RMSC NEws

 

Supercomputing centers acknowledge Amazon influence

November 19, 2009 (Computerworld) PORTLAND, Ore. - Amazon.com Inc. is to high performance computing what McDonald's is to food: fast, cheap, but with a limited menu.

 

But while some HPC users may refer to Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service as a "CPU farm" or a "CPU bin," there are aspects of the company's model and pricing scheme that may be having an impact on supercomputing centers that have typically been the domain of researchers.

 

Amazon may be helping supercomputing centers indirectly by popularizing the pay-as-you-go model, which makes it easier for the centers to attract business users and clearly contrast their services against the online giant.

 

Access to supercomputing is increasingly seen as critical to U.S. competitiveness for its ability to test designs virtually and speed products to market. That has encouraged some states, including Ohio, New Mexico and Montana, to invest in supercomputing programs aimed at smaller businesses.

 

"You cannot just have the biggest of Fortune 100 companies using supercomputing to become more competitive - you really need to enable the whole supply chain to become more competitive," said Ashok Krishnamurthy, senior director, research and scientific development at the Ohio Supercomputer Center in Columbus.

 

OSC is working to make its model easier to use. This month, it announced that it had developed with Nimbis Services Inc., which provides access OSC's compute services through a Web portal. Users can pay for the service using using a credit card, like the EC2 model.

 

But for the most part, that's where the comparison to Amazon ends.

 

Nimbis also negotiates terms with HPC computing application providers to enable users to run those apps on OSC's platform. Nimbis is a for profit software company that can make agreements with vendors more readily than an academic supercomputing center can, said Krishnamurthy.

 

Supercomputing centers say they can provide expert help as well as ISV software, fast interconnects, large memory footprints, and other technologies not available though commercial cloud infrastructure providers. While Krishnamurthy said the broader familiarity with Amazon's model makes it easier to explain their process to customers, "our model is not Amazon's model."

 

The New Mexico Computing Applications Center in Albuquerque, which was funded by the state and operates as a nonprofit, offers customers a pricing sheet for compute cycles and monthly invoice. That keeps the cost management simple as the company goes "after specific industries that can help bring high paying jobs to the state," said Scott Collins, the center's CTO.

 

"We're not competing with [Amazon]," said Collins. "Our partnerships with the national labs allow us to leverage expertise to bring in people to work on the hard problems."

 

In Butte, Montana, Rocky Mountain Super Computing center was established with similar goals. It uses a large cloud computing platform that also allows it to move work to IBM's Computing on Demand Centers for projects that require more compute power than it has on hand. Similar to Ohio and New Mexico, its primary mission to develop jobs and make compute resources easily adopted through a "pay as you go" or "on demand" model.

 

At the SC09 supercomputing show here this week, Amazon.com Inc. had a booth for the first time, tucked away in a corner of the trade show floor. The booth was staffed by people who said they couldn't talk to the press without public relations office involvement.

 

That was no matter, as there were other firms on show, such as Cycle Computing LLC, that were working to make platform easier to use with management tool that scheduled and execute compute cycles on Amazon's cloud, allowing user to easily scale their codes over as many processors as they need, according to Jason Stowe, the company's CEO.

 

RMSC attends the 2009 MITA Conferance

The annual Montana Government IT Conference is an opportunity for state and industry professionals to share new technologies and applications, best practices, and plans for Montana’s IT landscape.

 

The primary goal of MITA is to promote and expand the Information Technology community that exists within the State of Montana. Montana’s Information Technology professionals are charged with the responsibility to deliver information services in a timely manner and with the highest degree of reliability. Agency professionals manage thousands of computers, complex applications, and a network that reaches every Montana community. This requires the expertise and cooperation of our vendor community.

 

RMSC and the IPAD, Office of Global Analysis/FAS/USDA Announce a Joint Project for Global Food Security

Washington DC, October 14, 2009 – International Production and Assessment Division (IPAD), Office of Global Analysis (OGA), Foreign Agricultural Service (FAS), U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), announce a joint project with the Rocky Mountain Supercomputing Centers, Inc. (RMSC) focused on:

 

• Utilizing their HPC Cloud to perform project work for two areas of interest -Carbon Management and Operational Agricultural Monitoring by hosting and managing multiple satellite sensor data sets


• Demonstrating sustainability improvements in modeling and new crop methodologies focused on Carbon Management and Global Food Security

 

The outcome of this project will support Montana’s Rural Development Programs and the IPAD/Office of Global Analysis/FAS/USDA by connecting Foreign Market Programs (with RMSC’s commercial computing cloud) driving government-to-government interagency programs and government-to-business collaboration.

 

Robert Tetrault, IPAD/office of Global Analysis/FAS/USDA, Satellite Imagery Archive Manager, states, “this joint project with the Rocky Mountain Supercomputing Centers, Inc. (RMSC) will allow us to access this High Performance Computing for improving environmental sustainability in research areas such as climate modeling, carbon management, and global food security. “

 

Dr. Alex Philp, President and Chairman of the Board of RMSC, states, “We are extremely excited about this pilot project with USDA. This effort represents exactly the type of public-private collaboration that RMSC was designed to foster and stimulate – solving hard problems utilizing the investment that the State of Montana and IBM have made in RMSC.”

 

“IBM is proud to be a stakeholder and collaborator in this cloud computing project allowing “Big Sky” to be an asset for all of Montana,” said Earl J. Dodd, IBM’s Deep Computing Business Development Executive. “With the support and backing of the IBM Corporation and its global partners, Montana now has a scalable supercomputing resource base,” continues Dodd. “Supporting Vivek Kundra’s [U.S. Chief Information Officer’s] recent announcement of the White House Cloud Computing Initiative, the USDA is a leading consumer of cloud computing services and the benefits derived from the cloud’s use and delivery model.”

 

The IPAD/Office of Global Analysis/FAS/USDA is responsible for global crop condition assessments and estimates of area, yield, and production for grains, oilseeds, and cotton. The primary mission of OGA focuses on cross-cutting analysis to support USDA’s trade agenda and develops and maintains USDA's agricultural production, supply and demand data. This information is then disseminated in timely, objective, useful, and cost-effective global crop condition and agricultural market intelligence information. One of OGA’s key missions is to provide unbiased commodity estimates and forecasts to create a marketing edge for U.S. producers in world markets and the USDA’s trade agenda. (Source: USDA and NASA) These joint pilot projects allow them to obtain agriculture analysis solutions using satellite imagery, and high speed processing providing ancillary information to the crop analysts quickly and cost effectively. The IPAD/OGA/FAS/USDA special projects vendor liaison for this pilot will be managed by Global Marketing Insights, Inc.

 

RMSC is a Montana-based, private non-profit 501(c)(3) corporation that exclusively oversees the facilitation and brokering of cloud resources for the State of Montana. The first HPC installation known as “Big Sky,” The State purchased the cyberinfrastructure from IBM whom has joined resources between the State and IBM Computing on Demand (CoD) for a seamless, scalable pay-as-you-go cloud model. RMSC allows government agencies, industry and academia to perform high-capacity, high-productivity computing while capable of tapping into other larger systems throughout IBM’s Computing on Demand ecosystem.

 

Rmsc adds fast new Next I/O

Butte-Silver Bow county commissioners commissioners voted to grant $380,000 in loans from public funds to this project in hope that it will attract business and put Butte at an advantage in the technologies sector. The result has been positive.

 

Over $10 million is at work at the Rocky Mountain Super Computing high tech hub at the Thornton Building where one special piece of hardware was recently added.

A company called Next I/O, which specializes in creating the next generation of computing solutions, is using the supercomputer to test and utilize its newest piece of hardware. It's the next big thing in virtualization.

 

"It means efficiency. It means being able to share those resources over a variety of applications, so it's like having 10 mechanics sharing the same toolset rather than having their own unique toolset each," Next I/O Senior Director of Sales Jim Hasbrook explained.

The claim behind the new hardware is that people from all different places can use the technology remotely with greater efficiency than ever before, and greater efficiency means greater attraction from businesses. The supercomputer is already being used by groups like the National Forest Service to learn about fire spread. Even the U.S. Department of Defense is a client right now.

 

read the rest of what KXLF TV had to say about the event. Click Here.

 

Earl Dodd represents RMSC at the NEtrob conference

Earl Dodd and RMSC participated in the 2009 IFAC Workshop on Networked Robotics, a single-track event spanning two and one-half days, aimed at promoting development of a theoretical basis for combining control and telecommunication techniques in the field of networked robot, as well as demonstrating the current state-of-the-art in applications. The conference program included plenary lectures, a panel session, as well as presentation of peer-reviewed contributed papers.

NetRob 2009 was held Tuesday-Thursday, October 6-8, 2009 at the Colorado School of Mines in Golden, Colorado, USA.

 

MONTANA Business & Technology Magazine - Summer 2009 Issue

On Demand Business Model
While others have purchased supercomputers for economic development purposes, Montana’s investment in a public/private partnership with the IBM Corporation and its global partners is based on a business model that creates a “first in the nation” business structure.

The model is simple, ambitious and affordable. Rather than buying a very large system with a high price tag and subsequent rapidly depreciating value, Montana has purchased a modest supercomputer capability—named “Big Sky”—focusing its investment to support Montana’s growing high technology frontier. For projects requiring supercomputing power in excess of the State’s resources, RMSC will seamlessly transact the workload to one of IBM’s Computing on Demand Centers. This means projects of any size or duration can be run securely without modification allowing the customer to “pay as you go” via this “on demand” model.

Access to supercomputing and consultation services are available today with a sophisticated spot-price pricing model depending on several project characteristics (e.g., job size, duration, priority, work volume, discount schedule, and others).

Capabilities

The initial system configuration is approximately 3.8 teraflops peak performance and will be upgraded in the near future to even larger storage capacities and performance. Big Sky is housed in the Thornton Building in Butte because of the cyberinfrastructure available: an abundance of network capacity, an existing data center housing the supercomputer and eight long distance broadband service providers with points of presence. From this site, through the RMSC-IBM Computing on Demand Alliance, customers will be able to access more powerful and sophisticated supercomputer architectures around the globe, on demand, anytime.

 

Business Applications
Until recently, supercomputer usage has been limited to large corporations, government agencies and research universities. However, this initiative, through RSMC, is bringing these capabilities to small firms, researchers and policy makers who do not have major federal contracts, deep pocketbooks, or continuous computing needs.
RMSC allows customers to do in real time—meaning in hours, days or weeks—what could not be done during a lifetime with conventional computers. These users can create more accurate models of complex scientific or business processes, solve problems once thought impossible and analyze the increasing flood of data generated by experiments and sensors.

Applications for these capabilities abound in
Montana. Some examples include:

• Energy. Use high-fidelity 3D/4D seismic imaging to
  pinpoints hydrocarbons better and faster, project
  optimal wind farm placements and optimally design
  transmission corridors


• Manufacturing. Improve process cycle time, product
  development and time-to-market using complex
  virtual designs and prototyping


• Biomedical Sciences and Bioinformatics. Speed
  research in cancer and other diseases, improve public
  safety of infectious disease spread and reduce
  healthcare fraud


• Agriculture and Livestock. Model resources improv-
  ing the economic base for trade and production,
  mitigate disease spread or transferability and support
  policy management for land-water-animal intera-
  tion


• Environment and Climate. Aggregate real-time sensor
  and historical data (locally, regionally, internationally)
  for decision support for drought, wildfire spread and
  forest management
  

If you have an entrepreneurial bent, supercomputers have been used to design better golf clubs . . .

are fly fishing rods and snow skis next?
Do not let the lack of “supercomputing” understanding deter you from its uses and benefits. In this new age, it is clear that whoever outcomputes will outcompete. For Montana companies and the US, it is critical to do both. RMSC is an available and cost-effective tool for your business.

A number of companies and organizations are taking advantage of Montana’s “Big Sky” high performance computing capabilities. If you would like to learn more, please contact the RMSC office at 406 533 6733 or info@rmscinc.org.