Australians launch new Compute Cloud

“For the high-power HPC users, people who want to use all the features, GRISU provides a graphical user interface,” said Jim McGovern, a systems services manager at ARCS.

ARCS’ grid service GRISU, which sits atop Globus, provides Australian researchers and their colleagues with access to over 18,000 cores distributed across the nation. The Compute Cloud provides another layer, ultimately connecting researchers to the same resources GRISU accesses.

The Compute Cloud, McGovern explained, is ideally suited for less advanced users using standard packages.
As computational power has increased, computational methods have likewise become increasingly feasible for scientific disciplines not traditionally connected with grids, clouds, or HPC. Many of those researchers face a steep learning curve to access computational resources, as things currently stand.

“They’re used to a point-and-click world where they want things to work fairly easily,” McGovern said. “You can’t go to a bunch of bioinformaticians and geologists and expect them to write in a scripting language.”

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Source ISGTW newsletter 7th July 2010