Grazed from PR Newswire. Author: PR Announcement.

Altair today announced the release of CFDCalc, an on-demand and affordable computational fluid dynamics (CFD) application, built on top of Altair’s industry-leading CFD solver, AcuSolve™. Leveraging the reliability, efficiency and near-instant availability of Amazon Web Services (AWS), this innovative cloud application serves as both a software-as-a-service (SaaS) application and as a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) application. With this, users can access high-end CFD technology as an online, cloud-based service, and industry experts can take advantage of the vertical framework and easily develop their own vertical CFD applications.

CFDCalc comes with two pre-packaged, special-purpose vertical applications that are developed to solve two common yet challenging CFD problems: fluid mixing in the industrial and consumer mixing industry, and thermal cooling in the electronics industry. Altair will offer additional vertical applications while promoting experts and developers globally to use the framework to develop new applications, further enhancing the portfolio of solutions…

Grazed from MarketWire. Author: PR Announcement.

NaviSite, Inc., a Time Warner Cable Company, today announced thelaunch of NaviCloud Director — a VMware vCloud(R) Powered IaaSplatform that uses VMware vCloud Director(R) 5.1, and is designed toprovide cloud-based businesses a more flexible, customizable,enterprise class, production-oriented hybrid cloud environment.

NaviCloud Director further enhances NaviSite’s public cloud portfolioby offering businesses an IaaS platform designed for trulyvirtualized applications. To build the new platform, NaviSite tookinto account its extensive experience in cloud services in additionto industry needs, upcoming trends and feedback from its customersand partners…

Grazed from FCW.com. Author: Frank Konkel.

In its lawsuit against the federal government filed in July, Amazon Web Services claims IBM’s protest of its $600 million cloud computing contract with the CIA was "untimely" and "meritless," and that’s just a snapshot of a 79-page document sitting before U.S. Court of Federal Claims Judge Thomas Wheeler.

The lawsuit, unsealed Aug. 20, blasted the Government Accountability Office’s June decision to uphold portions of bid protests filed by Big Blue as irrational and against federal contracting law — a "flawed" decision that AWS argues is based on a technicality and contends would not have changed the CIA’s decision…

Grazed from DZone. Author: Brian Prince.

I just stumbled upon an industry report by Cloud Spectator (www.cloudspectator.com). It ran a test on the top IaaS providers, looking for who had the best performance for the buck. As far as I know, Windows Azure and Microsoft had nothing to do with this report.

The abstract of the report:

With a lack of standardization in the IaaS industry, providers freely use unique terminology to describe their VM resource allocations. How do you compare an ECU to an HPCCU to a vCPU? This report examines the performance and pricing of 5 of the world’s largest IaaS providers over a 5-day period, and provides a process to clearly determine the price-performance value of a cloud provider, addressing the issue of standardization in the marketplace…

Grazed from MarketWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Addressing the global cloud skills gap is the number one priority to help accelerate the successful adoption of Cloud. To help close this gap the Cloud Credential Council is releasing the Professional level series and offering this at European and US conferences in September 2013.

Companies are recognizing the potential of cloud computing to transform their business, and they are searching for talent with the necessary skills to help them maximize their investment. The Cloud Credential Council addresses these needs by involving leading cloud organizations to help develop corporate guidance and cloud certification standards. The CCC is releasing five certifications at the Professional level:…

Grazed from International Business Times. Author: Jessica Menton.

Nero AG, best known for developing Nero Burning ROM, could rival tech giants Apple Inc. (Nasdaq: AAPL) and Google Inc. (Nasdaq: GOOG) by looking towards the future convergence of technology by syncing devices in a new way.

“We have basically two branches that we work on. There’s still a PC based product that’s our legacy product. That’s where we focus more on the capability of syncing, but not necessarily using the cloud. We have functionalities that also connect through the cloud, for example Google Drive, Drop box, in order to be able to use the content,” said Stefano Miotto, technical director EMEA & APAC at Nero AG…

Grazed from Sciencemag.org. Author: Vijaysree Venkatraman.

If data driven discovery becomes the norm, more scientists will need to upgrade from their desktop computers to more powerful, scalable computing systems. As director of research–physical sciences at the eScience institute at the University of Washington (UW), it’s Jeffrey Gardner’s job to help researchers with that migration.

In addition to being a facilitator of computational work, Gardner is a computational astrophysicist. He has run code that utilized all 100,000-plus computer processing unit (CPU) cores and 10,000-plus hard drives of the supercomputer Kraken at the National Supercomputing Center at the University of Tennessee Knoxville. He works part-time at Google, as a visiting scientist. Before joining UW, he was senior scientific specialist at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center. So, he knows about resources for scientific computation…

Grazed from PCWire. Author: Alex Woodie.

Cloud-based supercomputing is, theoretically, a great idea, but the trend has not taken off as some in the HPC field believed it would. That isn’t stopping the folks at Cycle Computing, who say its Amazon-based supercomputers are not only helping scientists and researchers get real work done, but freeing their brains to ask the really big questions.

Scientific creativity is being hamstrung by the finite resources of traditional fixed-size supercomputing infrastructures, Cycle Computing CEO Jason Stowe said in a recent video. While all kinds of advances are being made in the HPC arena–particularly on the software side–all too often, scientists and researchers can’t adequately explore their ideas or ask the big questions due to a sheer lack of HPC capacity…

Grazed from Diginomica. Author: Phil Wainewright.

Business users love the convenience of being able to sign up for new applications on-demand and use them on any device, any time, any place. IT and security managers are less enamored. A proliferation of Web apps, a boom in mobile working and the persistence of unsafe browsing habits are causing more and more headaches for those entrusted with safeguarding enterprise data. When security breaches occur, it’s IT that carries the can. No wonder they want to get more control and oversight of what users are up to.

During July and August I’ve posted a total of six articles on the topic of identity and access management — three vendor interviews and three customer case studies. Taken together, they provide a useful snapshot of enterprise adoption of these technologies to help manage cloud and mobile apps, along with insight into their future evolution…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Joe McKendrick.

We’ve been hearing about it for several years now: that IT departments will shrink or disperse as cloud computing takes hold in enterprises. A new survey, however, suggests that IT departments are actually expanding, and IT leaders are taking on elevated roles within businesses as a result of cloud.

The survey of 4,226 IT leaders across the globe, conducted by Cisco Consulting Services, in partnership with Intel, finds that while cloud adoption within enterprises is growing — now accounting for 23 percent of IT spending, and expected to rise to 27 percent over the next three years — there is no discernible reduction in on-premises IT taking place. In fact, a majority, 57%, see the size of IT increasing in terms of full-time IT headcount…