The CycleComputing folks are good people in my book and I bet more than a few are subscribed to this list. The founders are old-school Condor gurus with a long track record in this field.
One of the nice things about their work is how "usable" it is to real people with real production computing requirements - in the IAAS cloud space there are way too many marketing robots talking vague BS about "cloud bursting", "hybrid clusters" and storage aggregation/access across LAN/WAN distances. Cycle has built, deployed & delivered all of this with (what I'd consider) a bare minimum of marketing and chest thumping. It's not a PR gimmick and limiting the definition of "cluster" to only systems that run parallel applications would alienate quite a few of us on this list :) In the life sciences a typical cluster might run a mixture of 80-90% serial jobs with a small scattering of real MPI apps running alongside. I get cynical about this stuff because in the cloud space you see way too many commercial people promising the world without actually delivering anything (other than carefully hand-managed reference account projects) while the academic & supercomputing folks are all busy presenting and bragging about things that will never see the light of day after their thesis defense. There are people like Cycle/Rightscale etc. etc. who actually rise above the hype and deliver clever & usable stuff with a minimum of marketing BS. My $.02 of course -Chris _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, [email protected] sponsored by Penguin Computing To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
