Tuesday, October 8, 2024

Gateway Snags First Grid Customer

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Gateway has signed on the American Diabetes Association as the first customer for its Grid computing service.

The ADA will use Gateway’s Processing On Demand solution, backed by United Device’s Grid MP Alliance platform, to accelerate diabetes research. The platform will run software to help the ADA analyze clinical programs and treatments, develop clinical practice guidelines, study the efficiency of care processes, set priorities and plan diabetes research.

Gateway made a splash in December when it announced plans to rent spare CPU cycles from 7,000 high-performance PCs in its retail stores to firms that need high-performance computing power. The ADA is the first customer from that effort.

By using the Gateway solution, the ADA says it has already experienced a dramatic improvement in the time it takes to process a component of diabetes related research – from 48 hours down to one hour – and is expecting further reductions in time for improved efficiency. Before, such calculations stretched the limits of normal computing resources, causing unacceptable delays.

“Renting supercomputer time to perform these types of calculations can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars,” said Richard Kahn, the ADA’s chief scientific and medical officer. “By leveraging thousands of computers on the Gateway Grid, we’re able to perform our studies quickly and accurately.”

Gateway claims its Grid service ranks among the top 10 largest supercomputers in the world by processing power. The Gateway Grid can produce more than 11 TFLOPS (trillion floating point operations per second) at peak capacity, with most nodes averaging 2.0 GHz or better.

“The beauty of this solution is that customers can take advantage of the high-performance Grid computing power of nearly 7,000 PCs without investing upfront capital building their own technology infrastructure,” said Gateway CTO Bob Burnett. “Companies pay only for the processing power they need to solve their complex computational problems.”

Gateway provides the hardware for the service, and United Device’s Grid MP Alliance platform provides the virtual operating system for the Grid. Customers submit job requests, get real-time status updates and pick up results when the job is complete. To process its data on the Grid, the ADA runs what is called the Archimedes software application initially developed by Kaiser Permanente. The ADA Grid may also serve as the test bed for further development of the Archimedes application.

The Gateway Processing On Demand service is priced based on processor hours used and does not require any long-term or minimum-usage commitments. For more information, visit http://gateway.com/work/services/pod.shtml or www.ud.com/alliance.

Landmark Graphics and United Devices Ink Reseller Agreement

Landmark Graphics, a wholly owned business unit of Halliburton, has signed a three-year reseller agreement with United Devices to provide Grid computing to the exploration and production (E&P) industry.

Using Grid technology, oil and gas companies can more effectively utilize available resources to accelerate compute-intensive projects, the firms said. Landmark’s DecisionSpace applications and the VIP reservoir simulation suite will leverage United Devices’ enterprise Grid technology to more efficiently and quickly simulate hundreds of unique reservoir development scenarios, enabling asset teams to narrow the gap between actual and predicted reservoir performance.

“Affordable access to massive amounts of computational power has been a critical ingredient to the successful prediction of reservoir performance,” said Andy Lane, CEO of Landmark Graphics. “By combining VIP and DecisionSpace applications with Grid computing technology, the cycle time for field development planning and reservoir performance prediction can be compressed from months or years to days or weeks.”

“By leveraging computing assets they already own, oil and gas companies can significantly reduce the costs associated with high performance computing,” said United Devices CEO Ed Hubbard. “Companies that use compute-intensive applications such as seismic analysis, reservoir modeling and horizontal drilling will significantly reduce their research time and see a dramatic ROI by deploying Grid-enabled applications.”

GridSystems Signs Japanese Distribution Agreement

BestSystems and the Spanish company GridSystems have signed a distribution agreement that will grant BestSystems subsidiary Grid Research rights to distribute in the Japanese market the InnerGrid Software developed by GridSystems. The agreement includes duties for both commercialization and support.

InnerGrid is GridSystems’ multi-platform software product that uses Grid technology to obtain the maximum performance from a group of computers. This product is designed to exploit all the resources (CPU cycles, disk capacities, etc.) of a heterogeneous set of computers (dedicated and not dedicated Windows and Unix computers).

The BestSystems Group includes several Japanese companies specializing in different technological fields. Grid Research is one of its subsidiaries, and specializes in Grid system solutions and integration. The company provides portal construction, Globus installation, development using P2P technologies, ASP operations and also Grid services and development for the PC cluster market. Grid Research also offers hardware and software solutions for Access Grid based on inSORS Integrated Communications products.

For more information, visit http://www.bestsystems.co.jp.

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