Supercomputing and the private cloud: time is money

Posted on January 22, 2013 by

Supercomputers are great team players, but they work best on a tight schedule. And on-demand private clouds are providing a way to schedule some of their toughest jobs.

Before getting into the convergence of high-performance computers and cloud, let’s talk workload management in general

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Software rules

The popularity of a cluster computing, joining high-performance computers and other hardware into a single system over a network, is growing. So is grid computing, which takes it further by bringing HPC systems, even spread over the world, into lock-step. The advantages are clear: jobs are sent to the right place, at the right time, and thus, complex tasks can be completed faster and more cheaply,

But it’s the software that has to be in charge of managing it all. And until recently (the 1990s), it was fairly primitive. After a quick evolution though, HPC workload management software is now far far more sophisticated. For example, I spoke to one vendor, Adaptive Computing, which has developed such a platform, known as Moab.

According to Wolfgang Baumann, business development manager at the company, Moab can schedule tasks intelligently over a cluster or grid, sending the right jobs to remote locations, calculating the capacity necessary to run them, whether it’s thousands of small jobs or one large one, and working within defined limits.

These limits could be cost or power consumption (or both). A few days ago, for example, Adaptive announced it was partnering with Cray to provide Moab to a research institute and university in Germany, which share a massive distributed Cray XC30 grid.

Enter the cloud

While grids and clusters, and the software to manage them, were growing, cloud was going through its own evolution. And as it turns out, HPC systems can thrive in a private cloud environment under the right circumstances.

How? Baumann used the example of a financial institution that’s paying for a 100-node cluster over a month to process thousands of small transactions. But at month’s end, it needs to run a simulation on its entire portfolio in one shot–one gigantic problem to solve. Adaptive Computing can then build an “on-demand” private cloud to do it using a whopping 1500 cores.

While HPC is traditionally seen as something in the domain of science labs and universities, I found this an interesting use case in the enterprise, and something I’m going to look into more.

Posted in Big data, cloud, HPC, private cloud | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

The hottest IT skill of all in 2013

Posted on January 16, 2013 by

I’ve just written part 2 of two-part series for Staffllink’s blog on in-demand IT skills in Canada in 2013 and who stands the best chance of getting them (hint: those with the ability to market themselves).

This man is standing in your way. Convince him to let you in with a killer pitch that sells yourself -- a priduct you're passionate about.

This man is standing in your way. Convince him to let you in with a killer pitch that sells yourself — a priduct you’re passionate about.

This point has been hammered to death already, yet it still bears repeating: technical skills will only get you so far, sometimes only to the gate of a company — its HR department. And like it or not, IT pros need to learn how to sell themselves aggressively at this very moment. Few talented people remain unemployed very long, but you need to convince future employers to give you the job that you want.

Take home message from this one: you are not irreplaceable, not matter how much of a genius you are. Employers may be lining up to hire the most brilliant data scientists these days. But that still doesn’t mean you can write your own ticket–it just means you’ll be competing in the big leagues.

Click here to read the blog post.

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COBOL: The elephant in the room

Posted on January 9, 2013 by

I wrote a long piece about the future of COBOL almost a year ago. Many of are aware of the enormous legacy burden it’s going to cause in the next couple decades.

One of those problems is finding people who are still proficient in the language. More and more, post-secondary schools are leaving it out of the curriculum. So, we’re faced with the prospect of paying exorbitant consulting rates to retirees to maintain systems that still run it.

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As Phil Murphy of Forrester Research put it to me, you can’t separate COBOL from the mainframe. And both those skills are definitely on the wane as the new generation of aspiring programmers and developers choose more exciting career paths, like developing iOS, Android or BB10 apps. So, the old-timers are pretty much your only hope. At least here in North America.

There are ways around this problem, of course, including offshoring to countries that have the critical mass of IT pros (and the foresight) to realize that COBOL skills are going to be in very high demand, at least for the next while. Ideally, a company would offshore to a country in which English is widely spoken (read: India) as COBOL was originally developed expressly for use by English-speaking users with fairly limited coding ability (by the standards of the time).

But what about coders here in Canada? If Murphy is right that COBOL might be around until the 2030s, that’s almost 20 years of almost guaranteed employment. Is it worth it, then, to master a language that’s dying very slowly if the price is right?

I’ll explore this topic in more detail either here or on Stafflink’s blog. Stay tuned.

 

Posted in Legacy tech | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Social media in the supply chain: Just say the words

Posted on January 8, 2013 by

Supply chain management is serious business. Maybe that’s why there’s a reluctance on the part of vendors to tell us exactly what’s been transforming it.

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Social media for business is well entrenched by now, but since the term still brings Twitter or Facebook to mind for many people, you’ll see references to “enhanced communication tools” or something like that instead.

Have a look at this blog post by the Oxford Consulting Group about how flexible and agile today’s retail supply chains need to be. They have to “collaborate remotely,” and “maintaining communications” is important.

Sound familiar?

The definition of social business software doesn’t lead to as many semantic arguments as “cloud” does, so I think it’s pretty safe to say that when you talk about remote collaboration today that doesn’t involve e-mail or phone calls, you mean social media. The decision whether to call it as such seems to be a marketing decision, with only certain companies daring to pronounce the words.

Here’s an example of such a flexible and agile retailer. A while ago, I wrote about Indigo Books, a familiar name to many Canadians. They were quite open about the fact they were using Moxie Software’s cloud-based Employee Spaces software to manage their supply chain. It was a big business decision for them, but one they deemed essential to make.

I don’t mean to single out the business of supply chain management as particularly reluctant to change. Across all sorts of enterprises “social media” is either approached with caution or displayed as a badge of progress. But most of the smarter companies are using it, whether or not they’ll admit it.

 

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Ubuntu smartphone will find its niche

Posted on January 6, 2013 by

Canonical has decided to think different on smartphones.

Under development for some time, we’ve now seen what the new operating system looks like. It has a pretty nice aesthetic and flow, though it does seem a tad sluggish.

But it’s not the interface that’s going to differentiate this phone, according to Canonical. It’s imagining a future in which smartphones don’t just integrate seamlessly with PCs, but rather can become full-fledged PCs that run Ubuntu desktop when plugged into a mouse, keyboard and monitor, or as Canonical puts it, creating “a new category of superphones.”

While some commentators have dismissed the Ubuntu phone OS as a curiousity that will go nowhere, Linux enthusiasts are naturally happy about the announcement, eager to get their hands on the first phones running it, probably sometime next year. Gauging by their comments, there’s a sense in the Linux community that the Ubuntu phone will fill a gap in the market for a truly open-source mobile OS that is both user and business friendly. Unlike any other product on the market at present (WIndows 8 and Windows RT, for example), the desktop and mobile operating systems would be written in the same code.

But to me, the big differentiator is the “portable OS on a phone” concept, or at least that’s the impression I’m getting.  It’s a cool idea, but cool doesn’t always mean practical. If we’d reached the stage at which BYOD means no corporate computers whatsoever, it might make sense. And I have to say, it would be a little odd to see a workstation with keyboard, monitor and mouse–and without a laptop or desktop of any kind. Just a mess of cables, I guess.

It’s fair to assume that in the near future, businesses are not going to ditch their company PCs. And right now, if an employee needs to run a separate operating system on the go, there’s an easy enough way to do it: they can run various Linux distributions from a Live CD or USB stick, and Microsoft has created something similar in the corporate version of Windows 8 with Windows To Go (a high-capacity USB stick that runs a portable version of the operating system).

I don’t see the point of fiddling around with cables and Bluetooth connections to connect a smartphone to peripherals when you can plug in a single USB stick and get the same functionality.

People love their smartphones, and people who love Linux will buy Linux phones. The archetypal Linux enthusiast is the tinkering type–someone who wants control. I’m sure the OS will provide that on yet another platform. But I doubt the “superphone” will cause a real revolution in the way most people live and work.  

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Holiday wishes for some good friends

Posted on December 22, 2012 by

Wishing the all my friends and colleagues a pleasant holiday and success in the new year. Closest to home, I’d like to thank the wonderful staff at IT World Canada and Stafflink Solutions.

Then we get to my analyst friends at Forrester, Gartner, InfoTech, IDC and the Cutter Consortium, who were especially helpful to me during 2012.

holiday

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