csmith

If you've been around the HPC space for a while, you'll be feeling the same sense of anticipation that I am for the Supercomputing conference (SC08) happening next week in Austin. Platform will be there (booth 1627), and I'll be in the booth from 12:30pm to 3:00pm every day, so come on by to say hello!

I also want to let people know about the HPC Profile BoF that's happening on Wed from 5:30pm to 7:00pm, and invite all to come and see the exciting things happening in the world of...

Last week, I attended the "Cloud Computing and Beyond: The Web Grows Up (finally)" conference hosted by SDForum in Santa Clara. The purpose of the conference seemed to be to provide a snapshot of where the software market currently sits with respect to cloud computing right now, as well as provide some vision as to where things are going. There was a lot of great content, mostly in the format of panels, which I enjoy quite a bit compared to just presentations.

There were...

The Open Grid Forum recently held it's 24th meeting at the Biopolis in Singapore, co-located with GridAsia2008. OGF meetings are a great way to learn about Grid activities happening worldwide, and OGF24 was no exception. There was definitely cloud on the mind, as evidenced by a keynote from Peter Coffee of salesforce.com and with some buzz around Singapore as one of the data centre locations for the HP/Intel/Yahoo cloud initiative. There was also a good, solid program around enterprise and e-research...

I saw this post over at ClusterMonkey. It's about a new training program at Georgetown's Advanced Research Computing that is intended to train people to be system administrators for HPC systems. I think this is a good idea. There is enough difference between running general purpose systems and HPC systems, and a lot of the tuning can be quite different, so preparing people for this particular kind of specialization is well due.

This week I attended the Structure08 conference held here in San Francisco. The theme of the conference was "Cloud" and the topics ranged from issues scaling out web applications to getting your cloud startup funded.

I particularly enjoyed Werner Vogels keynote on Amazon Web Services, and the way that Amazon got into the business of "Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)". There were also some very good panel sessions. Overall, I liked the format of the conference...