Archive for February, 2009
New Grid, HPC, Cloud book
February 27th, 2009A new book I co-authored has been released entitled “TheSavvyGuideTo HPC, Grid, DataGrid, Virtualisation and Cloud Computing. The aim of TheSavvyGuideTo book range is to get people up to speed as quickly as possible on the subject matter of the books.
Although the book covers a range of technologies it is a good read for anyone who wants a good concise overview of the HPC, Grid, Cloud space etc, whoever they are. Of course, GigaSpaces is covered in the book as well as many other vendors and technologies, which are all covered objectively.
Writing your own real-time search engine and Adwords service
February 23rd, 2009There are various ways to implement a search engine. The typical way uses a crawler technique. The crawler continuously scans the information, collects changes and indexes them. The indexing service is a centerpiece in the architecture and enables quick matching…
Will the credit crunch help Cloud Computing cross the chasm ?
February 23rd, 2009I posted this on the Cloudiquity blog that I contribute to and am syndicating it here also.
Without a doubt the credit crunch is affecting everyone big and small. Firstly jobs are being shed, even from previously impervious organisations.
Microsoft announced that it was cutting 5,000 jobs worldwide, Intel announced it was cutting between 5-6,000 of its 83,000 employees, and SAP announced it was to reduce it’s 51,500 headcount by 3,000 before the end of 2009. Add to this Citrix cutting 4-500 jobs, Lenovo cutting 2,500 employees…well you get the picture. Times are tough and companies are doing whatever they need to so they can maintain profit margins.
Now if we look at the organisations that these companies supply we find a different problem. Banks are reluctant to lend and capital markets have dried up. How do companies find the capital expenditure to fund new initiatives or project that are the lifeblood of all companies who sell hardware or software in the IT space ? Well one way is for the same organisations who supply the software / kit to also provide the credit. To that end HP, SAP and evenMicrosoft have announced initiatives in which they will be offering 0% finance on new purchases.
Some of the companies bucking the trend are Amazon and VMWare. VMWare increased Q4 year-on-year profits by 25% to $515 million and it’s profits were up by 34% to $102 million. Amazon’s net profit rose 9 percent, to $225 million, in the 4th quarter, up from $207 million, in the same quarter a year earlier. It is diificult to figure out how much of this was related to Amazon’s web services business as they do not break out these figures but the web services products feature strongly in the Amazon investor relations releaseleading one to speculate that they continue to perform strongly.
I see two ways in which the current credit crunch can help Cloud Computing move much closer to fully crossing the chasm. Firstly because of the economics of the utility compute model (for more details see this article) Cloud Computing allows organisation to continue to drive innovation and project without the upfront capital costs (CAPEX) associated with such projects in the past, enabling them to utilise an OPEX model. Even if this only relates to using the Cloud for the testing cycle of a project this can be a huge win for cloud computing. I know of one telecoms company whose testing needs for their projects, in terms of software, hardware, data centre space etc are vast.
Secondly, by the very nature of companies utilising more Cloud Computing Services this will foster more companies to build products, have cloud strategies, and to compete with other established cloud vendors.
All in all, 2009 could truly be the year that Cloud crossed over.
Scalable SOA with Mule & GigaSpaces
February 22nd, 2009If you missed the joint Webinar Ken Yagen of MuleSource and I did last week, you can find the recorded version here. The demo application shown during the webinar can be downloaded here.The demo application requires the following to be installed on you…
Application Scalability is the key
February 16th, 2009In a recent article on SysCon Shai Fultheim states the following:
There’s a downside to cluster computing. The disadvantage is the complexity of installation and ongoing management of the infrastructure, as well as the restrictions put on end users because of the programming model.
Programming Model
Besides complexity, cluster deployment poses two challenges at the application level:
* Programming model: A specific programming model is needed to accommodate the distributed nature of the computing resource. This is usually achieved via MPI programming. In-house or legacy code has to be modified to run on such systems.
* Lack of large memory footprint: Each processor can access only the “cluster” node’s local memory, which is usually limited to keep the physical size (leveraging 1U systems) and the cost of the cluster to a minimum.
In a series of 5 articles entitled “Multi-Multicore Single System Image / Cloud Computing. A Good Idea?“ on the blog Perils of Parallel, Greg Pfister asks the question “Why hasn’t SSI taken over the world ?”. In other worlds why haven’t massively distributed cluster’s with single OS’s become more commoditised ?” . Greg offers a series of thoughts as to why he thinks this is the case and I’ve cherry picked one of them below:
Scaling up an application is a massive logical AND. The hardware must scale AND the software must scale. For the hardware to scale, the processing must scale AND the memory bandwidth must scale AND the IO must scale. For the software to scale, the operating system, middleware, AND application must all scale. If anything at all in the whole stack does not scale, you are toast: You have a serial bottleneck.
A very good paper has been released by UC Berkeley Reliable Adaptive Distributed Systems Laboratory (Berkeley RAD Lab). The paper is a very good drill down into all the different aspects of Cloud Computing (although it has caused it’s fair share of controversy as well !) as well as their view on the top ten issues that they believe are prevalent within Cloud Computing. These include:
- Availability of Service
- Performance unpredictability
- Scaling quickly
One of the things that each of these articles highlights that scaling up and out on demand in distributed architectures is difficult. Doing it on demand is even harder. Tying this lightening performance and it becomes even more difficult. Making all of this available s part of a user-defined SLA management agreement at an application level even more difficult.
Why do we need to do all of this ? To enable the applications we built to scale up and out, with low latency, and which can react to SLA’s that are set.
How can you achieve this ? Well it just so happens that GigaSpaces XAP is built to enable exactly this whether that in-house, in a data-centre, in a private cloud or a public cloud. It is not something that will be ready next week or next year. It is here now and GigaSpaces have many customers who are smiling smugly to themselves knowing their applications are able to take advantage of GigaSpaces technology to ensure their applications are built for application scalability.
