Plötzliche Besucheranstürme gehören zum Alltag im Internet: Ein Blog-Eintrag wird von einer Minute zu anderen populär und die Nutzer strömen in Scharen, bis der Server zusammenbricht. Virtuelle Welten im Netz haben mit dem gleichen Phänomen zu kämpfen. Im Gegensatz zu normalen Websites lassen sich die User hier allerdings schwieriger über beliebig viele Server verteilen, um die Lastspitzen auszugleichen. Mitspieler müssen schließlich in der Nähe bleiben, damit sie miteinander interagieren können. VastPark, ein australisches Unternehmen, das Grundlagentechnologien für virtuelle Welten entwickelt, will nun eine neue Technik des Forschungsinstituts National ICT Australia (NICTA) nutzen, um das Problem anzugehen.
The real-world implications of the rise of internet computing
EVEN when the sky is blue over Quincy, clouds hang in the air. The small town in the centre of the state of Washington is home to half a dozen huge warehouses that power the global “computing clouds” run by internet companies such as Yahoo! and Microsoft. The size of several football pitches, these data centres are filled with thousands of powerful computers and storage devices and are hooked up to the internet via fast fibre-optic links.
Yet even more intriguing than the buildings' size is their location. Quincy is literally in the middle of nowhere, three hours' drive from the nearest big city, Seattle. But it turns out to be a perfect location for data centres. As computing becomes a utility, with services that can be consumed from everywhere and on any device, ever more thought is being put into where to put the infrastructure it needs.
Apparently, when CERN isn't colliding particles (and ripping massive holes in the space-time continuum), it's busy working on a new "internet" which will be 10,000 times faster than our current version.
HP, Intel und Yahoo haben eine internationale Initiative für Cloud Computing gegründet. Sie wollen damit laut Mitteilung die Grundlage für eine offene Zusammenarbeit der Branche, wissenschaftlichen Instituten und Behörden für datenintensive Forschung ohne logistische Grenzen schaffen. Daran beteiligt ist auch das Karlsruher Institut für Technologie (KIT) des Forschungszentrums Karlsruhe und der Universität Karlsruhe. An deren Steinbuch Centre for Computing soll eines von sechs so genannten Exzellenzzentren entstehen.
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Neben Karlsruhe werden auch die University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, die HP Labs, Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore, Intel Research und Yahoo mit einem solchen Zentrum bedacht. Jedes soll eine Cloud-Computing-Infrastruktur mit 1000 bis zu 4000 Prozessorkernen für so genannte Test Beds, also Testumgebungen erhalten. Sie sollen noch im Laufe dieses Jahres für ausgewählte Forschungsvorhaben zum Cloud Computing weltweit zur Verfügung steh
Weeks after Amazon's S3 cloud storage service went down due to a software error, and in the midst of continued MobileMe issues, two more online services have suffered problems. Gmail was unavailable for a couple of hours on Monday because of a software glitch, and online storage service The Linkup (TLU) shut down its service last Friday after losing nearly half of the data it had stored. The appeal of these services is obvious—they should be a reliable, scalable, cost-effective resource you can access from anywhere. But the recent disruptions show some of the risks of online services. What do you do when they go down?
Fura is a self-contained grid middleware that allows the grid enablement and distribution of applications on heterogeneous computational resources. Fura features a web-based GUI, wizard-guided installation and configuration, and Web Services compliance. Fura's component based plug-in architecture allows grid services to be extended or replaced, and new services can be developed reusing existing components.
Fura is for developers or highly technical enthusiasts who want the open and latest grid technology early and often to use it in non-critical computing environments. It is not recommended to use Fura where support options, maintenance, and software/hardware certifications are valued. For such environments, you must use either Fura Open Enterprise Edition (GPL Licensed) or Fura Commercial Enterprise Edition (Commercial EULA).
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