Dear All,

I am sure some of you will be interested in articles appreared in the
recent TFCC newsletter. Pls see the msg below.

Thanks
Raj

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: July TFCC Newsletter
Date: Wed, 2 Jul 2003 12:59:13 -0700 (PDT)
From: Frank Sommers <fsommers@...>
To: tfcc@...

Dear TFCC List Subscriber,

I'm pleased to announce the July/03 issue of the TFCC's very own
Newsletter, which is available at:

http://www.clustercomputing.org

The current issue carries the topic of large-scale clusters -
"geo-clusters" or "grids" - into the realm of data management. Jim Gray
(Microsoft Research) has contributed a fascinating piece on the economics
of distributed computing. The article takes current price trends in
hardware and networking into account to help determine when moving a
computing task from one cluster node (or grid node) to another makes
economic sense.

Wolfgang von Rueden and Rosy Mondardini (both with CERN) are involved in
the construction of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which will become the
world's most powerful particle accelerator when it starts operations in
2007. LHC will generate several petabytes of data per year, and that data
must be made accessible for analysis to over 5,000 physicists world-wide.
Their article describes some of the solutions to that huge data management
challenge utilizing grid technologies.

Finally, Craig Lee (The Aerospace Corporation) graciously contributed a
review of CCGrid 2003, one of the two international conferences
co-sponsored and organized by the TFCC, and which took place in Tokyo in
May.

With this Newsletter issue, we started a new section offering brief
descriptions of cluster- and grid-related software releases. The current
issue features a brief synopsis of GridSim 2.1, an open-source grid
simulation toolkit.


Call for Contributions

The Newsletter is the effort of the TFCC community, and you are invited to
submit news items, announcements (conferences, projects, grants, products,
etc), that you think might be of interest to the broader cluster computing
community. If you're willing to write up a brief description of your
project or product, we will include it in a forthcoming issue's "New
Releases" section. Otherwise, for short news items, we'll provide a URL
reference from the front page.

Of course, the Newsletter welcomes full article submissions as well. Over
the past three issues, we tried to focus on a topic in each issue, and
explore that topic from different angles in a few articles. We're planning
to keep that approach for forthcoming issues, with the following areas of
focus:

Vol. 5/No. 2: Application server clustering
Vol. 5/No. 3: What's new with Beowulfs
Vol. 5/No. 4: Cluster interconnects
Vol. 5/No. 5: Small-scale clusters, clusters-in-a-box, embedded clusters, etc.
Vol. 5/No. 6: Generic clusters vs. custom built clusters/supercomputers

If you'd like to submit articles on any of these topics, or if you have
any suggestions about future subject areas, please let us know by sending
email to editor@....


Call for department editor

A new feature that we have been thinking of introducing would be titled
"Living with Clusters" or "Cluster Experience," or something along those
lines. It would feature a brief article, or perhaps an interview, with
someone who would share his (or her!) experience in managing a large
cluster configuration on a day-to-day basis. I think this feature would
interest those who are considering building or using a cluster, but are
not quite sure what to expect in terms of the added management
responsibility. This Newsletter feature would offer first-hand accounts of
"living with clusters." However, we do not have any spare cycles at the
moment to introduce that feature (spot potential contributors, edit the
articles, etc). So we'd like to take advantage of some parallel
processing: If you're interested in editing that new section, please send
us email at editor@....


Acknowledgment

I would like to take this opportunity to thank the TFCC for the generous
support of $1,000 for the production of the Newsletter in 2003. This
support will enable us to continue improving the Newsletter, and to
publish more frequent issues for the rest of this year.


Sponsorship opportunity

As you know, the Newsletter is an entirely volunteer effort. However, we
do have some expenses on occasion, and we'd especially like to compensate
some of the volunteer students who have been very helpful in making
improvements to the Newsletter. If you or your company is interested in
sponsoring the Newsletter, please send me an email to
fsommers@....

And, most important, have a wonderful Summer!

Sincerely,

Frank Sommers
Editor
TFCC Newsletter






IEEE Task Force on Cluster Computing
http://www.clustercomputing.org
http://www.ieeetfcc.org
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