Sunday 14 March 2010
The signing ceremony was witnessed by Science, Technology and Innovation Minister Datuk Dr Maximus Ongkili, they said in a joint statement here Tuesday. They said Mimos joined Open Cirus as a test bed site to help advance cloud computing research and education. It would develop a national cloud computing platform to deploy services throughout Malaysia, focusing on enabling services through software, security frameworks and mobile interactivity, as well as testing new cloud tools and methodologies. Launched in July 2008, the Open Cirrus initiative is aimed at promoting open collaboration among industries, academia and governments by removing the financial and logistical barriers to research in data-intensive, internet-scale computing.
Malaysia has made major strides in advancing ICT development in the country with the establishment of MSC Malaysia and the Ministry of Science, Technology and innovation. Cloud computing is the next step. With a headstart in our involvement in cloud computing research, Malaysia will be able to reap the benefits as an early adopter. Besides Malaysia, Open Cirrus has test bed sites in United States, Singapore, Germany, United Kingdom, Russia and South Korea. The test bed stimulates a real-life, global, internet-scale environment and gives researchers an unprecedented ability to test applications and measure the performance of infrastructure and services built to run on large-scale cloud systems.
A global, multiple data center, open-source test bed for the advancement of cloud computing research, Open Cirrus was started last summer by HP, Intel Corp. and Yahoo! Inc. The goal is to “promote open collaboration among industry, academia and governments by removing the financial and logistical barriers to research in data-intensive, Internet-scale computing,” the founders say. The Open Cirrus initiative spread across more borders this week with the addition of the Russian Academy of Sciences, South Korea’s Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute, and the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation in Malaysia (MIMOS).
Noting that IDC predicts that cloud computing will become a $42 billion market by 2012, rival IBM announced its own Blue Cloud initiative earlier this year and in April opened its first cloud computing laboratory in Hong Kong. IBM is also ramping up its PaaS offerings. Prior to announcing the three newest members at last week’s Open Cirrus Summit in Palo Alto, Calif., the founders had already attracted researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany, and the Infocomm Development Authority, Singapore. HP also has developed Cloud Assure to help make any moves to cloud models mission critical in nature.
The new HP ProLiant SL server line, the latest addition to the HP ExSO portfolio for scale-out computing, comprises an open 2U chassis, which holds fans and power supplies, and task-specific server nodes that slip into the hardware’s rail-and-tray design. The ProLiant SL chassis fits into any standard rack from HP or third parties. Next is the SL160z, which is designed for large memory-cache apps. The server has 18 dual in-line memory module slots and up to two PCI slots. Finally, the SL170z is built for large storage applications such as Web search and database apps. The server has up to six large form-factor Serial ATA or serial-attached SCSI hard drives. HP is initially making three server nodes available. The first is the ProLiant SL2×170z, which fits two servers in a 1U tray. The servers are designed to support highly dense applications found in high-performance computing and Web front-end environments.
The new systems are scheduled to be available in July. Pricing will vary according to configuration and order volume. HP also offers management software and services as options for the ProLiant SL product line. HP, Intel, and Yahoo last year launched the Open Cirrus cloud computing test bed with a goal of promoting collaboration among businesses, government agencies, and colleges and universities. More than 50 research projects are plugged into Open Cirrus. Cloud computing is a type of computing in which dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources are provided as a service over the Internet. Companies operating such environments include Google, Amazon, and Salesforce.com. Small and midmarket companies are particularly interested in running applications on vendors’ cloud computing environments in order to avoid building large IT infrastructures.
