Monthly Archives: April 2011

Choosing a File System on Amazon EC2 – Part 2

Posted on April 29, 2011 by astrocompute

In the last post, we looked at the performance and cost of data sharing options on the Amazon EC2, for one workflow: a mosaic of images of M17 computed with the Montage image mosaic engine, an I/O-bound application. Here we … Continue reading →

Posted in astroinformatics, Astronomy, Cloud computing, cyberinfrastructure, High performance computing, image mosaics, information sharing, Parallelization, programming, software engineering | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Choosing A File System When Running Applications on the Amazon EC2 Cloud

Posted on April 22, 2011 by astrocompute

The cloud provides a powerful environment for running workflow applications, which communicate data between tasks using files.  The processing environment must provide access to files, either through a shared file system or by transferring data between nodes.  Amazon EC2 provides … Continue reading →

Posted in astroinformatics, Astronomy, Cloud computing, cyberinfrastructure, Data Management, High performance computing, image mosaics, information sharing, jobs, Parallelization, programming, software engineering | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

GPU’s vs. CPU’s: Apples vs. Oranges?

Posted on April 15, 2011 by astrocompute

This will be the last of three posts on processing with GPU’s.  Jan Zverina and Peter Varhol wrote a couple of interesting articles on the applicability of GPU’s and CPU’s in scientific data processing. They made a convincing case that … Continue reading →

Posted in astroinformatics, computer videos, cyberinfrastructure, Data Management, GPU's, High performance computing, information sharing, Parallelization, programming, software engineering, software maintenance, software sustainability | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

GPU’s in Astronomy: Critical Decisions for Early Adopters

Posted on April 8, 2011 by astrocompute

Following on from last week’s post about Graphical Processing Units (GPU’s), I have been reading another paper by the same team from the Center for Astrophysics and Supercomputing, Swinburne University of Technology in Australia.  This paper, Fluke et al. (2011), … Continue reading →

Posted in astroinformatics, Astronomy, cyberinfrastructure, GPU's, High performance computing, information sharing, Parallelization, programming, software engineering, software maintenance, software sustainability | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

The Use of Graphical Processing Units (GPU’s) In Astronomy

Posted on April 1, 2011 by astrocompute

Graphical Processing Units (GPU’s) were designed in the first instance to handle graphics intensive applications. Their design is radically different from the Central Processing Units that power computers. Whereas a modern CPU has several cores, allowing small-scale parallelisation, a  GPU … Continue reading →

Posted in Astronomy, cyberinfrastructure, GPU's, High performance computing, Parallelization, programming, software engineering, software maintenance | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments