Get rid of Boston data Center Harvard University Cloud Computing layout

Harvard already has cloud computing--specifically, an overall management, high-density http://www.aliyun.com/zixun/aggregation/13695.html ">it infrastructure, delivered by fast fibre links to researchers. Through several years of effort, Harvard has divided its own Academy of Arts and Sciences (FAS) it into 6 data centers, while the main one is located in the original Jordan Marsh building in Boston. Now it's time to change.

This bodes well for the advent of an IT infrastructure that manages and supplies differentiated, and the next step for Harvard is to get rid of the Boston data Center and join four other universities in "Community cloud computing", the Massachusetts Green High-performance Computing Centre project, 90 miles away. The project will be completed in 3721.html ">2014, which may be the last data center built by Harvard, according to James Cuff, director and CTO of the Harvard Computing Center.

"There is no need to deal with hardware anymore," he said in an interview at the Academy of Arts and Sciences (FAS) computing office, which had been closed in 2002. The cuff of the building is suitable for the High-tech operation.

In his office, a huge monitor is mounted on a wall and connected to a notebook, and with a few commands, cuff can list the calculated projects and resources in the activity. He can instantly display everything, small to a few CPUs and a handful of file stores, large to hundreds of TB and virtualized servers participating in the current project, all of which are listed by the ID of the ' owner ' (object of the supplied resource).

Cuff is responsible for these, of course, this is not Amazon Web Services. In fact, the resources he manages are limited, but that's why he has complete control over cloud computing. "We always have 4,000 subscribers and nearly 1000 activities," he said.

He has taken a backseat to how the team controls the infrastructure and how to conduct new models and technologies for different types of infrastructure. He used to say that any college student who wrote a "Perl script" could take over his entire operation, which was his original motivation to have a keen sense of insight and control over the state of infrastructure.

From an IT point of view, the results are quite astonishing. Through the efforts of the Harvard Academy of Arts and Sciences (FAS) over the years in integration, cuff and operators from various disciplines, not only in computational science, management hundreds of servers, petabytes of storage, and thousands of virtual machines, all with the least effort, can use a supply channel for all. Cuff said he could do the operation by ordering parts from the discount retailer Newegg (in fact, a number of dealers would give Harvard school discounts), and he would throw it to researchers, even while he was busy taking away their existing rooms.

They can use the funds to buy their own equipment, Cuff said, but within his operational dimension he can provide more of their needs in a matter of minutes. It's a very easy business to build a cluster in weeks or months. Cuff said that the core of cloud-type operation is the network.

The biggest hurdle for researchers in cloud computing is bandwidth, cuff. Grid computing and supercomputing are always around us, but today, you have to use bandwidth to reach them, just as you have to sit in a room with a computer. The problem is to find a way out of the two-dollar problem so that cuff can take advantage of both scale and modern high-density data centers.

The answer is a 40GB-per-second link to the Boston Business Center device. The ground floor belongs to Macy, the rest of the building is interesting.

It is the data center that Markley Group operates, Cuff uses a corner of the seventh floor for high-density computing, running all the devices, from a blade server running on wireless bandwidth (InfiniBand) to a 576TB SATA hard drive Array, To a commercial server running on 40GB Ethernet per second, and what he calls "commercial cloud computing". Every visit to the data center, cuff, is really amazed at how much activity happens in such a small place.

"I like to show stellar simulations, which is my favorite," he said with a smile. At this point he stood in the middle of a set of racks with his hands, "This is it!" The whole galaxy is here. "What he is talking about is a recent Harvard project that simulates the spiral formation of the Milky Way, which requires a hypothetical, calculated and deduced moment motion of billions of stars."

(Responsible editor: Lu Guang)