Posts tagged collaboration
Google Apps
Jul 30th
Google Apps (formerly known as Google Apps for your domain), is a web-based office suite offering businesses email, document creation, and collaboration functionality.
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DreamWorks signs cloud computing deal
Jul 28th
DreamWorks SKG has signed a multi-year deal with Cerelink for cloud computing access.
Instead of rendering movies like How To Train Your Dragon on thousands of its own computer cores, DreamWorks will use elastic compute resources housed in Cerelink’s supercomputing-class facility at the New Mexico Applications Centre (NMCAC).
“Elastic” cloud computing allows clients like DreamWorks SKG to dynamically adjust technical capacity to meet their real-time business needs.
Cerelink is a high performance cloud computing (cloud HPC) provider to the motion picture industry. It provides private clouds for rendering and other content creation and management application, based on a combination of data center space, scalable high performance computing and networking, in the form of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS).
The Cerelink facilities include access to several thousand square feet of secure data centre space located in Rio Rancho, NM. That space is fed by redundant electrical power grids. It has access to LambdaRail (pdf), the 12,000 mile US coast-to-coast fast broadband network, and to a supercomputer at Encanto.
This offers a theoretical peak speed of 172 teraflops (peak theoretical speed) from its Altix ICE 8200 cluster, with 133 teraflops sustained operation. The ICE 8200 consists of 1,792 nodes (14,336 cores) of quad Xeon 3.0 GHz processors housed in 28 racks.
Cerelink’s private cloud computing service was used by DreamWorks Animation to render parts of Shrek Forever After and How to Train Your Dragon this year. Cerelink itself was founded by a group of ex-Intel managers in 2005.
James Ellington, its CEO, said: “We forecast growing our technical capacity by 20 times by the end of 2011 – this will create one of the largest cloud computing arrays for motion picture production in the world.”
This represents a threat to suppliers of in-house HPC compute and storage facilities to the movie rendering industry, such as BlueArc, DataDirect, Dell, HP, Isilon, and NetApp. If their customers start hiring rendering and animation HPC capacity from service suppliers such as Cerelink, then there will be less demand for in-house kit.
It is some distance from the movie mecca at Hollywood to New Mexico, raising the question of why the movie moguls should look at doing their rendering and animation in New Mexico?
The State offers film production incentives, like a 25 per cent tax rebate, for projects done in the state. Also, Cerelink and the NMCAC, in collaboration with the University of New Mexico, and the New Mexico Department of Information Technology, use an ultra-high-speed network link to link New Mexico to Hollywood.
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Rackspace Open Sources Cloud Platform; Announces Plans to Collaborate with NASA and Other Industry Leaders on OpenStack Project
Jul 15th
SAN ANTONIO, Jul 19, 2010 (BUSINESS WIRE) — Rackspace(R) Hosting (RAX 16.64, -0.66, -3.82%) today announced the launch of OpenStack(TM), an open-source cloud platform designed to foster the emergence of technology standards and cloud interoperability. Rackspace, the leading specialist in the hosting and cloud computing industry, is donating the code that powers its Cloud Files and Cloud Servers public-cloud offerings to the OpenStack project. The project will also incorporate technology that powers the NASA Nebula Cloud Platform. Rackspace and NASA plan to actively collaborate on joint technology development and leverage the efforts of open-source software developers worldwide.
“Modern scientific computation requires ever increasing storage and processing power delivered on-demand,” said Chris C. Kemp, NASA’s Chief Technology Officer for IT. “To serve this demand, we built Nebula, an infrastructure cloud platform designed to meet the needs of our scientific and engineering community. NASA and Rackspace are uniquely positioned to drive this initiative based on our experience in building large scale cloud platforms and our desire to embrace open source.”
OpenStack will feature several cloud infrastructure components including a fully distributed object store based on Rackspace Cloud Files, available today at OpenStack.org. The next component planned for release is a scalable compute-provisioning engine based on the NASA Nebula cloud technology and Rackspace Cloud Servers technology. It is expected to be available later this year. Using these components, organizations would be able to turn physical hardware into scalable and extensible cloud environments using the same code currently in production serving tens of thousands of customers and large government projects.
“We are founding the OpenStack initiative to help drive industry standards, prevent vendor lock-in and generally increase the velocity of innovation in cloud technologies,” said Lew Moorman, President, Cloud and CSO at Rackspace. “We are proud to have NASA’s support in this effort. Its Nebula Cloud Platform is a tremendous boost to the OpenStack community. We expect ongoing collaboration with NASA and the rest of the community to drive more-rapid cloud adoption and innovation, in the private and public spheres.”







