Distributed Thinking

Licensing has been an ongoing issue for virtualising and grid-enabling applications. Many licensing models do not transfer easily to a world where applications and virtual servers can be run on many processors and moved from machine to machine. Vendors want to ensure that they are paid for the full use of their applications, while IT managers want to know how much they can expect to pay in a given accounting period. Everyone is aware of the problem and several people have been trying to work out ways forward, but the issue is still unresolved. Grid Computing Now! are bringing together some of the key players in the industry for a webinar on Thursday 10 April at 14:00 GMT: David Gittins of Capgemini, who has been working with the public sector on this challenge Neil Sanderson, Product Manager for Virtualisation at Microsoft Mark Cresswell of Scalable Solutions, a leader in the provision of tools for monitoring and reporting usage. Ian Osborne, Project Director of Grid Computin...

Yesterday I attended the Low Carbon ICT Conference organised by Oxford University, with funding from JISC. This was a good an useful day, with speakers covering a range of topics, and a small number of exhibits. Some of the speakers were familiar - Zafar Chaudry gave his excellent talk on the benefits of virtualisation in one of our webinars , while Liam Newcombe will be speaking in our next-but-one webinar on May 7th. Others were new to me. The speakers' talks covered office ITC equipment, virtualisation, data centres, PC manufacturing, sustainability entrepreneurship and enterprise planning. I was more at home with the techie end of things, but this is not a problem that can be tackled by technology alone so it was good to see the broad participation of this conference. I was aware of most of the technical issues, although I was surprised at how much energy is used by desktop PCs and peripherals (see below). I was also interested to hear Juergen Heidegger recommend the use ...

"This is the Century of Information" - G. Brown, November 2007. This week, I attended a think-a-thon about a strategy document that the e-Science community in the UK is developing. The goal is to put in place the right mechanisms for ensuring that UK research can make the most of new computing technologies and methods. We have many success stories from the e-science programme; the question is, how do we build on those successes and make the techniques available to everyone? One point that arose from the workshop is that we need different types of successes. Most of the examples put forward were of good research enabled in a range of domains (GeoSciences, BioScience, Chemistry, Physics, Social Science, etc.). We also found examples of advances in Computer Science itself, rather than just using CS to support other fields; this is essential if we are to engage CS academics. Beyond academia, we need examples of knowledge transfer to industry. This is where the Grid Computi...