Contrary Views

I did a review of a product recently. I liked the product and said so in the review. The product is good. It helps you manage physical as well as computer files in a really very efficient way. You should be able to find the piece of paper you wanted, very easily. That usually is the problem we all face everyday.

While thinking about it, I realized , a contrary view also is possible. One of the ways things are changing is a trend to have everything in the computer including information that is on paper today. The thinking is to get these scanned and manage every bit of document via the computer. If that approach is valid, then the view held by the product that we may be dealing with a mix of electronic and physical documents cannot be a very valid approach. It may actually be following the scanning approach.

Which is the right view! I guess, if we are worrying about now then the approach taken by the product under review is valid but soon enough it may be the next approach which ought to be taken. The basic issue really is where exactly we are. Are we into that all electronic future yet! Only time will tell, I guess!!!

teragrid the superpowered supercomputing grid

National center for supercomputing associations announced a super powered computing grid. While 280 teraflops of computing power and 20 petabytes of storage is impressive, it is the user interface that is supposed to be the crucial element for users.

Is anyone going to need more computing power! Well, it is always an application coming along that needs more resources than is available and thus catching up with all the available resources. It has happened always in computing history and I'm sure it is going to happen soon on this "teragrid" too. Until then it'll make the life of researchers in advanced areas easier quite a bit.

Computing Power On Tap- $1 per CPU Hour!!

Sun (www.sun.com) has announced a grid/utility computing resource. They have named it the network.com (www.network.com). Network.com is backed by a large grid of computers running Solaris10 and has a Network.com Applications catalog.

What happens is one could utilize this huge high power computing and pay for the time of actual use. That makes computing super power available to large community of users without making it necessary to buy and own large resources. Applications available cover the following right now.

• Computational Mathematics: Numerical computing, Linear Programming and Statistical computing and graphics applications.
  
• Computer Aided Engineering: Several Finite Element Analysis packages.
  
• Electronic design Automation: Spice simulation.
  
• Life Sciences:Large selection of Life Science related applications.
  
• General :3D rendering and environmental modeling packages.

The portal also allows software vendors to deploy their applications for "pay per use". They are allowed to charge a fee that they think is appropriate. Users too could upload their application.

Right now it is available to users in US only but should get extended to others soon.