Beowulf's Becker on grid vs. Cluster

As a clustering pioneer, it's natural that you see advantages to clustering. What's the bottom line difference between grid and clustering today?

Becker: Cluster software is, at this point, mature and well tested. Grid software is, on the other hand, very new, still in the research environment, still being worked out in the deployment environment. The companies that provide grid services are generally pre-product phase. They're still in a deployment phase that's too early for production.

I would say grid is not for commercial enterprises at this point. It works today where you have research groups, such as an academic research group, that need to share data sets.

Read what he thinks about Linux trademark and OSS at the link

My contribution to World Community Grid again

Now It is nnearing 100,000 points. The rank is 8,473 among 86,863 members. This is a collection of 139,045 devices among those members. The top ranked people and groups are such like IBM corporation, Slashdot group etc.
The points generated list provides the first 1000 with higher ranks and I am not yet there.
In the mean time please wisit the site to see my scores and to join the project. It is for a good cause

Cluster Builder builds Grids

An expanded version of Cluster Builder was released extending the site's scope beyond basic cluster components to include industry specific applications and grid middleware.

Cluster Builder—a Web site highlighting high performance computing (HPC) software and hardware—helps administrators, evaluators and users discover available clustering options and solutions. LinuxHPC.org and Cluster Resources Inc. jointly released this latest version of Cluster Builder version 1.1 as a part of their continued effort to provide a comprehensive library of clustering information and research on the Internet.

You can get all the software and documentation here!

Linux Database Cluster Price/Performance Record by Voltaire

Provider of interconnect solutions for high performance grid computing, Voltaire announced a new world record result for price/performance for a 3 Terabyte (TB) TPC-H benchmark. The new mark was achieved using the IBM DB2 Integrated Cluster Environment (DB2 ICE) and Voltaire Grid Interconnect solutions and delivered the best price/performance in the 3 TB category.
“This new result clearly demonstrates the powerful combination of industry-standard platforms and InfiniBand interconnect is an excellent alternative to proprietary SMP-based architectures in the data center,” said Patrick Guay, vice president, marketing, Voltaire. “Customers looking to run data warehousing and business intelligence applications using high-end, grid-based configurations can scale out and get great performance at a very attractive price point.”

The cluster utilized for the benchmark was composed of 64 IBM eServer xSeries 346 systems with Voltaire Grid Interconnect running DB2 Universal Database v8.2 on SUSE LINUX Enterprise Server 9. The cluster delivered a performance of 54,465.9 QphH for a price/performance of $32 per QphH.

Is your Grid Secure?

If not or if you are not so sure, now there is a guidline to follow!. Enterprice Grid Alliance has relesed "Leading Industry Organizations Provide Guidelines for Security Practitioners to Evaluate and Manage Risk", which you could read online or download as a PDF document.

New York State Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics and Life Sciences doubles capacity of cluster

In response to the soaring demand for computational power by the hundreds of researchers who depend on it, UB has expanded the computing capacity of the Center for Computational Research in its New York State Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics and Life Sciences with the installation of a new Dell high-performance computing cluster.

The cluster, with 1,668 processors, nearly doubles the Center of Excellence's computing capacity. If this cluster was listed on the current top 500 list of the world's fastest supercomputers, (http://www.top500.org), it would be among the 40 fastest individual machines.

The cluster was purchased with $2.3 million in federal funds appropriated for the Center of Excellence as a result of the efforts of Rep. Thomas M. Reynolds, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Sen. Charles E. Schumer.

Most clusters and Grids are safe

I am an avid fan of Linux and anything related to linux. So are clustering and Grid.
I was following SCO's case because it was targeting Linux. They said that they had a smoking gun. Well it seems it is another pipe dream in SCOums arsenel.

Oracle Database 10g Release 2 delivers increased grid computing capabilities

Oracle today announced the general availability of Oracle® Database 10g Release 2, which delivers a more robust implementation of the Oracle Database 10g Release 1 feature set. The new release adds compelling improvements in performance, availability, manageability and security to assist customers and partners in achieving a higher quality of service, while reducing the cost and complexity of information management. Oracle Database 10g is the only database designed for grid computing.

Oracle Database 10g Release 2 features new capabilities that deliver improved performance and availability, including:

* New sorting techniques greatly enhance the performance of all sorting
operations, such as queries and index creation, and eliminate the need
for costly pre-load sort operations and related third-party software;
and,
* Oracle Data Guard's new automated capabilities enable failover to a
standby database in seconds following a disaster, even in unattended
environments.

Activegrid LAMP is lighting up!

ActiveGrid Inc.’s campaign for helping Open Source LAMP-based tools and platforms to play a growing role in enterprise app development is getting a boost from some of the biggest names in LAMP, including Red Hat and Novell (Linux), Covalent (Apache), MySQL AB (MySQL), and Zend (PHP scripting language).
Activegrid's yared says it is time to move,
"ActiveGrid’s vision is based on a shift away from conventional languages like Java and C, to Open Source, native XML, and grid computing. The reason, Yared says, is that enterprise managers, architects and even devs, are beginning to see that the current way of building and updating apps is just too costly and time-consuming."

Want to step into Grid technology?

Step in by creating cluster! LinuxHPC.org has all the information you need.
The site provides resources and links for one to find information. And if you are a Guru in the field, you may provide that valuble information to users of the site via wiki like interface