George Ayotte

The US Department of Energy said today it will spend $32 million on a project that will deploy a large cloud computing test bed with thousands of Intel Nehalem CPU cores and explore the work of commercial cloud offerings from Amazon, Microsoft and Google. NetworkWorld Extra: 15 genius algorithms that aren't boring Magellan will explore whether cloud computing can help meet the overwhelming demand for scientific computing, the DOE stated. Ultimately the project, known as Magellan, will look at cloud computing as a cost-effective and energy-efficient way for scientists to accelerate discoveries in a variety of disciplines, including analysis of scientific data sets in biology, climate change and physics, the DOE stated.

Although computation is an increasingly important tool for scientific discovery, and DOE operates some of the world's most powerful supercomputers, not all research applications require such massive computing power. While shared resources are not new to high-end scientific computing, smaller computational problems are often run on departmental Linux clusters with software customized for the science application, the DOE stated. The number of scientists who would benefit from mid-range computing far exceeds the amount of available resources, the DEO stated. Cloud computing centralizes the resources to gain efficiency of scale and permit scientists to scale up to solve larger science problems while still allowing the system software to be configured as needed for individual application requirements. The combined set of systems will create a cloud testbed that scientists can use for their computations while also testing the effectiveness of cloud computing for their particular research problems. DOE is funding the project with American Recovery and Reinvestment Act money that will be divided equally amongst its Argonne National and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories.

Test staff will use performance-monitoring software to analyze what kinds of science applications are being run on the system and how well they perform on a cloud. Such high bandwidth will facilitate rapid transfer of data between geographically dispersed clouds and enable scientists to use available computing resources regardless of location, the DOE stated The Magellan system will be used to measure a variety of DOE applications and analyze its suitability for a cloud model by making Magellan available to Lawrence Berkley's 3,000 science users. The DOE facilities will be linked the agency's blazing 100Gbps Energy Sciences Network (ESnet). Lawrence Berkeley recently got $62 million to enhance ESnet wit the equipment to take it to 100Gbps. ESnet serves an estimated 50,000 to 100,000 DOE users, as well as more than 18,000 non-DOE researchers from universities, government agencies, and private industry. "We know that the model works well for business applications, and we are working to make it equally effective for science," said Pete Beckman, director of Argonne's Leadership Computing Facility and project lead. "We know that the model works well for business applications, and we are working to make it equally effective for science."

Over the past decade, the Internet has become a major source of donations for political campaigns and non-profit groups. But it's not just about campaign cash: Piryx also lets groups receive digital reports on their donation activities, review and audit all online donation filings and keep track of potentially inappropriate donations. Piryx, which made its official debut at Network World's DEMOfall '09 this week, is trying to become a one-stop shop for non-profits and politicians who are looking to raise serious cash for their causes.

Among other things, Piryx has helped launch the campaign for rocker Jon Bon Jovi's Soul Foundation, a nonprofit aimed at alleviating poverty and homelessness. What is Piryx's target audience and what is Piryx providing them that PayPal currently cannot? In this interview, Piryx founder and CEO Tom Serres talks about the inspiration for his company, what it costs to use Piryx and how he plans on dealing with the threat of politically motivated DDoS attacks. We were originally aimed at political organizations who needed help doing rapid response for online fundraising and who were doing the same things that Barack Obama did, but having the added capability seeing where the donations and support are coming from through all points of virtual connectivity, whether that's through Facebook, Twitter or blogs. Joe Wilson, who became famous for calling the president a liar earlier this month.

One recent client we signed up was Rep. There was a massive surge in both support for and opposition against him. Once he got up and running, he was raising $1.5 million through our system in a matter of days. And he came to us to set him up with an online fundraising page because for him to set up a processing account and then track where all the donations were coming from would have taken a long time using the PayPal API. So we had him up and running in about five to ten minutes and in real time he was able to track where his messages were going, why people were donating to him and so forth. Had he relied on traditional payment processors he wouldn't have had that kind of customization and he wouldn't have been able to deploy it as rapidly as he did. When you create a payment page you can tie it to an affiliate tracking code.

How exactly does it let the user have that level of detail? Then you can push it out to a particular channel such as Facebook, a blog, a social evangelist, a product evangelist or an e-mail marketing campaign. So as a donor you can navigate to that donation page and you can make that donation and then the organization that initiated that page can determine why you were there. It's a gateway for you to communicate with people who might be receptive to your message. They can determine how much of their money they raised from Twitter, Facebook and so forth and get a better understanding of what messages people are reacting to.

What steps would I have to go through. So let's say I'm a politician looking to set up an account with Piryx. When our clients go through our setup process we're going to ask them for things such as bank account numbers and routing information. There's a verification process and we have automated ways of setting them up through that, and we do that to make sure they aren't fraudulent users. If they're a corporation we want their employer ID number, their corporate tax ID, things like that. The basic process is that you fill out a form with all the pertinent information, you submit it, it activates your account and then sends you a link to authenticate your e-mail address.

Basically Piryx gets 4.5% every donation to start. What percentage of each donation made through the system goes to Piryx? Then once your campaign or organization raises $100,000 we gradually cut the rate we take per donation. You were hit by a DDoS attack after Joe Wilson shouted "You lie!" at President Obama earlier this month. Then once you get over $1 million in total donations, we take 4% per donation.

Do you think that as Piryx becomes more of a home for politicians and political organizations it will become more of a target for DDoS attacks? Yes we are and despite getting hit with that DDoS attack, we're even further along in shoring up our protection mechanisms than we thought we'd be at this point. How are you preparing for that possibility? Keep in mind that we're still a small startup company and we have around 150 users nationwide, up from around two users back when we first launched in February. This is our big coming out party. We've been under the radar until DEMO rolled around this week.

The District of Columbia this week hired a specialized search engine developer and entrepreneur as its new chief technology officer, overseeing what is arguably one of the most visible, progressive - and troubled - municipal technology operations in the U.S. New CTO Bryan Sivak is the founder of InQuira Inc. a privately held San Bruno, Calif.-based knowledge management firm, and has long worked on developing search engine technology designed for customer service environments. The new CTO joins a technology operation has faced some difficulties this year. Sivak succeeds Vivek Kundra, who left earlier this year after his appointment by President Barack Obama to become the nation's first CIO. That position had been filled on an interim basis since Kundra's departure.

A week after Kundra was appointed to the White House post, federal law enforcement officials filed bribery charges against Yusuf Acar, the department's acting chief security officer, in connection with what prosecutors alleged were a number of schemes developed to defraud the District of thousands of dollars. Payments were allegedly made to those "workers." After the arrests, Kundra took a leave from his new federal post. The scheme involved adding non-existent employees, or "ghost workers"," to the city payroll. Once the Obama administration determined that Kundra was not connected to the bribery scheme, he returned to the post. He is also a strong proponent of cloud computing.

Kundra gained notoriety and the attention of the Obama administration for his efforts to increase accessibility to government data. Mitchell Kramer, an analyst at the Patricia Seybold Group in Boston, said InQuira began operating as a developer of natural language search technology. This technology differs from more general Google-type search products by indexing only relevant information that can best answer specific customer queries. Later it combined that technology with a knowledge management and search application to create customer service tools that help customers seek product information and help on a company's Web site. Kramer said the market served by InQuira is growing, and is focused on high-end customers.

Kramer said it's unclear why someone with Sivak's background was selected for the District CTO's job. "For the last seven years he has worked for small software vendor that has a very narrow and not widely adopted application," he said. Salesforce.com is emerging as a competitor in that business. Kramer said Sivak could help the District use IT to provide better services to residents. Sivak was not immediately available for comment. But he wondered how Sivak will handle more general IT issues, such as changes to the government's general ledger systems, at least in the short term. "I'm sure he is capable of learning that stuff, but it's not clear that he has had the experience in acquiring, building and supporting those applications," Kramer said. In a prepared statement announcing the appointment, Washington D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty said that Sivak "brings a wealth of software and Internet technology experience to District government, and we look forward to putting his talents to good use for our residents." Prior to founding InQuira, Sivak co-founded Electric Knowledge LLC in 2000 along with Edwin Cooper.

Sivak had earlier worked as a software engineer at IBM. In 2002 the company merged with answerFriend and the combined company became the basis of InQuira.

PORTLAND, Ore. - Amazon.com Inc. is to high performance computing what McDonald's is to food: fast, cheap but with a limited menu. Amazon may be helping supercomputing centers indirectly by popularizing the pay-as-you-go model, which makes it easier for the centers to attract business users and clearly contrast their services against the online giant. But while some HPC users may refer to Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service as a "CPU farm" or a "CPU bin," there are aspects of the company's model and pricing scheme that may be having an impact on supercomputing centers that have been typically been the domain of researchers. Access to supercomputing is increasingly seen as critical to U.S. competitiveness for its ability to test designs virtually and speed products to market.

OSC is working to make its model easier to use. That has encouraged some states, including Ohio, New Mexico and Montana, to invest in supercomputing programs aimed at smaller businesses. "You cannot just have the biggest of Fortune 100 companies using supercomputing to become more competitive - you really need to enable the whole supply chain to become more competitive," said Ashok Krishnamurthy, senior director, research and scientific development at the Ohio Supercomputer Center in Columbus. This month, it announced that it had developed with Nimbis Services Inc., which provides access OSC's compute services through a Web portal. But for the most part, that's where the comparison to Amazon ends. Users can pay for the service using using a credit card, like the EC2 model.

Nimbis also negotiates terms with HPC computing application providers to enable users to run those apps on OSC's platform. Supercomputing centers say they can provide expert help as well as ISV software, fast interconnects, large memory footprints, and other technologies not available though commercial cloud infrastructure providers. Nimbis is a for profit software company that can make agreements with vendors more readily than an academic supercomputing center can, said Krishnamurthy. While Krishnamurthy said the broader familiarity with Amazon's model makes it easier to explain their process to customers, "our model is not Amazon's model." The New Mexico Computing Applications Center in Albuquerque, which was funded by the state and operates as a nonprofit, offers customers a pricing sheet for compute cycles and monthly invoice. It uses a large cloud computing platform that also allows it to move work to IBM's Computing on Demand Centers for projects that require more compute power than it has on hand.

That keeps the cost management simple as the company goes "after specific industries that can help bring high paying jobs to the state," said Scott Collins, the center's CTO. "We're not competing with [Amazon]," said Collins. "Our partnerships with the national labs allow us to leverage expertise to bring in people to work on the hard problems." In Butte, Montana, Rocky Mountain Super Computing center was established with similar goals. Similar to Ohio and New Mexico, its primary mission to develop jobs and make compute resources easily adopted through a "pay as you go" or "on demand" model. The booth was staffed by people who said they couldn't talk to the press without public relations office involvement. At the SC09 supercomputing show here this week, Amazon.com Inc. had a booth for the first time, tucked away in a corner of the trade show floor. That was no matter, as there were other firms on show, such as Cycle Computing LLC, that were working to make platform easier to use with management tool that scheduled and execute compute cycles on Amazon's cloud, allowing user to easily scale their codes over as many processors as they need, according to Jason Stowe, the company's CEO.