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Going green is a golden opportunity for providers |
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AUGUST 10, 2010 HEALTHCARE IT NEWS Stamford, CT-based Cycle Computing sees cloud computing as a wave of the future that not only offers environmental benefits, but also maximizes an organization’s computer usage. In a cloud computing project with Purdue University, Cycle built DiaGrid, a network of idle campus computers and servers to provide the massive computational capacity needed by researchers. » Read full article |
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Supercomputing Access and a New Economic Landscape |
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AUGUST 9, 2010 HPC IN THE CLOUD Supercomputing in the cloud and rent-a-cluster services could save the day for the economy as an article in the San Francisco Chronicle stated this morning. Companies and research sites with limited funds for investments in new hardware, especially the big iron required for an evolving series of HPC-type applications, are looking to rented infrastructure versus up-front investments. This is good news for the vendors, naturally, but it could also prove to be of enormous value for those who need the capacity without the initial expense. » Read full article |
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Cycle Computing’s Jason Stowe to Discuss Pharmaceutical Research in the Cloud at OSCON |
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JULY 21, 2010 PORTLAND, OREGON
Cycle Computing, providing proven, secure and elastic high performance computing (HPC) and open source solutions internally and in the cloud, today announced that Jason Stowe, CEO, will be presenting a session on pharmaceutical research in the cloud at the O’Reilly OSCON Open Source Convention in Portland, Oregon.
Stowe will discuss the use of open software in managing state-of-the-art HPC environments and provisioning auto-configuring software stacks in internal clouds and Amazon EC2.
Life science research, including molecular modeling, bioinformatics, proteomics and genomics contain multiple examples of open-source technology. Utilizing open-source technology like the Condor Project or Sun GridEngine to manage HPC clusters, researchers can deploy the software stacks that they use for calculations in the cloud. Utilizing Condor can also allow life science researchers to make the most of internal resources by harvesting compute cycles on dedicated servers, idle workstations and underutilized virtual environments.
Stowe’s presentation, Pharmaceutical Research in the Cloud, will take place at OSCON at 5:20 p.m. PDT on Wednesday, July 21, 2010.
To schedule a briefing with Jason Stowe at the event, contact Ashleigh Egan at 212.255.0080, ext. 12, or
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Cycle Computing’s CycleCloud Leverages Amazon Cluster Compute Instances to Build HPC Clusters in the Cloud |
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JULY 13, 2010 NEW YORK, NEW YORK Access to Localized Nodes with 10 Gigabits-Per-Second Bandwidth Drives Low Latency, High Performance Computing in the Cloud New York – July 13, 2010 – Cycle Computing, providing proven, secure and elastic high performance computing (HPC) and open source solutions internally and in the cloud, today announced its CycleCloud solution now supports easy access to Amazon EC2’s Cluster Compute Instances. With Cluster Compute Instances, CycleCloud enables users to create secure, on-demand clusters located together for low latency, with full 10 gigabits-per-second bandwidth between the nodes.
High performance computing environments that involve highly parallel applications must be able to optimize for latency and performance at every level to ensure the maximum results. CycleCloud automatically provisions HPC clusters in Amazon EC2 with schedulers including Condor and Sun Grid Engine (SGE), synchronizes data for calculations between internal and cloud environments and secures the data and clusters. Leveraging the full flexibility and power of Amazon EC2, users can access the new Cluster Compute Instances with faster, 10 gigabit interconnect to reliably solve some of their most challenging computational problems.
Prior to the launch of Amazon Cluster Compute Instances, when users provisioned nodes they were not aware where they were located on the cloud - a major challenge when performing high speed calculations that depend upon high performance. CycleCloud now works directly with the new Amazon nodes to provide easy access for users conducting MPI and other parallel calculations in fields including molecular modeling, life sciences, financial services, computational chemistry and fluid dynamics.
“Cycle helps our customers use the compute power they need to perform their most critical and intensive tasks with the speed and security that they demand,” said Jason Stowe, CEO of Cycle Computing. “CycleCloud gives them this power on Amazon EC2 with no web-programming required. Our ongoing partnership with Amazon and enhancements to CycleCloud allow us to bring 10 gigabit interconnected clusters to any HPC user easily and securely, using Amazon Cluster Compute Instances.”
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U of Missouri, IBM to Build Genomics Cloud Computing Environment in the Midwest |
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JULY 9, 2010 GENOMEWEB The goal of the project is to build a cloud computing environment for genomics research and personalized medicine that will allow sharing of bioinformatics resources among universities and institutions in the Midwest. » Access full article |
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Greening the grid: Purdue turns server pool into power management hub |
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JULY 8, 2010 ZDNet This post starts as a throwback to the utility and grid computing applications that used to dominate headlines. The high-performance grid in question is Purdue University’s DiaGrid, which aggregates the idle compute power of 28,000 processors at the university and on campuses in Indiana, Kentucky and Wisconsin. What initially started as a project mainly focused on effective resource utilization has, over time, has become a potential method for harvesting energy across the connected systems, says John Campbell, associate vice president at Purdue’s Rosen Center for Advanced Computing. What makes this possible is the Condor and CycleServer management tools from Cycle Computing. The directive is pretty simple at the university, which is trying to eke every available dollar out of the workstations and academic computers across the high-performance computing cluster, which are typically idle between midnight and 7 a.m. “Either join Condor or turn off your machine at night to conserve power,” Campbell says. Eventually, they won’t won’t have to make that decision: the software will automate a shutdown of idle machines. To get a sense of the impact that DiaGrid has had on the Purdue IT budget, Campbell notes that if the university was forced to replace the computing cycles that the grid coordinates, it would have to spend roughly $3 million in new hardware, not to mention all the power required to run those new systems. The power discussion has grown louder in the past two years, Campbell says, as the campus seeks to get the most utilization out of every watt of power consumed. That conversation has inspired other universities to join the DiaGrid project. Jason Stowe, CEO and founder of Cycle Computing, says many of the company’s clients — which include the likes of JP Morgan Chase, Lockheed Martin, Eli Lilly and Pfizer — are looking at how high-performance technical computing clusters can play a role in managing power management costs. While the power savings potentially might not be enormous, grid utility applications can play a key role in making sure a company’s existing power draw is used as effectively as possible. “Rather than buying new machines and more data center space, these technologies can help them make better use of what they have and let them power down nodes that are no longer in use,” Stowe says. » Read full article |
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Renting HPC: What's Cloud Got to Do with It? |
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JUNE 30, 2010 HPC IN THE CLOUD Cycle Computing CEO Jason Stowe summarized the concept of HPC-as-a-Service beautifully, stating "cloud HPC cluster users can start up clusters without having to worry about putting in place various applications, operating systems, security, encryption and other software." Yes, this is something that can be done in a private, public or even hybrid cloud environment with relative ease -- but only after the dues have been paid. After all, before entering into the blessed realm of the cloud there's some major work to be done. Major. You do not simply ship your data to Amazon and let them plug everything in for you, not if you're a small enterprise with a relatively light load and certainly not if you have any type of HPC applications. You no longer have a detailed view of your operating environment, nothing is tailored to your hardware, you have to program using specific APIs to make sure that everything is provisioned and setup properly or your experiment with the cloud is going to fail. It is no easy task -- at least not from any end users that have been directly interviewed by this little lady. No matter what the cloud structure, provider, expected use scenario, it is not something one can simply walk into and this is doubly true for HPC applications, of course, especially those that require some highly specialized behind the scenes manipulation to begin with." Stowe continued that in the HPC-as-a-Service model, "Scientists can create clusters that automatically add servers when work is added and turn the servers off when the work is completed," which means that once the calculations are done, the researcher simply clicks what amounts to a power down button to put an end to the massive availability of resources. It is in this simplicity -- in this easy off and on capability -- the on-demand essence -- that this could revolutionize how HPC is managed. » Read full article |
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Specialized HPC Clusters in the Cloud |
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JUNE 30, 2010 CLOUD COMPUTING JOURNAL A new frontier for life sciences and beyond There are hundreds of life science labs in the U.S. using next-generation sequencing, bioinformatics, proteomics, and molecular modeling to identify the genes behind, and potential drug targets to cure, many diseases including diabetes, cancer and Alzheimer's disease.
With increasing data coming off of modern scientific instruments, the demand for compute power to analyze the data is increasing dramatically. Currently, life science researchers in bioinformatics, next-generation sequencing, and molecular modeling need to spend tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy server clusters to run their scientific calculations.
High performance computing (HPC) has come a long way for life sciences. Twenty years ago, expensive parallel supercomputers were required to render proteins in three dimensions and run software that helped researchers understand their shapes. Now 3D rendering can be done on graphics cards in workstations, laptops and even phones.
It is important to note that there are two types of HPC. There's the sprinter type, where users try to run a highly parallel application, and then there's the marathon runner type of HPC, in which applications are pleasantly parallel. For sprinter applications, latency is of key importance and performance must be optimized at every level to get results. Currently these applications are best run on a single multi-core server in the cloud;
however, infrastructure from various providers may make this use case able to run on many servers. For the marathon applications, also called high throughput computing, many commodity servers can run jobs faster by taking advantage of the parallel nature of the work.
In either of these applications, compute clusters using many commodity servers have replaced expensive parallel supercomputers, but the data and problems being solved have grown to demand increased compute capacity. This leaves companies with large capital investments in fixed-size clusters that have all the traditional challenges of maximizing utilization, minimizing operational costs and shortening time-to-result for users. » Read full article |
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Cycle Computing Wins Cloud Computing World Series Award |
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JUNE 29, 2010 CLOUD COMPUTING WORLD FORUM CycleCloud for Life Sciences Named Best Cloud Management Solution Cycle Computing, providing proven, secure and elastic high performance computing (HPC) and open source solutions internally and in the cloud, today announced that the company’s CycleCloud for Life Sciences solution has been named the “Best Cloud Management Solution” by the Cloud Computing World Series Awards 2010. Winners were evaluated on multiple criteria, including business case, key distinguishing features, unique and innovative qualities and impact on target markets.
“The award for Best Cloud Management Solution was a fiercely competed category, so congratulations to Cycle Computing for winning the award in its first year” said Mark Johnstone, show director for the Cloud Computing World Series. “The quantity and quality of entries in each of the categories was extremely high and we hope the awards will now go from strength to strength providing people with a benchmark to measure qualities against.”
The CycleCloud for Life Sciences product family provides specialized clusters for scientists, and is currently the only supported cluster application in Amazon EC2. By using CycleCloud for Life Sciences, domain scientists have access to clusters that include a full range of pre-installed domain appropriate tools for bioinformatics, proteomics and computational chemistry. With the growing quantity of research data and corresponding need for compute resources, CycleCloud removes the upfront costs of purchasing and maintaining a cluster, giving scientists the resources they need to get their research done and only pay for what they use.
Cycle Cloud for Life Sciences allows scientists to focus on their research rather than the compute infrastructure required. As a result, researchers can concentrate on critical activities, such as running molecular modeling applications to identify a cure for cancer or performing next generation sequencing and bioinformatics calculations to isolate the gene for Alzheimer’s. By leveraging CycleCloud for on-demand availability of large, secure and trouble-free cloud computational resources, researchers can fill the gap between compute intensive calculations and the power needed to run them.
“Cycle’s selection as the Best Cloud Management Solution is testament to our proven solution and commitment to making cloud computing accessible to the masses,” said Jason Stowe, CEO of Cycle Computing. “Our focus on providing scalable, secure high-performance computing power via clusters continues to drive our steady company growth as we help our clients meet their intense compute requirements with minimal investment and effort, freeing them to focus on their vital jobs.”
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Will Public Clouds Ever Be Suitable for HPC? |
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JUNE 27, 2010 HPC IN THE CLOUD In an effort to overcome the performance gap yet still provide users with the freedom of owning and managing their own clusters, Penguin On-Demand (POD) and others, including Cycle Computing, are taking the concept of the cloud for HPC and making it more attractive to HPC users by eliminating the virtualization and providing customized servers. This missing layer of virtualization adds some complication to the term "cloud" but it is a logical step for researchers who are attracted to the cost benefits of avoiding the expense of a cluster investment. Since many HPC users have found that large public clouds, most notably Amazon's EC2 do not offer the service levels they depend on, it is reasonable to predict that there will be a host of new upstarts that seek to bring dedicated servers to researchers in an on-demand fashion versus creating a complex management layer that is tied to the public cloud. » Read full article |
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Of Clouds and Mass Spectrometers: The Varian Case |
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JUNE 18, 2010 HPC IN THE CLOUD Although there are other cloud management providers who offer similar services, Varian settled on Cycle Computing to handle the task of making sure the mission-critical project could be realized without the significant delay caused by its in-house IT environment. Cycle provisioned a secured cluster on EC2 that they scaled up to execute the simulation before shutting down when the calculations were complete. In EC2, running such a calculation on one machine for 100 hours costs the same as running 100 machines for one hour, which meant that in this case it was possible for the researchers to use and pay for only what they needed before returning to normal operations. This is beauty of the cloud model for short-term needs like Varian’s in this case and is the same model that has been employed across other industry areas during times of peak requirements. According to Cycle Computing, this required 18 hours to become fully functional—and that was with a few unexpected application-centered hitches that required refinement. » Read full article |
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Cycle shortlisted for Cloud Computing World Series Awards |
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JUNE 2010 CLOUD COMPUTING WORLD SERIES AWARDS SHORTLIST Cycle Computing has been shortlisted for the Cloud Computing World Series Awards. Cycle is a finalist for Best Cloud Management Solution with CA Technologies and Zeus Technology. |
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JUNE 2010 GENOMEWEB In early March, Cycle Computing rolled out a family of specialized compute clusters that utilize the Amazon EC2 cloud and come equipped with a slew of pre-installed application sets for bioinformatics, proteomics, or computational chemistry. "We help to make it so that folks don't need to do any programming to run applications on the cloud," says Cycle Computing CEO Jason Stowe. "We spin up a cluster and make it so that the cluster environments grow and shrink depending on the demand or load on the cluster. That's where we've improved on what Amazon offers." The company's new service offers analysis pipelines that incorporate software favorites such as Gromacs, Bowtie, HMMER, and Blast. |
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Looking for the silver lining |
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JUNE/JULY 2010 SCIENTIFIC COMPUTING Jason Stowe started Cycle Computing in 2005 with a view to helping to manage internal clusters across a wide range of HPC-using organisations. ‘There wasn’t really a cloud at that time,’ he notes. ‘The application environments ranged from small life-science clusters of tens of nodes to a university with 32,000 cores. We noticed that a lot of our customers had a peak vs. median usage problem; essentially, they couldn’t provision enough nodes to make computing power available when they needed it the most.’ In 2007, Cycle’s answer was to develop cluster management software that would re-size the cluster, depending on the work that was put into the queue. The software not only makes use of the on-demand processing offered by Amazon and similar cloud service providers, but it also allows the user to harvest and use internal resources efficiently. |
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JUNE 2010 PharmaVOICE When Dave Powers, senior systems engineer, research and development IT at Eli Lilly and Company, talks about the advantages of cloud computing in the life-sciences industry, he gets pretty excited — as do others who have experienced first hand the benefits of the cloud. According to our thought leaders, cloud computing is game changing in the race to innovation, enabling scientists and technologists to quickly answer complicated analytical problems in record time and at record cost-savings.
Lilly has validated the ability to move large scientific computing workloads online, or to the cloud, if you prefer. Among other initiatives, Lilly runs a 64-machine cluster computer working on bioinformatics sequence information that is able to reduce a 12-week processing time to 20 minutes. The speed is remarkable, and so is the cost: using Amazon’s EC2, the computer power costs all of about... |
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