Archive for August, 2008
Video is worth a million words. . . Latest GigaSpacesXAP demo
August 12th, 2008With my wife and kids away, I am having a geeky bachelor time that many who read this would probably find quite thrilling. For example: I spent this last weekend producing a new MonteCarlo application example for GigaSpaces.
It is rich in the patterns it utilizes:
- SBA (Colocated spaces with workers)
- Master-worker (remote workers which scale dynamically when the workload is too high)
- Spring Remoting on top of GigaSpaces – the aggregation work is achieved utilizing our Sync Remoting
The app goes like this:
Historical information regarding several funds is used to predict the future behavior of those funds over a 20 year time period with Minute by Minute fluctuation in prices being calculated and applied.
These funds are grouped in different formations into Portfolios and the entire Portfolio assessed for its growth over the same 20 year period.
In the end, the best combination of funds within a portfolio is determined and reported and the best and worst behaving funds are also shown.
Technically, several portfolios and their associated funds are written as tasks into the system for analysis – the logic needed to process them and their historical information is sent along with them as well. Workers take the tasks, process the associated logic and return a result showing the outcome of the application of the expected variation in price for each fund in the portfolio over the designated 20 year period.
This is performed over a set of possible portfolios – each containing different variations of funds.
Each set is repeatedly simulated to avoid undo skewing and allow for better control of the randomness.
In the end, the client requests a summary of all the results which is created by a service that operates in parallel across the available spaces to take all the results and sort them and aggregate them to determine the most common, best [highest value portfolio], and worst [lowest value portfolio]
This information is returned to the client and printed out to the console.
This morning, I produced a nifty 8 minute flash presentation showing my Monte Carlo application being executed on the GigaSpaces platform.
NB: To keep the video short, and because I only used my laptop, I kept the size of the sets and the iterations at very low levels. Nevertheless, the application scales very nicely and provides fault-tolerance as well.
You can check out the 8 minute video using this link: THE MONTECARLO VIDEO
[you may have to wait a while for the video to load, if it stops
mid-way, play it again from the beginning after it loads completely]
I hope you enjoy watching the fruits of my labors – what could be a better way to spend a bachelor weekend eh?
Cheers,
Owen.
Bridging the gap between the clouds
August 9th, 2008Dekel Tankel of GigaSpaces spoke recently to a hip cloud crowd regarding the risks associated with moving an application to the cloud or grid environment.
Without a GigaSpaces Space-based architecture (what I refer to as a TPC Architecture ) applications running in a cloud suffer from an inability to scale and start to erode the benefits of the cloud. In addition there are questions regarding the ability to maintain state reliably in a cloud: especially a pay by the drink cloud where it can get expensive both in terms of $$ and time to utilize the persistence mechanisms provided by the vendor.
Dekel speaks about and demonstrates how GigaSpaces makes it possible to manage your application services -moving them from machine to machine as needed and also addresses scaling the application by spreading it out [partitioning it while removing the traditional bottlenecks of the database and network boundaries between services]
He does a nice job – way to go Dekel!
Cheers,
Owen.
Video Interview on Virtualization.com
August 7th, 2008Toon Vanagt at Virtualization.com recorded a video interview with me at Structure 08 in San Francisco (I spoke on a panel). I talk about cloud computing and GigaSpaces, virtual middleware, the economics of pay-per-use pricing and more. Here it is:
Scaling-Out Web Application with GigaSpaces XAP. Part I
August 7th, 2008Overview
Building a reliable, automatic scaled-out infrastructure for your web application is not a job for the faint of heart. It often involves deep knowledge of your application servers or getting expert consulting. Sometimes both. GigaSpaces XAP application platform will let you do that, and more, with just a few easy steps and at a much [...]
Geva makes a strong argument…
August 1st, 2008In his blog post: here Geva Perry speaks about the dollars and sense regarding setting up shop in a cloud and how GigaSpaces’ Elastic Appserver [my term], provides incredible efficiency which leads to greater dollar value realized from your it investment. After reading Geva’s blog, I have nothing to add except I am *so* glad I work for GigaSpaces!
BTW, These days, I am conducting various educational webinars designed to assist new users in understanding the nature of architecting and programming GigaSpaces solutions. Please, feel free to check them out.
Other news: I created a new introductory video series with a new and improved [or so I think] HelloWorld application example. The videos are < 20 minutes each and should also prove useful in helping users get started with the GigaSpacesXAP way of doing things. Check out this quick start guide to see what I am talking about.
Hope you are having a great summer, my family is back in FL (remember the wedding pics?) so, I should be able to get a tan and lose some weight playing tennis and swimming. -ahh life is good.
Cheers,
Owen.
