High Performance Computing Hits the Cloud. High Performance Computing (HPC) is defined by Wikipedia as: High-performance computing (HPC) uses supercomputers and computer clusters to solve advanced computation problems. Today, computer systems approaching the teraflops-region are counted as HPC-computers. The term is most commonly associated with computing used for scientific research or computational science. A related term, high-performance technical computing (HPTC), generally refers to the engineering applications of cluster-based computing (such as computational fluid dynamics and the building and testing of virtual prototypes). Predictably, I use the broadest definition of HPC including data intensive computing and all forms of computational science. High Performance Computing is one of those important workloads that many argue can’t move to the cloud. The HPC community uses the Top-500 list as the tracking mechanism for the fastest systems in the world.
What about HPC in the cloud, the next “it can’t happen” for HPC? --jrh. Performance Testing. Updated: AWS Security Whitepaper. Good news for all those interested in security...we've released the fourth version of our Overview of Security Processes whitepaper. It contains ten pages of new and additional detailed information. Highlights of new content include: A description of the AWS control environmentA list of our SAS-70 Type II Control ObjectivesSome discussion of risk management and shared responsibility principlesGreater visibility into our monitoring and communication processes and our employee lifecycleDescriptions of our physical security, environmental safeguards, configuration management, and business continuity management processes and plansUpdated summaries of new AWS security featuresAdditional detail about the security attributes of various AWS components The additional information and greater level of detail should help to answer many common questions.
As always, feel free to reach out to us if you're still needing more information. > Steve < Happy 4th Birthday Amazon EC2. Amazon's cloud has a silver lining - Mail & Guardian Online: The smart news source. Half a billion dollars. That’s what online retailer Amazon.com will earn from its cloud computing services this year—if you believe UBS Investment Research’s latest report. Not bad for a service that started off renting out Amazon.com’s spare computing capacity. Even more startling are the profit and growth figures. Nearly half of that revenue is pure profit, and with the service growing at 50% every year, Amazon will be making a cool $2,5-billion from the business unit by 2014—nearly 4% of its total revenue. What makes the service so popular?
Three things: technical flexibility, a highly granular pay-as-you-go billing model and a powerful self-service interface. Amazon Web Services (AWS) gives any company, from the tiniest start-up to the corporate behemoth, access to Amazon’s vast pool of computing power. This means that instead of investing great chunks of cash in powerful servers that will sit idle at least some of the time, you can simply rent capacity—literally an hour at a time. The Age of Speed: Learning to Thrive in a More-Faster-Now World: Vince Poscente: Books. App Engine - Google Code. The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering, Anniversary Edition (2nd Edition): Frederick P. Brooks: Books.
Amazon Web Services Developer Community : Amazon EC2 Announces General Availability, SLA, and Windows. Dear AWS Developers, We are excited to announce that Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is now Generally Available and includes a Service Level Agreement (SLA). AWS is also releasing, available today, a public beta of Amazon EC2 running Microsoft Windows Server and Microsoft SQL Server. In addition, we're giving you a sneak peek at some upcoming features that will make Amazon EC2 even easier to operate. Please see details below on these announcements. Amazon EC2 today is entering General Availability (GA), after just over two years of operation in beta and the addition of many highly-requested features. We are also providing an SLA for Amazon EC2, with a service level commitment of 99.95% availability within a Region. If availability falls below this level, customers are eligible to receive service credits. The new Amazon EC2 SLA is designed to give customers additional confidence that even the most demanding applications will run dependably in the AWS cloud.
Amazon Architecture | High Scalability. This is a wonderfully informative Amazon update based on Joachim Rohde's discovery of an interview with Amazon's CTO. You'll learn about how Amazon organizes their teams around services, the CAP theorem of building scalable systems, how they deploy software, and a lot more. Many new additions from the ACM Queue article have also been included. Amazon grew from a tiny online bookstore to one of the largest stores on earth. They did it while pioneering new and interesting ways to rate, review, and recommend products. Greg Linden shared is version of Amazon's birth pangs in a series of blog articles Site: Information Sources. Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't: Jim Collins: Books. The Attention Economy: Understanding the New Currency of Business: Books: Thomas H. Davenport,John C. Beck.