IBM Shifts Cluster Tech to Cloud

Grazed from EETimes. Author: Rick Merritt.

IBM is applying technology developed for large server clusters to cloud computing systems. The move is another example of how the company is focusing its efforts on the web datacenters that are the fastest growing slice of today’s server market IBM sees a wide array of applications for its distributed job scheduler, now the basis for a U.S. Patent 8,645,745. It described possible uses including trading, retail, online gaming, and medical research services.

"There are a wide variety of job scheduler techniques to optimize resource usage in a cluster, for example by scheduling jobs in parallel," said Eric Barsness, one of the inventors for the IBM patent. "We flipped that model to have multiple job schedulers running in parallel, each managing a subset of jobs," he wrote in an email exchange…

The technique aims to "help large clusters handle a large volume of concurrent requests for resources… eliminating a potential bottleneck," Barsness said. "You might not use this in a small cluster or one that isn’t very busy, however, because it could add unnecessary complexity…

Read more from the source @ http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1322174&_mc=RSS_EET_EDT

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