clusters

Coming to a sky near you: a large cluster of multicolored balloons carrying a real-world version of the flying armchair featured in Pixar's forthcoming film, "Up."

The film, Pixar's 10th animated feature, focuses on the fate of 78-year-old Carl Fredricksen, his house, and a wayward 8-year-old who happens by one day. Together, launched into the sky by a cluster of balloons tied to the roof of Fredricksen's house, the two set off on, you know, the adventure of a lifetime.

For most of us, we'll have to go to the theater to share in … Read more

For the last decade, Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff has promoted his pet idea that traditional application software was destined for obsolescence.

He was a few years early, but Benioff understood computer history better than his detractors.

Most of the hosted on-demand application vendors, or ASPs as we called them back then, crashed and burned. Not only did they burn through money at a frightful clip, but the technology they used was thin, relying on single-tenant, non-scalable computing architecture models that left a trail of dissatisfied customers.

In the post-Internet bubble world, however, the proliferation of cheap hardware combined with … Read more

The industry's premier Web players--Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and Facebook--agree on at least one thing: the future is cloud computing, and Hadoop is the engine to power the cloud.

Cloudera, the company set up to harness the power of Hadoop for the enterprise, on Monday released its first commercial product, the Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop.

The Web, and how enterprises use it, will never be the same.

If I sound a little giddy, it's because I am. I think that Cloudera's distribution for Hadoop is one of the biggest things to happen to the enterprise ever because it … Read more

Need a little extra computing power, but don't want to pay for it? Sure, we all do.

Altair was probably thinking along the same lines Monday when it announced its Personal PBS. It's a free turnkey application that purportedly leverages multicore CPU technology to transform any desktop computer into a miniature compute farm or cluster system.

In addition, for an (undisclosed as of yet) fee, PBS provides an upgrade option path that lets customers submit jobs from their personal desktop to back-end server systems running PBS Professional.

Altair expects this new product to appeal to the open-source community, … Read more

Democratize IT. A banal catch phrase until you see off-the-shelf gaming boxes from PC maker Dell being used for visual supercomputing.

CEO Michael Dell showed the "Stallion" Visualization Cluster at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) running on standard Dell XPS gaming machines during his keynote Tuesday at SC08, a conference in Austin, Texas, focused on high-performance computing. (The keynote was streamed over the Web.)

The Stallion "visualization wall" uses XPS boxes to power 30-inch Dell displays. "The largest display of its kind in the world, at 307 million pixels," Michael Dell said.

"… Read more

Update 2 p.m. PDT: I added more detail and examples of searches that stumped Google.

SAN FRANCISCO--Udi Manber sums up Google's core challenge with this description of people's expectations: "Here's what I say, now give me what I need."

In other words, the company must use computers to comprehend humans, said Manber, the vice president of engineering in charge of Google search, in a speech at the Gilbane Conference here Wednesday.

"Ideally, we would understand your question, we would understand all knowledge, and match the two," Manber said.

That's not possible … Read more

Microsoft released the public beta of Windows HPC Server 2008 for running large computing clusters, part of its plan to creep into supercomputing.

HPC Server 2008 is the successor to Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003. HPC Server runs on the individual servers in a cluster and also comes with higher-level software that coordinates all of the members of a cluster. Microsoft says it achieved a 30 percent improvement in Linpack, a commonly used supercomputing benchmark, on its production cluster with 2,048 processor cores.

HPC is also being used on a 1,151 node cluster at the Holland Computing Center … Read more

A new alternative search engine that caught my eye this morning is SearchCrystal, a very experimental-looking tool that combines multiple search engines in a rich visual design. Each search engine gets its own color code, and results that show up in a large circle. When an item is listed on more than one search engine, it's given its own geometric shape showing which engines picked it up, along with lines that link up identical results. The goal is to give you a visualized results page that lets you compare a few engines at a time without having to scroll down one large list.

The results are split up into five different areas--one for each search engine. These engines vary by what you're searching for, be it photos, videos, news, or blog postings. In the case of blogs, SearchCrystal will pull results from Sphere, Bloglines, Google Blog search, Technorati, and BlogPulse. There's also a mode to just view Wikipedia articles. Each string shows the top 10 results in order, with the ones closer to the middle of the sphere being more important. The end result makes it look similar to a dartboard.

The one real hurdle with SearchCrystal is that it's slow. Most searches took about ten seconds a pop, with the longest taking just over 20 seconds. This is just simply too long for a casual search. Likewise, it has a learning curve--you're probably going to stare at the swarm of results the first time you try it out before knowing what you're supposed to do. While not difficult to pick up, I can see someone like my mom not knowing where to start.

As usual, there's a Facebook app for SearchCrystal. You can also e-mail it, or embed it in a blog or site with the query of your choice, which I've done after the break.

Related: Five weird ways to see search: Quintura, Clusty, and more

… Read more

OpenMosix, an open-source project to run software across a group of computers, will shut down on March 1.

Moshe Bar, who launched and led the project, announced the move Sunday on the OpenMosix project Web site. Bar more recently has been involved in two virtualization projects--first Xen and later KVM--that have the potential to achieve some of what OpenMosix could have enabled, a computing infrastructure that can flexibly adjust to changing work demands by shifting running software from one physical machine to another.

"The increasing power and availability of low cost multi-core processors is rapidly making single-system image (… Read more