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DAILY NEWS AND INFORMATION
FOR THE GLOBAL GRID COMMUNITY / JUNE 30, 2003: VOL. 2 NO. 26
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Special Features:
PURDUE IT DIVISION EMPLOYS GRID
COMPUTING
United Devices, a market leader in secure grid solutions, announced that it
is in the process of linking 2,300 computers at Purdue University to create a
computational grid to perform research that previously was performed using
supercomputers.
"Our instructional labs close at 1:00 a.m. and reopen at 7:00 a.m. During
those six hours, 2,300 machines sat idle," said David Moffett, associate vice
president of research computing services for Information Technology at Purdue
University. "The compute cycles existed, but no one was using them in the dark
of night. With United Devices, we were able to create a grid to use those
cycles, maintain throughput, and clear our supercomputers for tasks that
they're much more qualified to perform."
The United Devices Grid MPTM platform allows the University to triple the
power of its core resources without having to invest in additional expensive
hardware. ITaP (Information Technology at Purdue) is using the massive
computational power to perform 8,000 to 10,000 genomics and proteomics
sequencing runs a day, a volume previously unobtainable without relying on
their supercomputing resources.
"Organizations today just don't have the unlimited budgets to continue
buying
expensive computational hardware," said United Devices' CEO, Ed Hubbard. "ITaP
is ahead of the curve in taking steps to use grid computing to supplement
their resources. In fact, this move triples their available power and frees up
existing resources for other uses."
Grid MP Enterprise from United Devices is the leading grid solution for
on-site institutional deployments. By collectively harnessing the latent power
of existing clusters, servers, desktops, and workstations, organizations
maximize the value of resources they already own while gaining compute power
to accelerate and refine research and analysis. The software aggregates
heterogeneous network resources into a virtual supercomputer capable of
increasing processing power (and decreasing processing time)
exponentially.
According to representatives at ITaP, there are several possibilities in
further utilizing the grid, including sharing CPU cycles with local industry
partners in the genomics space as well as borrowing compute cycles from
University affiliates who aren't using them during the evening. "We're trying
to utilize all of the resources available," said Moffet. "In this case, the
CPU cycles were available, but we had yet to effectively use them."
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