Grid, Cloud, HPC … What’s the Diff?

Posted on November 18, 2010 by Randy Bias

It’s always nice when another piece of the puzzle comes into focus.  In this case, my time speaking at the first ever International Super Computer (ISC) Cloud Conference the week before last was well spent.  The conference was heavily attended … Continue reading →

Posted in Cloud Computing | Tagged amazon, aws, cloud, cloudscaling, commoditization, conferences, grid, hadoop, hpc, hsc, iaas, infrastructure, performance, scalability, scaling | 7 Comments

Up, Out, Centralized, and Decentralized

Posted on July 28, 2009 by Randy Bias

It can be confusing to understand how to scale computing systems, but it’s not rocket science.  There are really only two main axes of scale: out and up.  Closely related to the axis of scale is the general type of … Continue reading →

Posted in Cloud Computing | Tagged centralization, cloud, commoditization, databases, decentralization, enterprise, hadoop, infrastructure, Internet Operations, open, scaling, sharding | 5 Comments

The Secret Sauce Problem

Posted on July 18, 2009 by Randy Bias

The vast majority of web applications have what I call The Secret Sauce Problem.  Every commercial web service of any kind needs to be differentiated in order to be interesting and attractive to customers.  There isn’t any kind of differentiation … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Automation, batch processing, cloud, Cloud Applications, hadoop, N-tier, secret sauce | 2 Comments

Hadoop 101 by Chris Wensel

Posted on June 22, 2009 by Randy Bias

What conversation about cloud computing is complete without a mention of big data, distributing processing, and distributed databases?  There is a recent trend away from relying exclusively on the traditional relational database for everything.  Newer technologies like BigTable and Hadoop … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Big Data, cloud, databases, hadoop, scaling, sharding | 6 Comments