Grid computing projects and vendors continue to adapt their wares for the new era of cloud computing, with DataSynapse, Univa UD and Monash University's eScience and Grid Engineering (MESSAGE) Laboratory the latest to announce cloud computing projects.
DataSynapse said it now supports the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), and the company also announced a beta program for DataSynapse Federator 1.5, new software that lets the company's customers "seamlessly bridge traditional data center resources and the Amazon EC2 cloud."
DataSynapse said tapping into the Amazon EC2 cloud will help enterprise customers reduce CapEx spending on hardware infrastructure by meeting capacity demands as needed. DataSynapse-based applications are deployed on about one million CPUs in Fortune 1000 data centers, the company said.
The Federator 1.5 beta program will begin in April and will be open to a limited number of organizations. Beta program participants will be able to run an unlimited number of DataSynapse engines on the EC2 cloud free of charge, and DataSynapse engines running on Amazon EC2 will not count against existing license caps. Customers will still have to pay Amazon infrastructure charges.
Univa UD announced that its Grid MP users can now provision and scale HPC capacity on Amazon's EC2 cloud environment, expanding computing resources to meet peak demand.
With UniCloud, an extension to Grid MP, users can establish workload policies and requirements that dynamically trigger the setup of virtual nodes in Amazon EC2. "This flexible, on-demand approach to satisfying HPC needs reduces capital expense and lets you avoid the politics involved with an internal grid expansion," the company said.
And MESSAGE Lab's grid computing middleware, Nimrod, is now cloud-enabled. The lab said that cloud computing "is a highly touted new paradigm building on diverse technologies such as virtualization and Web services, and having much in common with grid computing. Clouds offer Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and rely on economies of scale to make cloud services attractive compared with in-house infrastructure."
Nimrod lets users run computationally intensive experiments over widely distributed computers. It was initially developed in the Co-operative Research Centre for Distributed Systems Technology (DSTC) in 1994 and has been continuously developed by researchers in the Faculty of Information Technology at Monash.
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