Content about Business

Feature - HPC adds a spark to EDF’s computing capacities

Image courtesy Zsuzsanna Kilian, stock.exchng

Jean-Yves Berthou is responsible for IT in the research and development area of Electricite de France — a major energy company in Europe. EDF’s 2,000 researchers use computing to work on a number of different projects, including areas such as minimizing CO2 emissions, alternatives to fossil fuels, and ensuring the security of electricity grids. Here, he describes the use and impact of high performance computing (HPC) at the company.
Why do you use HPC?
Berthou: In many cases physical experiments and testing are not possible, for example in the simulation of fuel assemblies and crack propagation in nuclear reactors, or in optimizing electricity production and trading. Even when experimentation is possible, numerical simulation can go beyond what is physically possible. However, experimentation still remains an indispensable tool.
 
In what application

Video of the Week - NoHardware.com destroys server huggers' equipment

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Link of the Week - Move over, Deep Blue: Watson is here

Watson (center) competes against humans in a mock Jeopardy match. To see the video this image was taken from, click on the image.
Screenshot taken by Miriam Boon. Video courtesy of IBM.

To make artificial intelligence history, Deep Blue had to defeat chess grandmaster Gary Kasparov. Now those zany IBM AI researchers are at it again, pitting their latest experiment, Watson, against champions of a much more challenging game: Jeopardy.
Watson, which runs on a Blue Gene computer, uses a variety of separate algorithms to search its memory for answers to the clues posed on the show. Then, it combines the results each algorithm returns - taking certainty into consideration - to come up with an answer. This technique has made a huge difference, according to the team lead, David Ferrucci, as quoted in a great article that appeared in the New York Times in June.

Whether Watson will win when it goes on TV in a real “Jeop

Open Nebula becomes what you want

An intricate sand castle sculpture, about 10 feet (over 3 meters) high, in Victoria, Australia. Photo courtesy Wikipedia, under Creative Commons license.

As children, our sand castles were limited only by our imaginations. Sand is a great building material, making it possible to do almost whatever you wanted. It is abundant, easy to shape and, if the tower, outer wall or turret didn’t turn out as you hoped, easy to re-shape. It might not be very permanent, but for the job at hand — it worked great. The stuff of computing should be a bit more durable, but similarly flexible. The demands of today will not be the same as those of tomorrow, and the computing underpinnings should adapt as needed. Companies who manage a lot of data can now hire the support of a start-up business, C12G Labs, to help them design and construct a custom-fit cloud infrastructure. The people behind OpenNebula — an open-source toolkit to build cloud computi

Link of the week - Did you know?

Image courtesy YouTube

At Sony’s Executive Conference a few months ago, they played this video to bring home the sense fo the rapid progress of information technology and the changes it wrought in our times.
It has since gone viral on YouTube.
The video starts with small tidbits of information, called “Did you know,” which mention, for instance, that “The top ten in-demand jobs in 2010 . . . did not exist in 2004.”
Or that “the U.S. Department of Labor estimates that people in school today will have been in between 10 and 14 jobs by age 38.”
Or that “the volume of unique new information we will generate this year (4 exabytes) is greater than produced in all of the past 5,000 years of human history.”
It also claims that the amount of new technical information doubles every two years — meaning that by the time someone enters the third year of a four-year technical program, half of what they l

Lights, camera, action: FilmGrid

Image courtesy FilmGrid

Film-making is a very labor-intensive craft, relying upon the work of many people.
This is especially true of the part known as “post-postproduction” — traditionally, that portion of the process when all the raw film has been shot and is “in the can.” During this phase, all the editing, natural sound, music, background painting, voiceovers, montages, special effects, and everything else take place.
Because so much of post-production is manual, and because so many hands are involved — and because post-production often involves widely scattered individuals and companies — it can often be very difficult to maintain an up-to-date picture of the status of a film production, leading to inefficiencies, unwanted duplication of effort, and complications. In addition, couriers sometime lose hard disks containing footage with terabytes of information, and security can often be difficul

Feature - Fighting money-laundering, with the grid

Image courtesystock.exchng

When it comes to money laundering, crime really does pay. An estimated 1 trillion US dollars is laundered annually worldwide by criminals moving dirty money around in an attempt to cover up the origins of their cash.
The AMONG (Anti money laundering in Grid) Business Experiment from BEinGRID is set to stop such crooks in their tracks.
AMONG is helping banks to cooperate in order to improve their Anti-Money Laundering (AML) mechanisms. Currently, banks track suspicious behavior with AML systems set up within their own individual institution, with communication between banks initiated only in the case of an anomaly. But this approach can only detect simple cases of fraud.
“Money laundering cannot be dealt with when you look only within one organization,” says Kostas Tserpes from NTUA (National Technical University of Athens), a partner in the project. “By default, the person doing money l

Feature - Clouds in Geneva: the telecom view

Image courtesy Catherine Gater

Recently, Geneva played host to the impressive ITU Telecom World 2009, an event held only every few years and of significant importance to the telecommunications and ICT sectors. Attracting its fair share of world leaders, it has created quite a media splash – this is the first event I’ve attended that featured a special lounge marked ‘Heads of State’ (and no, they wouldn’t let me in).The CERN booth was a lot busier than some of the larger, slightly shinier contributions, whose extensive marbled floors had a tendency to look rather empty. The CERN booth on the other hand, was packed with visitors admiring the dashboard Google Earth and finding out more about the LHC and the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid.Given the buzz around cloud computing at EGEE’09 a few weeks ago, I was interested to hear the telecom community’s take on the subject. A distinguished panel of experts fr

Link of the week - Bid for your grid

GridEcon has developed a marketplace for the grid. Image courtesy Neil Gould, stock.xchng

Ever since grid computing was conceived, there have been visions of one colossal standard grid which is open and simple for anyone to use, just as you can plug into an electrical power grid to get as much electricity as you need on demand.
The dream of making grid computing a universal on-demand utility has yet to be realized. But what if instead of being like a power grid, grid computing resources were available through an open market?
The GridEcon project has developed a platform which turns grid computing resources into commodities which can be bought and sold like stock.
Because the ideology behind grids when they were first established was to enable computing resources to be shared for free, a market system for sharing computer resources seems to go against this ethic. However, the rising popularity of clouds — once described as &ld

Feature - Grid sails to the aid of shipbuilding New FSG ships anchored next to the factory building where they were constructed. Image courtesy of FSG Shipyards in Europe cannot compete on price alone against overseas competitors, especially those based in the Far East.Consequently, European shipbuilders must  concentrate on high-quality construction projects that are specially tailored to their customer's requirements. Each ship is a unique product, produced only once or in a very small run. To improve their competitive position, modern European shipyards must harness the most advanced simulation and design tools to produce complex structures cost effectively, in order to reduce the technical and economic risks at a time when orders for new ships are down worldwide.The goal? The complete, virtual design of a ship. The solution: the grid. At the Flensburger Schiffbau Gesellschaft (FSG) shipyard, managers wanted to find ways to design their ships so that they used less of costly materials such as steel — while r

Feature - Enter the age of computer merchants Goods for sale: companies like Digital Ribbon can quickly and easily connect clients with computing resources tailored to their needs. Image courtesy of sxc.hu Modern researchers are not short of ambition. Physicists at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, for example, will need to catch and sort through an estimated 15 petabytes of data each year, the equivalent of 20,000 years of music on an MP3 player. Collaborations like WISDOM, a global initiative for discovering new medicines for neglected and emerging diseases, test tens of millions of chemicals in computer models.  This is an opportunity for companies like Digital Ribbon in the United States, which seeks to be a kind of clearing house for computational resources. They call their model a “service registry,” connecting resource consumers with the right resource providers.  It could transform the way users run jobs on clouds or grids.“Computing is moving towards becoming a commodity,” says Erik Weav

Feature - Cycle-harvesting around campus in Singapore The NUS Grid Project Team: (from left) Yeo Eng Hee, Wang Junhong (Project Lead), Grace Foo, Tan Chee Chiang (Manager), Zhang Xinhuai. Image courtesy of NUS Grid At the National University of Singapore (NUS), researchers  in the areas of bioinformatics, financial simulation and data-mining had a problem: It was taking days, if not weeks, to run a computation.  The situation encountered by one researcher at the NUS Business School, Dr Ding, was typical. He found that each simulation he needed to do took over ten days to execute on a desktop computer. Clearly, something had to be done.Then came the NUS Grid (also known as Tera-scale Campus Grid or TCG@NUS), overseen by the Computer Center team at NUS. By using technology similar to that of well-known community grids  such as SETI@HOME, FOLDING@HOME and World Community Grid, the team found that they could dramatically cut down computation time. “With the NUS PC grid, we can finish one execution of our pro