Category Archives: Cloud Computing
Preakness winner Cloud Computing to skip Belmont Stakes – FOXSports.com
NEW YORK (AP) Preakness winner Cloud Computing wont run in the Belmont Stakes, leaving the final leg of the Triple Crown without the winners of the first two races.
Kentucky Derby winner Always Dreaming also wont run in the 1+-mile Belmont on June 10 in New York.
Trainer Chad Brown confirmed Sunday that Cloud Computing would skip the Belmont, which had been expected.
Brown will still have a starter in the $1.5 million race: Twisted Tom, who won the Federico Tesio on April 22. Because Twisted Tom wasnt already nominated to the Triple Crown series, it will cost $75,000 to get him in the race. He will try to become the third gelding in history to win.
Other confirmed Belmont runners are Classic Empire, Japan-based Epicharis, J Boys Echo, Lookin At Lee, Senior Investment, Tapwrit and True Timber. Irap, Meantime and Multiplier are considered likely.
Also possible are Conquest Mo Money, Gormley, Hollywood Handsome, Irish War Cry and Patch.
The Belmont field is limited to 16 horses.
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Preakness winner Cloud Computing to skip Belmont Stakes - FOXSports.com
Baidu to use cloud computing, AI to improve behavioural analysis – South China Morning Post
Chinese internet giant Baidu says it plans to leverage advanced cloud computing to analyse the online data of millions of its users to help companies improve their marketing campaigns.
The Chinese search engine giant, which has real-time search data on more than 700 million internet users, is able to analyse individual users through its cloud arms artificial intelligence (AI), big data and cloud computing technologies, Yin Shiming, vice-president and general manager of Baidu Cloud Computing, said in Shenzhen.
AI is bringing in new ways of thinking for many traditional industries, said Yin, who cited the recent battle between Google DeepMinds AlphaGo computer program and Chinese Go master Ke Jie as supporting his view that the development of AI technology has stepped up.
Our Marketing Cloud, backed by Baidu Clouds data and technology, is not just saving resources and costs, but making marketing easier, Yin said.
Despite challenges from other local search brands such as Sogou and Qihoo 360, Baidus dominance in online search has hardly swayed over the years, accounting for about 75 per cent of the search market.
Baidus mobile app is ranked as the seventh most popular in China, with 244.3 million active mobile users as of the end of March, according to Beijing-based research agency Analysys.
Currently over 70 per cent of newly emerged marketing strategies are AI-driven ones, according to Tang Jin, a deputy general manager of Baidu Cloud Computing. But tonnes of data on the internet is ignored without being interpreted properly. To achieve precise marketing for commercial institutions, we need to understand user behaviour on the internet first, said Tang.
The scale of the cloud computing industry in the mainland is forecast to grow to 430 billion yuan (US$62.75 million) in 2019 from 150 billion yuan in 2015, according to the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.
Baidu launched its AI platform for commercial users in Beijing in November. The system is powered by cloud computing technologies that include perception, machine learning and deep learning. More than 30,000 enterprises from various sectors are reportedly employing Baidus cloud services.
The company is actively pushing for a transition from the traditional search-engine business to an AI-led company to broaden its revenue channels after reported 10.6 per cent drop in net profit during the first quarter ended March 31.
Baidu aims to intensify efforts in applying AI technology to improve existing products and accelerate the development of AI-enabled new businesses for higher revenue growth in the coming quarters, vice president Lu Qi said after the quarterly results in late April.
Baidu in January appointed Lu, a leading AI expert and former Microsoft Corp executive, as its chief operating officer in a bid to bolster its efforts in AI.
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Baidu to use cloud computing, AI to improve behavioural analysis - South China Morning Post
Cray Takes the Plunge into Cloud Computing – TOP500 News
Cray is now offering its Urika-GX supercomputer for rent. One of the last HPC system vendors to give cloud computing a whirl, the companys initial foray into supercomputer-as-a-service will target life science customers looking for compute cycles on something more sophisticated than a traditional cluster.
To make its cloud business fly, Cray is partnering with Markley, a cloud infrastructure provider based in Boston, Massachusetts. Markley is a fairly typical cloud company, offering services like collocation, utility storage, disaster recovery, and so on. The company promises 100 percent uptime.
Crays entrance into the cloud came about as a result of a beta trial of the Urika-GX supercomputer by a research institute located outside of Boston. According to Ted Slater, who heads up the healthcare and life sciences unit at Cray, genomic researchers there were doing variant analysis, studying cell mutations associated with disease. Identifying those mutations can often lead to effective diagnosis and treatments.
Slater says the researchers were able to realize a five-fold speed-up on their variant analysis runs, compared to the HPC clusters they were using. That allowed them to analyze more data and ask more interesting questions. In fact, the faster turn-around time sped up the whole workflow, including software development of the genomic codes.
Its not too surprising that a Urika-GX could outrun a conventional HPC cluster, given its customized design, in particular, its use of the Aries interconnect to speed inter-node communications. Its also important to know that Urika-GX is an extremely flexible platform for analytics, says Slater.
The system comes with a complete software stack tuned for analytics applications, especially graph analytics. That includes the low-level Cray Graph Engine, a popular statistical programming languages in R, and distributed programming frameworks, like Hadoop and Spark. Application libraries can be added as needed.
Thanks to the five-fold performance improvement, the research institute was sold on the Urika-GX, but they preferred to rent rather than buy. After all, says Fred Kohout, Crays senior vice president of products and chief marketing officer, who wouldnt want to use a Cray?
Although the cloud offering will initially be confined to the Urika-GX system and life science types, Kohout says theyre already considering ways to expand the business. Were going to continue to look at other industries and other parts of the Cray portfolio as they make sense, says Kohout. And well roll those out in the months ahead.
If you happen to be attending the Bio-IT World Conference and Expo in Boston this week (May 23-25), Cray and Markley will be on hand to talk about their cloud computing venture. If you miss the event, the two companies will be conducting a live webinar on the new service on June 13th at 10:00 am PDT. You can register for it here.
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Cray Takes the Plunge into Cloud Computing - TOP500 News
Cloud Computing’s Trainer Wins One for His Mentor at Preakness – New York Times
New York Times | Cloud Computing's Trainer Wins One for His Mentor at Preakness New York Times Chad Brown after Cloud Computing, a horse he trained, won the Preakness Stakes on Saturday at Pimlico in Baltimore. Credit Rob Carr/Getty Images. BALTIMORE You don't choose your mentors, they choose you. Ask Chad Brown. He was a small-town ... Cloud Computing's Preakness win one to appreciate Cloud Computing wins again; this time, as a 13-1 shot at the Preakness Cloud Computing Wins Preakness Stakes With Upset Finish |
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Cloud Computing's Trainer Wins One for His Mentor at Preakness - New York Times
Red Hat to acquire cloud computing firm – Triangle Business Journal
Red Hat to acquire cloud computing firm Triangle Business Journal Harry Mower, head of Red Hat's developer division, says the relationship between the companies has been building over the past year. Both worked on the same upstream project: Eclipse Che, an open-source cloud integrated development environment. Red Hat To Acquire Codenvy Codenvy Blog |
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Red Hat to acquire cloud computing firm - Triangle Business Journal
Rackspace names new CEO and acquires TriCore Solutions for biggest buy in company’s history – Cloud Tech
To say it has been a busy week at Rackspace would be something of an understatement. The company has announced the appointment of Joe Eazor as its new chief executive while also unveiling the acquisition of enterprise app management provider TriCore Solutions.
Eazor joins Rackspace having previously headed up EarthLink. The company had specialised in dial-up internet but moved into the 21st century with the addition of a cloud and networking portfolio, a shift with which Eazor is credited, culminating in a billion dollar merger with Windstream announced in November last year.
The companys missive indicated no strategic shift this time around, however, with Eazor saying he was excited by the huge market opportunity that Rackspace has in managed services.
Rackspace is uniquely well positioned to take advantage of this trend, as the only provider who can deliver expertise and exceptional customer service for all of the leading public and private clouds, along with managed hosting, Eazor said in a statement
Thanks to the strategy Rackspace adopted a few years ago, its got the early lead in the managed cloud space, he added. My goal here is to build on that foundation and make us the worlds preeminent IT services company.
This was expanded upon in a blog post titled Why Im joining Rackspace the valedictory post from outgoing CEO Taylor Rhodes at the beginning of this month was naturally titled Why Im leaving Rackspace where Eazor discussed the importance of leaving the public arena. As a private company, we can move more aggressively and rapidly to allocate resources for long-term growth, to enhance our product offerings, to expand into new geographies and make smart acquisitions, he wrote.
Lo and behold, news on the latter duly arrived with intention to buy TriCore Solutions. The company serves approximately 275 managed service customers and aims to deliver services on infrastructure in any location the customer chooses. This all rings nicely with Rackspaces ambition, announcing a partnership with Google to become its first managed cloud services support partner in March, as well as noting strong demand for AWS cloud customers, as well as Microsoft and OpenStack private cloud in its Q216 results last August.
The transaction is expected to close in June with financial details not disclosed, while Eazor starts his new role on June 12.
Picture credit:Rackspace Afterparty TechStars Boulder 2011, byAndrew Hyde, used underCC BY/ Modified from original
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Rackspace names new CEO and acquires TriCore Solutions for biggest buy in company's history - Cloud Tech
Cloud computing will change the nature of hospital IT shops – Healthcare IT News
Start putting the puzzle pieces together and a clear picture emerges of hospitals implementing more and more cloud services in the immediate future.
The freshest of those pieces, IDCs Cloud in Healthcare 2.0, said that hospitals are acquiring a taste for buying IT via the pay-as-you-go model and its operational expenditure approach rather than purchasing technology the old-fashioned way, as a capital expenditure.
The use of cloud computing as an increasingly business-critical technology is quickly changing how healthcare organizations and payers evaluate, procure, and deploy IT assets, IDC analysts wrote.
[Also:Hospital datacenters: Extinct in 5 years?]
Earlier this month, HIMSS Analytics research director Brendan FitzGerald said that data-intensive trends such as precision medicine and population health will demand more robust infrastructure than what hospitals have in place to support EHRs today. Moving forward, then, more and more hospitals will turn to infrastructure-as-a-service offerings from Amazon, IBM, Google, Microsoft and others.
Smart CIOs should be thinking about the best ways to coordinate cloud vendors and infrastructure instead of applying an asset-centric view toward managing IT resources, IDC added, so they can ultimately deliver either cost-savings, innovation or both.
Hospitals should also be taking inventory of how many and exactly which cloud services various lines of business have tapped. While that may sound simple, the Internet Security Threat Report Symantec published late last month found that CIOs thought their users had about 30 or 40 cloud apps but, instead, enterprises have 928 already.
IDC said that cloud computing will become the main platform for analytics and big data, as well as mobile and internet of things tools. As those and other emerging technologies, such as cognitive computing, 3D printing and robotics spark digital transformation, CIOs and IT departments will have big opportunities to drive innovations in the cloud that they otherwise could not.
But the cloud model will also force them to evolve.
IT departments will operate in an environment that has a centralized operating model where they focus on service delivery and more predictable expenditures, the IDC analysts wrote. Cloud will enable an IT department to have a line of business point of focus because daily operations and services are acquired instead of managed internally.
Twitter:SullyHIT Email the writer: tom.sullivan@himssmedia.com
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Cloud computing will change the nature of hospital IT shops - Healthcare IT News
Cloud computing streamlines oil field monitoring – Williston Daily Herald
The oilfield has always been in a tech race, but the downturn helped light a fire under some feet. Among the new inventions and systems that surfaced as a result is one recently recognized by the American Petroleum Institute. It is a cloud computing system designed by AE2S that can help maximize the deluge of data produced by oilfield sites.
For now, the system is being used primarily on saltwater disposal sites, but it would be useful in the oil and gas sector as well, according to Instrumentation and Control Systems Division Manager for AE2S Jason G. Sanden.
The oil and gas sector is looking to become more active, but it faces a tight labor pool. Cloud computing could help them meet their obligations more efficiently and with fewer people, Sanden believes. Typically, Bakken oilfield companies have sent employees directly on site to take readings and check tank levels, but the AE2S cloud computing system can handle that remotely. Alarms can be set to go off when parameters fall outside the desired range, triggering automatic adjustments to prevent problems before they happen.
We took the power of the internet and put the information up in the cloud, so you can get the information wherever you are, Sanden said.
Larger oilfield operators may have something like this already, Sanden said, but many of the smaller operators do not. Since the system is cloud-based, there are no special computers, nor particular software programs, for companies to buy, which makes it more cost-effective. Data that the company is already generating with its own systems can be pushed to the cloud into a customized program for real-time monitoring and control.
The company can access the resulting reports and schematics through a secure webpage on a device of choice, whether mobile or desktop. Encryption ensures that the page is not accessible to anyone who isnt authorized.
While sending employees driving around to well sites has been typical in the Bakken, its not necessarily the most efficient way to do it.
If something is shut down for a day, and you didnt know about it until you came around, thats a lot of lost production, a lot of lost operation, Sanden said. With real-time monitoring and control, you can see those as they happen and even take action remotely to change a pump, reset a valve and things like that.
The programs can even tag a variety of data for the particular equipment in question, such as maintenance schedules, run times and the last calibration. Being able to link so much historical data is another feature that makes the AE2S system unique, Sanden said. Another is the customizability that the company offers.
We didnt develop the technology, but we adapted it for the industry and have made it economical for the smaller operators, Sanden said. One thing we do a bit differently is we really customize our system for the client. There are some satellite-based systems out there, but theyre not that customizable. They are pretty canned as far as the services offered.
The AE2S system can be laid out physically the same as the operation, so it is easier to follow from beginning to end.
Companies that did this while they were booming have been able to take advantage of it in the downturn, Sanden said.
The company is now working on a data management system for day to day operations of a facility. Its not specific to the oil and gas industry, but its definitely applicable, Sanden said.
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Cloud computing streamlines oil field monitoring - Williston Daily Herald
Make Sense of Edge Computing vs. Cloud Computing – Linux.com (blog)
Make Sense of Edge Computing vs. Cloud Computing Linux.com (blog) Edge computing will not replace cloud computing, though the two approaches can complement each other. The internet of things is real, and it's a real part of the cloud. A key challenge is how you can get data processed from so many devices. Cisco ... |
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Make Sense of Edge Computing vs. Cloud Computing - Linux.com (blog)
Is This the Airbnb of Cloud Computing? – Bloomberg – Bloomberg
Its too late to invest in Airbnb Inc. but a company that bills itself as the Airbnb of cloud computer storage is raising cash -- and anyone with an Internet connection can get in on the action.
Storj Labs Inc. is sellingdigital coins at 50 cents apiece to raise $30 million in an early stage financing round. In just five days, hundreds of contributors signed up for a piece of what they hope will be the next Silicon Valley unicorn. But theres a catch -- unlike traditional venture capital investments, the tokens dont confer a claim on Storjs equity or future profits.
Instead, the tokens value derives from their utility in the firms app, by providing access to data storage on a distributed network. They are the latest entry in the growing ledger of cryptocurrencies, digital coins that unlock myriad apps across the computing world. The coins are tradable on dozens of online exchanges and demand for all sorts of them has exploded as people speculate on the next big tech startup.
The average investor is missing out on the Ubers and AirBnbs of the world, said Bart Stephens, a managing partner at Blockchain Capital, a VC firm thats invested in blockchain-related startups since 2012. If the next Uber decides to issue tokens, that would be an opportunity for more investors to get access to the most exciting technologies out there.
The Storj sale is known as an initial coin offering, a model of finance spreading across the tech sector.Investors spent $332 million on tokens in the past year, more than double what VCs handed over in seed rounds, according to data compiled by coin-focused blog The Control.The haul is slated to hit $600 million in 2017, it says, adding to a market for tokens thats nearly tripled in the past year.
ICOs are possible thanks to blockchain, the catchall term for a digital ledger that promises incorruptible storage of financial transactions. Banks and stock exchanges have spent millions on it, looking for ways to cut the costs for transferring money or recording equity sales. One of the latest to back the technology wasthe chief executive officer of Fidelity Investments, AbigailJohnson. Most famously, its the technology that underpins bitcoin -- just as it does for every token offered in an ICO.
Their massive increase in popularity has more than a few detractors warning of a bubble, worried that the allure of finding the next tech lottery ticket is fueling rampant speculation. The concern is particularly acute at a time when investors are fretting about stretched valuations for tech startups, with the likes of Uber commanding multibillion-dollar price tags even as they burn through cash.
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Take Gnosis, a prediction market application based on the Ethereum blockchain that raised $12.5 million in 12 minutes on April 24, resulting in a market cap of almost $300 million. Its generated no revenue and has little more than a white paper describing what it intends to do. Yet its tokens, which would allow users to bet on things such as election outcomes, soared eightfold in the three weeks since May 2, giving it a valuation of over $2 billion -- more than the average Russell 2000 Index stock.
Gnosiss runup is just part of the craze thats gripped the cryptocurrency market in the last month, with the price of a bitcoin surging over 30 percent in the past week alone to more than $2,500. Thats pushed the market capitalization of digital currencies over 50 percent higher to more than $90 billion.
Even after that surge, the market is still relatively small, though its taking steps toward maturity as the ICO boom spreads. There are platforms to track historical prices and volume, and reports on individual issuances to help prospective buyers assess a firms prospects.
The offerings happen outside the purview of regulators -- quite by design -- as technically, the coins are part of the app and not securities. ICOs dont have disclosure requirements, and the issuer can accept an unlimited number of U.S. investors, instead of the 99 vetted investors limited to traditional VC funding rounds.
The space has also been a breeding ground for scams, and some coins have turned out to be vulnerable to attacks. Hackers were able to steal $50 million from a fund called Decentralized Autonomous Organization after it raised $150 million in the biggest issuance ever in April 2016.
For entrepreneurs, the appeal is obvious. A white paper published online replaces weeks of pitches to VC firms, followed by an online auction that can take minutes. The technology can be poked and prodded by geeks around the world, providing a depth of expertise often missing at even the best Silicon Valley firms.
You dont have to limit yourself, said Jae Kwon, who raised $16.8 million in a coin sale for Cosmos, which aims to provide custodian-like servicefor transactions across different blockchains. There are just not that many VCs and theyre not experts. People who contributed to our fundraiser are the experts.
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Is This the Airbnb of Cloud Computing? - Bloomberg - Bloomberg