Drive.

Ironstone VC Fund Using Data Science to Pick Disruptive Startups

overheardinpdx@gmail.com (Rich Brueckner) — Tue, 12 Feb 2013 16:32:24 PST

Can Big Data analytics be used to predict which Startup companies will succeed? In this podcast, Thomas Thurston from Growth Science discusses the new Ironstone Venture Capital Fund, which is using Business Model Simulation to choose disruptive Startups.

The human mind is good at some things but bad at others. So we use data science and technology to help our brains with the things they weren’t designed for. This marriage between technology and the brain has allowed us to predict business behavior in ways that weren’t possible even a decade ago. It’s the future of venture capital,” said Thomas Thurston from Growth Science. "This fund is unique. First, instead of mostly using intuition, like most VCs do, we’re using powerful, proven data science to identify disruptive companies. That’s revolutionary. Second, we’re interested in seed- and early-stage companies, which is much needed as our economy rebuilds itself. Finally, unlike a lot of VCs focused on exits and quickly ‘flipping’ startups, we have a long-term view and really want to partner with people growing strong, disruptive, meaningful businesses to make the world a better place.”

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An Overview of Glasshouse Cloud Services

overheardinpdx@gmail.com (Rich Brueckner) — Tue, 12 Feb 2013 16:30:40 PST

In this podcast, Ken Copas from Glasshouse presents an overview of the company's Cloud services.

GlassHouse delivers clarity amid the hype, providing vendor independent, objective IT consulting, to drive customer defined business outcomes, and guide clients along the full lifecycle of transforming their IT infrastructure. We are unique in our focus not just on technology but also on our clients’ information policies, procedures and organizational design, as those have the most significant impact on IT costs and effectiveness. Our solutions cover end-to-end planning, design and deployment to fully managed services."

Download the MP3 * Subscribe on iTunes * If Dropbox is blocked, download audio from Google Drive.

Cycle Computing Runs Amazing 10,600 Instance on AWS for Big Pharma

overheardinpdx@gmail.com (Rich Brueckner) — Wed, 06 Feb 2013 09:11:26 PST

In this podcast, Jason Stowe from Cycle Computing describes how the company spun up a 10,600 instance HPC cluster in 2 hours with CycleCloud on Amazon EC2. Using just one Chef 11 server and one purpose in mind, this on-the-fly cluster was used to accelerate life science research relating to a cancer target for a Big 10 Pharmaceutical company.

To tackle this problem, we decided to build software to create a CycleCloud utility supercomputer from 10,600 cloud instances, each of which was a multi-core machine! This makes this cluster the largest server-count cloud HPC environment that we know about, or has been made public to date (the former utility supercomputing leader was our 6,732 instance cluster for Schödinger from 2012). If this cluster were a physical environment, analysts said it would occupy a 12,000 sq ft data center space, costing $44 million. Instead, we created this in 2 hours, with these 10,600 hosts, used it for 9 more, at a peak cost of $549.72 per hour, and turned it off for a total cost of $4,362. Wow!"

Read the Full Story * Download the MP3 * Download the Slides (PDF) * Subscribe on iTunes * If Dropbox is blocked, download audio from Google Drive.

Merle Giles on Increasing Emphasis on the Industrial Sector at ISC'13

overheardinpdx@gmail.com (Rich Brueckner) — Mon, 04 Feb 2013 11:58:23 PST

In podcast, Merle Giles from NCSA and I discuss the new Two-Day Industry Track on "HPC for Small and Medium Enterprises" at the upcoming ISC'13 conference. As part of the ISC Distinguished Speaker Series, Giles will present on the common needs of engineering and scientific research in regard to HPC.

The goal of the Industry Track is to help attendees from the industry, who often have different computing requirements than those at scientific institutions, make informed decisions about acquiring and operating HPC systems. This newly established track will focus on engineering and manufacturing in industry, especially on helping the industry improve product design and time-to-market through the use of HPC. The talks are also aimed at spurring a dialogue between users, technology companies, hardware vendors, software vendors and service providers. Small and medium Enterprises (SMEs) will be strongly represented.

ISC'13 will take place June 16-20 in n Liepzig, Germany, a new city for the show. Download the MP3 * Subscribe on iTunes * If Dropbox is blocked, download audio from Google Drive.

More than Big Data: Scott Gnau on the Teradata Unified Data Architecture

overheardinpdx@gmail.com (Rich Brueckner) — Sun, 03 Feb 2013 11:29:24 PST

In this podcast, Scott Gnau from Teradata Labs discusses various aspects of Big Data and how the company's Unified Data Architecture can position the enterprise to succeed.