U.S. Department of Energy Asks, Is Cloud Computing Fast Enough f. With cloud computing gaining acceptance in the business world, the U.S. Department of Energy wants to know if cloud computing can also meet the needs of the scientific computing. The National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) has launched Magellan, a cloud computing testbed to explore this question, with facilities that will test the effectiveness of cloud computing for scientific projects. Magellan is built to meet the special requirements of scientific computing using technology and tool sets unavailable in commercial clouds, including high-bin processors, high-bandwidth parallel file systems, high-capacity data archives, and pre-installed scientific applications and libraries.
But will cloud computing be fast enough? According to a report in Federal Computing Week, preliminary results suggest that commercially available clouds operating Message Passing Interface (MPI) applications such as weather calculations suffer in performance. What is Mobile Virtualization and Why is it Important? - ReadWriteCloud. Virtualization is often thought of as not the most sexy of topics. But what it can do continues to fascinate, especially in context of the larger mobile marketplace and what it means for people who use smartphones and lots of apps.
Carrying two mobile phones is not unusual. People will often need one device for work and a second for personal use. Virtualization on a mobile device wold mean just one smartphone with virtual partitions so people could use it for both for work and their personal lives. It would mean that people could download a far greater variety of apps.
And it has the potential to drop the cost of a smartphone for the end user. What is Mobile Virtualization? According to Open Kernel Labs, there are some differences between enterprise virtualization and its mobile counterpart. The problem? Dimitri Sirota is co-founder of Layer 7 Technologies. Sirota says that an operating system like Android is not viewed as that secure. That’s why U.S. Sirota: Claim: We Don’t Need Net Neutrality Because The Internet Isn’t ‘Broken’ Reading Drudge and the Wall Street Journal this morning had me concerned that Julius Genachowski, the FCC chairman, was going to smash my modem into tiny pieces with a +2 mace in the name of flexing regulatory muscle. Hardly. It’s true that the FCC will vote tomorrow whether or not to implement some sort of Net Neutrality regime, but considering that it’s already stated what it means to accomplish with the vote, I don’t understand why folks are so upset.
But, I’m willing to listen. “The FCC’s Threat To Internet Freedom,” written by an FCC commissioner, Robert M. McDowell, appears in today’s Wall Street Journal, but it doesn’t say anything new. The premise seems to be a defense of the argument “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” The story goes that the Internet has evolved splendidly so far, and it’s done so more or less independently of government intervention. It’s a fine enough argument, but only if you ignore a few things (which the op-ed does, of course). Peering problems: digging into the Comcast/Level 3 grudgematch. Is Comcast really trying to wreck the open Internet with a set of new tollbooths? Is Level 3 really trying to browbeat its way to a good deal? Ever since the Comcast/Level 3 interconnection dispute broke wide open into public view last week, the accusations from both sides have been flying. Sorting out those accusations has been difficult, in part because it was just so hard to know, on a technical level, what exactly has been going on.
Peering and transit issues can be notoriously complex but also murky, the details hidden behind nondisclosure agreements. As the 2009 Annual Report (PDF) from the ATLAS Internet Observatory put it, such deals are "difficult to quantify due to NDA/commercial privacy. " One upside of the dispute is that some of this secrecy has been lifted, and both sides have been unusually open with the press and with regulators about how they interact and what they believe to be at stake. There's no better public example of that ambiguity than the Level 3/Comcast mudfight.
No One's Happy About FCC Net Neutrality Proposal. iStockphoto.com After years of debate, the Federal Communications Commission is moving forward with controversial rules intended to preserve the open Internet. The FCC chairman outlined the proposals this week and criticism came quickly, from all parts of the ideological spectrum. Ever since he took the job, FCC chairman Julius Genachowski has been promising new rules of the road for the phone and cable companies that provide broadband access, as well as the companies and consumers who depend on it.
"It is the Internet's openness and freedom — the ability to speak, innovate and engage in commerce without having to ask anyone's permission — that has enabled the Internet's unparalleled success," he said. In a brief appearance Wednesday, Genachowski sketched out the rules that he said would ensure that broadband providers treat all of the data on their networks equally — an idea known as net neutrality. Loopholes Abound, Say Some Who Should Decide? That's not likely to happen anytime soon.