RightScale

One of the most important problems with cloud computing is vendor lock-in. If you use, for instance, Amazon EC2 it is quite a hard to move your solution into other cloud quickly. There are several solutions that address this issue. Probably most interesting among them is RightScale.

RightScale is a web based cloud computing management solution for managing cloud infrastructure from multiple providers. To manage public and private cloud resources RightScale uses RightLink, their agent that is pre-installed with ServerTemplates or cloud be installed on your own Linux and Windows images. RightLink is open source tool for compliance review and offers secure outbound communication without a need for open inbound ports.
It supports several popular cloud vendors, such as Amazon EC2, Google Compute Engine, Windows Azure and so on.
Our engineers spent some time by playing with RightScale API to determine if it fits our requirements. In general, it works as expected, but there are several reasons why it doesn't fit our needs. Shortlist of pros and cons follows:
Pros:

• it allows you to avoid vendor lock-in
• MultiCloud images
• version control system for virtual images and configuration

Cons:

• you still have vendor lock-in, but this time on RightScale
• one more abstraction layer adds unnecessary complexity
• lack of SDK, just REST API
• three versions of API, two of them are in beta-version and one is not yet released at all 
• it doesn't support Amazon GPU instances (basically it was showstopper for us)

As a conclusion, it looks like RightScale really does what it is supposed to do: allows you to work with several cloud vendors without lock-in. But it doesn't support all features of all vendors - just a common subset. It is also hard to start work with it because of lack of SDK and very little information about it in the Internet, so that it doesn't look as product for start-ups. It looks like it could be used by corporate customers with more or less standard needs.

AWS Simple Icons

Have you ever tried to draw cloud solution architecture in Visio? It is always hard to choose template for this task. Fortunately, Amazon Web Services provides simple icon set (including Visio stencils) for such kind of diagrams. Check this out:

Great article about future of Big Data and Hadoop

Absolutely brilliant article about current state of the Big Data industry and Hadoop's future by Mike Miller: Why the days are numbered for Hadoop as we know it?
It looks like Google is running ahead of rest of industry by at least five years.

[GTC 2012] Effective HPC Architecture - Design, Develop, Implement (Presented by Oleh Khoma)

GTC 2012

NVidia started their business by building graphical accelerators for video games and 3D designers. In 2007 they announced CUDA, a unified parallel computing architecture. 5 years ago it seemed that only crazy people could do some vital calculations on hardware designed for video games. Now building High Performance Computing accelerators is becoming core business for NVidia.
This year GPU Technology Conference (by the way, ELEKS was Silver Sponsor of GTC 2012) has shown us how important HPC business is for NVidia. They make lots of efforts to make it more and more usable by developers. They make GPUs more energy-efficient, they pack them with many new features, and they make them faster and faster. Check outstanding keynote by Jen-Hsun Huang for more details.
Oleh Khoma, Head of HPC unit at ELEKS was a speaker at GTC 2012. Here is his presentation:

Eleks gtc 2012

View more PowerPoint from ELEKS Software

Effective HPC system is so much more than just GPGPU. Real-world applications often need to stream large amounts of data from across system boundaries to the dozens of worker nodes in a most scalable and efficient way. They usually require storing huge amounts of data, scheduling of computation jobs, monitoring of system health and results visualization. Having first-hand experience in design, development and implementation of end-to-end HPC solutions, our engineers will share their experience on some of the pitfalls to avoid and things to consider when planning your next HPC system that works. 

DevTalks #1 presentations

Materials from our second DevTalks event (February 22, 2012).
1. Hadoop: the Big Answer to the Big Question of the Big Data (by Victor Haydin)

Video (in Ukrainian):


2. GPGPU: From 3D games to supercomputing (by Taras Shpot)
Slides: http://ge.tt/8fyqX0E/v/0 (hint: use 'n' and 'p' keys for navigation - feel the power of emacs)
Video (in Ukrainian):

DevTalks #0 presentations

Materials from our first DevTalks event (December 21, 2011).
1. HTML5: Ready yet? Best features and when to start using them (by Markiyan Matsekh, in Ukrainian)

Resources: http://www.slideshare.net/markiyanmatsekh/html5-examples-10660313

2. Cloud Computing in a Nutshell (by Victor Haydin)