Digipede On Board!

I know I can't use the word "inside" (apparently, Intel owns it now). But we've now got tiny little decals that let you tell the world your computer is on the grid!

If you're a Digipede customer and you want some of these nifty stickers to throw around your datacenter, give me a shout (dan {at} digipede {dot} net).

Technorati tags: grid computing, digipede

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