by Michael Cooney, NetworkWorld
Microsoft researchers are experimenting with a programmable, low-cost prototype switch they say could help support cloud or other network-delivered services.
Called ServerSwitch, the package integrates a high performance, programmable ASIC switching chip with a fully programmable multicore commodity server and control software designed to handle data center network traffic more efficiently than [...]

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An Interview with Joseph Hellerstein
by Nicole Hemsoth
MIT’s Technology Review provided some in-depth coverage on the top ten emerging technologies for the coming year. On a list that includes solar fuel, green concrete, and light-trapping photovoltaics the publication tacked on the concept of “cloud programming” — a revolutionary movement that is a attributed in large part [...]

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by Aharon Etengoff
Chip expert and analyst David Kanter has warned that cloud computing poses “definite” security risks for both corporations and individual end users.
“From a direct security stand point, one problem for cloud computing is the inherent risks of sharing the same physical hardware and software (i.e. multi-tenancy). While the software stack in a [...]

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More and more of today’s computing is happening in “the cloud” — not just on the desktop or even on the big servers in the basement but all over the Net at once. Government agencies, banks and companies like Google, Amazon and Microsoft maintain dozens of huge data centers all over the country and the [...]

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By Stacey Higginbotham
Tilera, a startup building chips that contain anywhere from 16 to 100 cores, said today it’s raised $25 million in a third round of funding from investors including Broadcom (BRCM). Chips made by Tilera, which we named as one of five multicore statups to watch two years ago, are aimed at boosting performance [...]

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KEY CLOUD-COMPUTING TAKEAWAY: The network is broken.
Pacific Crest hosted seven panels and 30 company presentations on cloud-computing trends at the Fourth Annual Emerging Technology Summit in San Francisco last week. Despite the perception of the cloud as overhyped, it was clear that most, if not all, hardware, software and services companies are aggressively repositioning [...]

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SGI, a global leader in HPC and data center solutions, today announced the immediate availability of Cyclone, the world’s first large-scale, on-demand cloud computing service specifically dedicated to technical applications.
Until now, cloud solutions have been primarily focused on running important business applications like CRM, ERP, email and other database programs. Cyclone capitalizes on over 20 [...]

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by Manek Dubash
Ten-gigabit Ethernet network switch vendor Arista Networks has been something of an industry poster child since its inception five years ago. It took its time producing its first products, but is now expanding into the UK.
When chief executive of Arista Networks Jayshree Ullal was in London recently, ZDNet caught up with her to [...]

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By Ryan Paul
The USPTO awarded search giant Google a software method patent that covers the principle of distributed MapReduce, a strategy for parallel processing that is used by the search giant. If Google chooses to aggressively enforce the patent, it could have significant implications for some open source software projects that use the technique, including [...]

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By Michael Biddick
Cloud computing has the potential to transform how government agencies tap into IT services, and open source is an underlying technology in several of the early government clouds that have been developed.
We have yet to see the federal government issue a position on open source clouds, but it’s clear that agencies have [...]

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In another move toward consolidation in business computing, Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft said they will spend as much as $250 million over the next three years in a new collaboration to deliver integrated systems, software and services for cloud computing.
The two expect to roll out a variety of products based on Microsoft’s Azure cloud service, running [...]

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by Johan De Gelas
Cloud Computing was probably the most popular buzzword of 2009. There was a lot of hype, but basically, cloud computing is about using the large datacenters of the Internet to your advantage. Either by copying the methods they use to be very scalable and available and applying them in your own datacenter [...]

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By Chris Mellor
Microsoft’s Azure storage offering suggests it is developing its own cloud storage operating system. Azure was developed in a Windows Azure Group which was separate from the Windows and Servers Group. The two organisations have now been combined into a new Servers and Cloud Division (SCD) unit, headed up by a senior VP, [...]

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By Guy Currier
Cloud computing and new mobility technologies gain focus as IT executives look beyond cost-cutting to new productivity and growth opportunities.
CIOs can be forgiven for feeling a bit jaded about the kind of chart shown on the right-hand page of this story. After all, how often have you heard that a new technology was [...]

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Microsoft Tuesday created a new division designed to brings its cloud and on-premises software development together and provide a consistent platform for corporate customers.
The Server and Cloud Division (SCD) will be part of the Server and Tools business unit and is a combination of the Windows Server and solutions group and the Windows Azure group. [...]

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By Dawn M. Foster
As we move into the Thanksgiving holiday here in the United States, people start thinking about wrapping up the current year and looking forward to what next year might have in store for us. A few of the open source industry analysts and other industry experts have started to post their predictions [...]

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By Gaston Hillar
“You already know that achieving a linear speedup as the number of cores increases in real life parallelized applications is indeed very difficult. However, sometimes, the multicore scalability of certain algorithms for existing multicore systems could be worse than expected. The overhead and the bugs introduced by concurrency could bring really unexpected scalability [...]

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Azure is Microsoft’s attempt to bridge the gap between desktop and cloud-based computing. The idea behind it is that applications developed using a common Windows programming model can be run either in-house or as a cloud service.
Microsoft chief software architect Ray Ozzie describes this as “giving customers choice”. Clearly, this is a well thought out [...]

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by Ina Fried
When Ray Ozzie penned his Internet Services Disruption memo back in 2005, he had a pretty good idea where the computing world was going. He just didn’t know how Microsoft was going to get there.
While many are ready to write off Microsoft as an declining icon of computing’s last generation, Ozzie sees [...]

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By James Reinders (Intel)
Available today: a way to test scaling using cloud-computing, Intel has released this web-based tool to help with parallel programming. The Intel® Parallel Universe Portal will take your Windows (32 bit) application, run it through the scaling analysis engine in Intel Parallel Studio, and give back a report about the performance running [...]

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