Google Mimics Amazon Cloud With ‘Google Compute Engine’

With Google Compute Engine -- a new service unveiled by on Thursday -- you too can run applications inside Google's state-of-the-art data centers. Photo: Google

Google has unveiled a service akin to Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud, letting developers and businesses hoist applications atop virtual machines running on the same sweeping infrastructure that underpins Google’s own applications and web services.

Unveiled on Thursday morning by Urs Hölzle — the man who oversees Google’s infrastructure — at the company’s annual developer conference, the new service is known as Google Compute Engine. The company already offers a service for building and running applications atop its infrastructure — Google App Engine — but this service does not offer access to raw virtual machines. With App Engine, you must code applications for specific APIs, or application programming interfaces, that place certain restrictions on what programming languages, libraries, and frameworks can be used.

With raw virtual machines, developers can pretty much run whatever software they want, just as they can with Amazon EC2, the undisputed king of the cloud computing game.

Google’s new service is currently in the beta testing stage, and it’s available to only a limited number of users. Hölzle claimed that next to competitors — presumably Amazon — the service would offer 50 percent more compute power per dollar. During his keynote, the Google man said that the service lets applications scale to hundreds of thousands of processors cores, showing one genetics-related application running on about 600,000 cores.

The move had been rumored since mid-May, with GigaOM reporting that Google was preparing to release a service akin to Amazon EC2. Google’s service will compete not only with EC2, but with a similar service Microsoft added to its Windows Azure cloud last month and services offered by the Texas-based Rackspace.

Like these competitors, Google Compute Engine is essentially a way of building and hosting applications without setting up computing hardware in your own data center. Amazon pioneered the idea of a public service that would provide businesses and developers with instant access to virtual servers and other computing resources, such as storage, and according to one estimate, its services now run as much as 1 percent of the internet. In response to the popularity of Amazon service, myriad companies have introduced similar services.

Continue Reading “Google Mimics Amazon Cloud With ‘Google Compute Engine’” »

Tags: , , , ,
Back to top

Google Plugs GDrive Into Chrome OS, iPhones, iPads

Google’s Chromebook, a machine that essentially runs only one local application: a web browser. Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired

Google has plugged its Google Drive online storage service into its Chrome OS operating system as well as Apple’s iOS, the operating system that runs the iPhone and the iPad.

This means that you can synchronize files stored on your Chrome OS and iOS devices with GDrive and across various other devices, including Windows machines and Macs.

Starting on Thursday, the company will offer local software applications that run on Chrome OS and iOS and connect back to Google Drive in the proverbial cloud. Such software is already available for Windows machines and Macs.

The news was announced on Thursday morning at the company’s annual developer conference in San Francisco. During the same morning keynote, Google also unveiled a new version of Google Docs — its document and spreadsheet service — that lets you edit documents when offline. Previously, you could only view files when offline.

The two announcements are particularly important for Chrome OS, the Google operating system that seeks to move the world onto applications that reside on the web. Since it does not run local software, Chrome OS very much needs a tool like Google Drive that can facilitate the movement of files between applications, and it needs as many applications as possible to work offline.

Continue Reading “Google Plugs GDrive Into Chrome OS, iPhones, iPads” »

Tags: , , , , ,
Back to top

Wanna Rent One of the World’s Biggest Supercomputers?

The first two racks of Vulcan have now been installed. It will be open for business by early 2013. Photo: Lawrence Livermore National Labs

Lawrence Livermore National Labs is home to Sequoia, a classified supercomputer that’s used to simulate nuclear bombs. It’s a number-crunching wonder, the most powerful computer in the world.

But just a few feet from Sequoia, lab technicians have now assembled the first two server racks of what will one day be Sequoia’s little brother, Vulcan: a mighty supercomputer that anybody can use.

Well, not exactly everybody. You’ve got to pay Lawrence Livermore a fair chunk of change for access to the computer. The lab is a little hazy on pricing, but clearly, renting out one of the world’s largest supercomputers isn’t going to be cheap.

It’s part of a new program the lab announced with IBM on Wednesday, called Deep Computing Solutions. They hope to make big-time computer simulations available to companies that might not have money or the technical wherewithal to build and run their own supercomputers — a proposition that could appeal to engineering companies or finance firms or biotechnology outfits.

In the past, LLNL worked with invited private partners inside to help it solve its nuclear simulation problems. But with Vulcan, things will be different, says Fred Streitz, director of the lab’s High-Performance Computing Innovation Center, which is playing host to Deep Computing Solutions. “The laboratory has a long history of working with industry, but not pointedly on their problems,” he says. “What’s different here is we’re pointedly trying to address business issues.”

In fact, Livermore has been working with companies for the past year, as part of Streitz’s computing program. They’ve worked with the U.S. Air Force, Navstar, and others to make 18-wheelers more fuel efficient, and they’ve also had power modeling software maker Energy Exemplar into the labs, to run electric grid simulations.

The future site of Vulcan. You can see Sequoia in the background. Photo: LLNL

But when Vulcan goes fully online in early 2013, businesses will have one mammoth supercomputer to play with. Vulcan should do about 5 petaflops, or 5 quadrillion calculations per second. That would put it at number four on today’s list of the world’s most powerful computers. Sequoia, just a few feet away, but on a separate, classified network, has been benchmarked at 16 petaflops.

But, more importantly, customers will also have access to the brains of Lawrence Livermore’s computer scientists. That’s essential, if the companies want to write simulations that really take advantage of Vulcan’s complex design. “It’s no longer an issue about the computers itself, it’s an issue about the expertise,” says James Sexton, an IBM program director. “What we’re offering is not just a computer, but also some of the best minds in the world.”

Tags: , , ,
Back to top

As Mystery Cloud Looms, Google Revs App Engine

Though Google will soon offer software developers a brand-new cloud service, its App Engine is alive and well. Photo: bianconero/Flickr

Google is apparently on the verge of unveiling some sort of cloud service that lets software developers do things they can’t do with Google App Engine. But App Engine is evolving too.

On Tuesday evening, just before its annual developer conference in San Francisco, Google released a new software developer kit, or SDK, for App Engine, a service that lets you build and host applications atop the company’s famously agile online infrastructure. Among other things, the new SDK lets you encrypt traffic to and from your applications using the secure socket layer protocol, or SSL, the standard means of encryption on the web.

Google, for instance, uses SSL to encrypt traffic on many of its own web services. But this is the first time the company has offered such encryption to those building applications atop App Engine. “Lack of custom SSL was the main issue preventing me from considering App Engine for my web service, so I’ll definitely have to revisit it to see how it could compare to AWS in production,” said one commenter on the popular developer discussion site Hacker News, referring to Amazon Web Services, by far the world’s most popular service for building and hosting applications online.

AWS is a very different animal. Unlike Google App Engine — which handles all the raw computing resources under the proverbial covers and limits what software you can run — AWS offers up raw virtual servers where you can run almost anything. Because of this flexibility — and because it was first on the scene — Amazon’s service now runs an estimated one percent of the internet. But Google is determined to make up lost ground.

Even as it beefs up App Engine this week, Google is expected to reveal a new service that looks more like Amazon. It appears that this new service operates separately from App Engine, but on Wednesday afternoon at the Google I/O developer conference in San Francisco, Greg D’alesandre, who oversees App Engine, declined to comment on the matter.

Continue Reading “As Mystery Cloud Looms, Google Revs App Engine” »

Tags: , , , , ,
Back to top

As Greece Collapses, Gunmen Set Fire to Microsoft

A security guard walks outside Microsoft’s burned-out offices in northern Athens. Photo: AP/Thanassis Stavrakis

Three attackers drove a van through the front of Microsoft’s offices just north of Athens on Wednesday, marched out security guards at gunpoint, and tried to burn the building to the ground.

It’s unclear who is behind the attack, but it’s a worrying sign for foreign multinational corporations, coming as Greece struggles under the weight of a collapsing economy.

The attack happened during the very early hours of Wednesday morning, before staffers had shown up for work. The assailants “drove a van through the entrance to the building, ushered the two security personnel out of the building and then set the van on fire,” a Microsoft spokesman said Wednesday.

No one was injured in the attack, which occurred in Maroussi, a suburb of Athens.

The blaze was put out, but the fire department estimates damages at about €60,000 ($75,000), according to local reports.

Microsoft Greece general manager Ernst-Jan Stigter said he learned of the attack at 4:30am. “They smashed the entrance, pulled out gasoline,” he told Reuters in a video interview. “They put it all over the place in an effort to burn the whole place down.”

The attackers had pistols and an automatic rifle, according to Reuters.

Greece has been teetering on the brink of economic collapse for months, as the country and the European community struggle to stave off a default on its massive loans. After four years of recession, the country is broke, and the International Monetary Fund and the European Union have been demanding unpopular spending cuts from an increasingly unhappy populace.

Police are investigating the incident, Microsoft said.

Tags: , , , ,
Back to top
« OLDER POSTS