Feature - Virtual infrastructure

A problem of scale (and motley software)

Grid site administrators have numerous problems to deal with when configuring and scaling their infrastructure, including a large number of users with different software components, and physical resources that cannot be isolated or partitioned. Together, these make for limited service and reliability, along with inflexibility.

To overcome these challenges, Ignacio M. Llorente and his colleagues of the dsa-research group at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid developed a new, open-source technology which acts as a virtualization layer between the service and the physical infrastructure layers, integrating existing Grid and cluster middleware stacks.

It extends the benefits of Virtual Machine Monitors (VMMs) from a single physical resource to a cluster of resources, decoupling the server not only from its physical infrastructure but also from its physical location.

Feature - GridUNESP

Grid brings teraflops to Brazilian researchers

Researchers at São Paulo State University in Brazil will soon speed up their calculations to 33.3 teraflops with the new GridUNESP scheduled to come online in October. The $1.9 million grid will be the largest computational infrastructure in Latin America, potentially increasing the number of processors available several-fold.

Feature - GRelC

Euro-Mediterranean Center for Climate Change

Talk to any climate scientist, and they’ll tell you that one of their biggest problems is dealing with the sheer volume of data they acquire. They don’t lack for data; if anything, they have too much to choose from—everything from tree rings to ice cores to collections of air samples from hot-air balloons . . .

Link of the week

It's you, the reader!

The link of the week this week is . . . iSGTW, and the subject is you, the readers.

Over ten percent of you responded to our 9-question readership survey–double the rate of our previous surveys–and your responses revealed some things we expected. And some things we didn’t.

For instance, we found that most subscribers read it once per week, scientists and information technology professionals account for 76% of our readers . . .

Image of the week

Live from Budapest: International Summer School of Grid Computing