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HP & Commodity Computing

Posted by Hemos on from the the-grid-network-cometh dept.

Handpaper writes "The BBC has a story about HPs SE3D lab's pilot scheme to provide raw rendering power for smaller studios and amateurs. A sample movie is available.. " Yes, the long fabled "grid computing" may arrive soon on a massive scale.

1 of 64 comments (clear)

  1. We keep it busy by steve_l · · Score: 5, Informative

    We have things to do to keep the facility busy; its a flexible fabric and it can do interesting stuff. To be honest, pure CPU cycles is not its strength -many home computers can deliver more mips.

    What the farm(s) have is large amounts of storage near those mips, which is what you need for data-intensive computation. Large animation models is one use. data processing from things like the Large Hadron Collider another, though we wont have real data from the LHC yet.

    Now, if you have projects to run on such a fabric come talk your nearest HP sales rep.

    The stuff we do in HPLabs is focused on 'research on how to use these systems'; things like resource allocation, load balancing for thermal management, etc, etc. I'm working on distributed deployment and testing, using the datacentres and perhaps soon the PlanetLab facility, which has more distribution for interesting problems.

    If you want to play with the deployment tools, to http://smartfrog.org/ and download it. The technology is designed to make it possible to install and configure complex systems over a utility computing infrastructure.