Something for everybody

I know there are two distinct flavors to my readers: those who care about distributed grid application virtualization parallel computing in general, and those who read specifically to hear about the latest Digipede news. This post has a little something for everyone.

Bill McColl has a great post up over at Computing at Scale entitled "Domain-Specific Parallel Programming." His most important point: "(thirty years of research and funding) has gone into parallel supercomputing, an area that is in many ways the opposite of industrial and commercial computing." He then contrasts supercomputing programmers ("Ph.D. level scientists with deep experience of parallel software development") with developers in the commercial world ("have only a limited range of programming skills, and usually no experience whatsoever of parallelism").

He's absolutely correct--and the latter set needs access to powerful distributed computing just as much as the former.

On the Digipede front, I've just put up a couple of posts on the Digipede Community site specifically for developers using the Digipede Framework SDK: here's a list of the new features in version 2.1 of the SDK, and here's a little sample that uses some of the new API functionality.

Finally, for my social-networking-addicted-readers (both of you): I got totally annoyed at the criticism of Scoble's claim that Twitter beat the USGS with news of the earthquake. The lesson isn't "You should get earthquake news from Twitter because the USGS takes two minutes." The lesson is "There is an amazing new, very widespread information gathering and distributing network--wider and faster than anything that has ever existed." That is news, and it was worth trumpeting.

Technorati tags: grid computing, digipede

Release Me!

Whew!

As I'm sure Deatle is about to announce, Digipede Network version 2.1 just gained "general availability" status.

The frequency of my posts here is one indicator that a boatload of work has gone into this release -- by all rights, it should probably be called v3.0. Here's a quick rundown of my favorite features:

• Certified for Windows Server 2008: Announced previously, but cool nonetheless.
  
• Risk-free sharing: "Pool Rank" permits risk-free sharing of resources: you can add your departmental servers to the enterprise grid and ensure that they always work on your jobs first. That means that by joining the grid, you can only improve your application performance.
  
• Job concurrency: The improved Digipede Agent software can manage different applications simultaneously, maximizing utilization of compute nodes on the grid. This allows your multi-core machines to be used most efficiently.
• Management APIs: New management APIs give developers programmatic ability to create, modify, and delete resource pools.
• Improved task concurrency: More detailed specification of task concurrency lets you specify the number of cores per task (for multithreaded applications) or the number of tasks per core.
• Improved server efficiency: The Digipede Server has been vastly improved in its use of storage and memory. It will handle more applications, larger applications, better than ever before.
  

And, of course, a host of other small changes.

If you're already a customer, make sure you let us know when you're ready to upgrade. And if you've been waiting for a chance for an evaluation, here's a perfect chance.

I'll be hosting some webcasts over the next couple of weeks to go over new features. If you're interested in signing up for one of those, head over here...

Photo credit: M42

Technorati tags: grid computing, digipede

Use that heat!

Ian Foster has a terrific post up about a program happening at the University of Notre Dame -- they've put an HPC cluster in a greenhouse, where the heat it generates is actually welcome. They're saving money on heating in the greenhouse, and on cooling in the datacenter.

It's genius!

He then describes an idea from Paul Brenner from ND's Center for Research Computing:

Paul then described a fascinating idea: placing low-cost (but high-heat) "grid heating appliaces" (CPU+memory+network) in campus offices... By scheduling jobs only to cold rooms, a grid scheduler can do double duty as a source of both low-cost computing and free heating (or is it heating and free computing?).

I love that.

My question is: who's going to write the first thermostat to grid-scheduler interface module? It would be absolutely fantastic to see a scheduler that is dynamically allocating jobs based on temperatures in rooms.

Of course, it's a bit of a pipe dream. Clusters that generate lots of heat also tend to generate lots of noise, and you can't have that just anywhere.

Still, creative ideas like this can lead to practical innovations -- you can imagine a university eliminating a large datacenter in favor of "compute closet/heat rooms" throughout the campus. Or a large datacenter where the generated heat is used to heat water -- as the datacenter in Uitikon, is doing.

Technorati tags: hpc, ian foster

MDavey in DDJ: PFX, PLINQ, and Digipede

Matt Davey of Lab49 must live in a world where the days are 30 hours long.

Read his blog and you'll soon find out that he's an expert at user interface (Lab 49 has been working with Microsoft for a while on cutting edge UI with Silverlight and WPF), but he's also delved quite deeply into complex event processing as well as distributed computing.

He also manages to write articles for Dr. Dobb's -- oh, and don't forget that he's a consultant, so you know he's working for clients as well.

I don't know where he finds the time.

But I'm glad he does. In his article in the current Dr. Dobb's, he discusses parallelism and concurrency, PLINQ and ParallelFX. He writes about his experience taking PLINQ and implementing it to run on a compute grid (using the Digipede Network). Check it out.

One thing he doesn't mention is that some people developing in .NET are solving their multicore problem using Digipede alone -- the API makes it dead simple to take single-threaded code and run it in parallel (on separate threads or in separate processes) on multicore and multi-processor machines.

As an aside: we are just about ready to release v2.1 of the software. It's been heads-down around here for quite a while as we get ready for this, which is by far our best release ever. Haven't had time to blog about it (or anything else, for that matter), but all should return to normal very soon.

Technorati tags: grid computing, digipede, plinq

Desktop software is hard, eh Google?

I was excited to hear about Google Calendar Sync. I got a Blackberry Curve last week, and I've been playing around with the best way to get both my personal (Google) and business (Outlook) calendars sync'd with it.

We don't use Blackberry Enterprise Server, so the Outlook syncing seemed to be a bit spotty. It got some events over the air (maybe the ones for which I was e-mailed invitations), but didn't get all of them. If I plugged it in and used Blackberry Desktop Manager it worked fine -- but I didn't want to have to plug it in.

But with the Google Sync download for my phone, it started grabbing my Google Calendar items with no problem.

Google Calendar Sync seems like it's an ideal solution for me: it can keep my Outlook calendar in sync with a Google Calendar, and my phone can grab those events directly from Google over the internet. Fantastic!

So I headed over to Google, downloaded the software, and ran the install. And this is what I see: "Google Calendar Sync supports Microsoft Outlook 2003 and 2007 only"

Now, this is a brand new laptop that has only ever had Outlook 2007 on it. It's never been uninstalled, reinstalled, or anything hinky. Should be pretty vanilla.

What's worse is that there's nothing I can do. No setup pages to look at, no documentation to read. I guess I'm just SOL.

Has anyone else seen this? And more importantly: has anyone else solved this?

Technorati tags: blackberry, googlesync

Where Was HPC?

Nathan Trueblood, John Powers, and I went to the Windows Server 2008 launch last week (of course, we had to show off our shiny new Certified for Server 2008 logo).

It was surprisingly well attended (and I wasn't the only one who was surprised; apparently the catering staff was as well. In the continuing battle of Microsoft vs. Ciruli on the lunch front, I lost -- no lunch for me. How hard is it to count attendees at an event that requires pre-registration??).

Anyway, there were thousands of people there. We had hundreds walking around with the cool-looking Digipede stickers, and one lucky sticker-wearer went home with an XBox.

With a triple-product launch, Microsoft had an enormous contingent there, both attending and demonstrating. In the Microsoft pavilion, they had 30 booths -- most of them centered around Server 2008. Many of those booths weren't for products that were launching: SharePoint Server was there, Microsoft Forefront, Exchange Server. Many of the booths were related to Server 2008: Hyper-V, File and Storage Solutions for Server 2008, Scalability with Server 2008.

But you know what had no mention at all? HPC Server 2008.

It was conspicuous in its absence.

Now, HPC Server 2008 won't be out for months...then again, neither will SQL Server 2008 and it was launched at this event.

So, what's the deal? While I think HPC Server 2008 will go far beyond what Windows Server 2003 CCE did (both in terms of capabilities and sales), missing an event like this shows that Microsoft still isn't thinking of the server market as a continuum. They're dividing server users into HPC (high performance computing) and what may as well be called LPC (low performance computing).

In reality, of course, there's no strict division. It's a continuum. And Microsoft should be doing everything it can to bridge the gap between HPC and "the rest of us." As Jim Gray used to refer to it: Indoor Computing. It runs the gamut.

I guess the HPC crew are huddled in Redmond, preparing for their release later this year...too bad they couldn't find the time to market to the thousands of Windows Server fans who gathered in LA last week.

Technorati tags: microsoft, server 2008, hpc server 2008

Win an XBox 360 from Digipede at Server 2008 Launch

Are you going to the Windows Server 2008 / Visual Studio 2008 / SQL Server 2008 global launch in LA tomorrow?

If you'll be there, stop by the Digipede kiosk in the Partner Pavilion and pick up a nifty sticker...and it could win you an XBox 360!

The stickers are cool -- they feature Deatle, our lovable, binary mascot. And if we see you wearing one in the afternoon break, you could end up going home with an XBox 360.

See you there...