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Showing posts from December, 2006

OGF20 - May in Manchester (Call For Proposals)

I'm very pleased to report that OGF20 will be held in the UK: to be precise, at the Manchester International Convention Centre from May 7-11 next year. It will be co-located with the 2nd EGEE User Forum. Grid Computing Now! are organising a two-day industry outreach track . This is something I've been working on for almost a year. At first my main interest was to get the event in the UK and run the GCN! part of the programme. This got me involved in choosing the venue and general planning; I am now programme chair of the whole shebang and devoting quite a bit of time to planning the sessions. We have just announced a Call For Proposals for presentations, panels and workshops. This call covers all aspects of industry and academic use of Grids, including the GCN! track. Full details are available on the OGF web site . I would encourage everyone to submit suggestions; the deadline for submission is February 9th. Obviously I'd be happy to discuss this with anyone who is inte

Virtualisation for green IT centres?

Power consumption is already on the minds of IT managers , having replaced space as the main (non-staff) cost of running IT centres. The recent publication of the Stern report on the economic effects of climate change [ full report ; BBC online coverage ] gives extra incentive to look at ways of reducing power use. Virtualisation and Grid seem obvious tools to investigate for this end. Case studies have shown they can more than double the utilisation rates of existing servers. The Grid Computing Now! team are looking into this approach and we're keen to hear your stories. Please get in touch if you have experience of increasing server utilisation - or if you need to control your power bills!

Webinar: The business case for next generation IT architecture

Last week we recorded and broadcast another Grid Computing Now! webinar. This featured Steve Wallage of The 451 Group and Shahid Mohammed of Marsh talking about the business case for Grid. Steve presented a distillation of the 451 Group's findings from talking to Grid users across a wide range of sectors. Shahid then gave us the benefit of his experience applying Grid in an e-commerce business. Both are good presenters and I recommend their talks. You can see the webinar at http://brighttalk.com/comm/gridcomputingnow/3b03d97eee-2473-632-2319 . This uses Flash and so should be compatible with most browsers. Viewers submitted a good range of questions. A couple of people asked about the type of businesses - small, medium or large; finance, pharma or other - that can benefit from Grid. Shahid's talk demonstrated that reasonably small firms in a general commercial sector can benefit. Another question focussed on security. Both Steve and Shahid explained that Grid can be