http://sciencex2.org/en/taxonomy/term/2101 The taxonomy view with a depth of 0. en http://sciencex2.org/en/node/17836 <h3 class="field-label">Description</h3> <div class="content"> <p>Simulation scientists are mostly limited by both the number, and the speed, of the computers available to them. Really large simulations need really serious computer resources, but simulations like that are pretty rare; so the resources for them have been concentrated in <a href="http://www.grid-support.ac.uk/content/view/239/157/">regional grids</a> or national centres like the UK's <a href="http://www.hpcx.ac.uk/">HPCx</a>.</p> <p>Economically this makes a lot of sense, but there's a lot of overhead; for instance, compute time has to be bid for long in advance of when it might actually be used. In that light, commodity on-demand computing services like <a href="http://aws.amazon.com/ec2">Amazon's EC2</a> begin to look promising as an alternative; they have even greater economies of scale than the national infrastructure services, can provide a scientist with more CPU power at essentially no notice, and often provide more flexibility in choice of operating system and software than a centrally-provided system can. At the moment, they don't scale to the massively parallel calculations that the national supercomputers specialize in, but sooner or later they'll be competitive even for those cases.</p> <div class="og_rss_groups"><ul class="links"><li class="first last og_links"><a href="/en/node/13855" class="og_links">Computer &amp; Information Science</a></li> </ul></div></div> <div class="field field-type-text field-field-source"> <h3 class="field-label">Source</h3> <div class="field-items"> <div class="field-item"><p><a href="http://www.grid-support.ac.uk/content/view/239/157/" title="http://www.grid-support.ac.uk/content/view/239/157/">http://www.grid-support.ac.uk/content/view/239/157/</a><br /> <a href="http://www.hpcx.ac.uk/" title="http://www.hpcx.ac.uk/">http://www.hpcx.ac.uk/</a><br /> <a href="http://aws.amazon.com/ec2" title="http://aws.amazon.com/ec2">http://aws.amazon.com/ec2</a></p> </div> </div> </div> http://sciencex2.org/en/node/17836#comments capability computing Cloud Computing cyberinfrastructure density functional theory eScience grid computing molecular dynamics parallelism scientific infrastructure Future of chemistry Computer &amp; Information Science Sat, 10 May 2008 16:25:00 -0700 Andrew Walkingshaw 17836 at http://sciencex2.org