I was in Dubai on the last weekend of August, hosted by Symantec for their Partner Event called – Partner Engage 2008.

It was nicely done event.

We were conferred the award – Partner for Emerging Solutions. This is well deserved because it resonates with our focus on IT Automation and our SOM (Services Oriented Management) strategy.

SOM is the cornerstone of SOI and we have been able to successfully develop blue print for customers that brings enormous visibility into their Enterprise Infrastructure assisting making informed decisions. The relationship between CI’s (Configuration Items) is key to our SOM approach including users (is user a CI? Yes!).

The award by Symantec is to recognize us in helping customers offer technology; processes and sustainable methodology in building the blocks that will make them Adaptive Enterprise.

Thanks and Cheers!

Uttam

Large Hadron Collider, the world’s largest scientific experiment is embarked and it will get intense over next few months. The current stage is warm-up and calibration. The scope of the experiment is massive. While we would have all read and heard about the complexity involved including the huge accelerator ring, the collision and guiding technique, the interplanetary space etc and therefore the expected outcome thru findings – Higgs boson, quark-gluon plasma and beauty quark or ‘b quark’ – is hard to get to terms with.

I am excited, more so to realize how the world is coming together and collaborating by exploiting scientific computing and power of network to aid an experiment of this scale. The computing resources within CERN aren’t enough in spite of being really enormous and therefore data is being provided to hundreds of sites around the globe to thousands of physicists contributing to the experiment.

The CERN facility hosts cluster with over 15,000+ cores and is magnitude of several 10 TFlops, plus with over other 6000 PC’s being part of the facility, the storage is 7000 TB as they embark; but as LHC runs full capacity for over 200 days the need to store and process data would change to a magnitude never used before. Every second, 600 million particle collisions are measured, and scientists filter out the thousand or so that are interesting. The electronic ‘photo’ of each event requires 1 to 2Mb of storage. And thru the Tiered model of computation over 100,000 computers are likely to participate.

The data storage requirement will eventually be in the order of 20 petabytes per year.

All the scientists in CERN and across the world demanded a new approach to data storage, management, sharing and analysis – tasks handled by the LHC Computing Grid (LCG) project. I had a chance to know little about the LCG from a scientist in TIFR at Mumbai sometime ago. The LCG unlike the conventional Grid is a less overhead protocol and much more efficient.

The Interconnects in use and the job submissions (bear in mind this is not HPC but HTC – High Throughput Computing) is tremendous.

I am glued and will follow the progress closely.

Cheers!

Uttam