Tag Archives: scalability

Event: Talk on Planet-Scale Distributed Storage by YouTube/PayPal architect Sugu Sougoumarane

Talentica Software invites you to a talk by Sugu Sougoumarane, a senior architect at YouTube, and co-founder of Youtube’s Vitess Project, which is an open-source scalable, distributed storage system that is used by YouTube for scaling.

The talk is on Friday, 8th July, from 3pm to 5:30pm, at Talentica Software, 4th Floor, Amar Megaplex, Baner Road. (Ample parking on Baner Road near the venue.) The event is free and open to all, but RSVP is necessary.

About the Speaker – Sugu Sougoumarane

Sugu is the co-founder of Youtube’s Vitess project, which has been under development since 2010. He hails from BITS Pilani and has been in the software industry for over 30 years. He has experience in a variety of fields including computer graphics, compilers, IDEs, databases, payments and software architecture. Prior to YouTube, Sugu joined X.com/PayPal in its early stages where he built many of its core features. He was also a member of the elite scalability team that was responsible for keeping PayPal scalable.

Abstract of the Talk

Sugu will cover the following topics as a part of his presentation

General Storage Concepts and Guidelines:

  • Computing trends: How distributed systems are changing the way we design software.
  • Challenges of distributed systems: Principles that govern the trade-offs.
  • How to practically apply these principles in real-life systems.
  • What is Paxos and how to tone it down when it’s not always needed.
  • How to make 2PC work, when it has always failed
  • Simplifying it all.

Vitess, the present and future

  • How was Vitess started and why we open-sourced it
  • Evolution of Vitess, from a connection proxy to a sprawled out planet scale storage solution. We are the real cockroach.
  • V3, the latest coolness
  • What’s in the future

Location, Fees, and Registration

The talk is on Friday, 8th July, from 3pm to 5:30pm, at Talentica Software, 4th Floor, Amar Megaplex, Baner Road. (Ample parking on Baner Road near the venue.)

This event is free and open for anybody to attend. However, seating at the venue is limited, so you must RSVP by sending a mail to rsvp@talentica.com.

Top 5 things to worry about when designing a Cloud Based SaaS

(This article on things you need to be careful when designing the architecture of a cloud based Software-as-a-Service offering is a guest post by Mukul Kumar, who, as SVP of Engineering at Pubmatic has a lot of hands-on experience with having designing, building and maintaining a very high performance, high scalability cloud-based service.)

Designing a SaaS software stack poses challenges that are very different from the considerations for host-based software design. The design aspects for performance, scalability, reliability of SaaS with lots of servers and lots of data is very different and interesting from designing a software that is installed on a host and is used by that host.

Here I list the top 5 design elements for Cloud Based SaaS.

High availability

SaaS software stack is built on top of several disparate elements. Most of the times these elements are hosted by different software vendors, such as Rackspace, Amazon, Akamai, etc. The software stack consists of several layers, such as – application server, database server, data-mining server, DNS, CDN, ISP, load-balancer, firewall, router, etc. Highly availability of SaaS actually means thinking about the high availability of all or most of these components. Designing high availability of each of these components is a non-trivial exercise and the cost shoots up as you keep on adding layers of HA. Such design requires thinking deeply about the software architecture and each component of the architecture. Two years back I wrote an article on Cloud High Availability, where I described some of these issues, you can read it here.

Centralized Manageability

As you keep on adding more and more servers to your application cluster the manageability gets hugely complex. This means:

  • you have to employ more people to do the management,
  • human errors would increase, and
  • the rate at which you can deploy more servers goes down.

And, don’t just think of managing the OS on these servers, or these virtual machines. You have to manage the entire application and all the services that the application depends on. The only way to get around this problem is to have centralized management of your cluster. Centralized management is not an easy thing to do, since every application is different, making a generalized management software is oversimplifying the problem and is not a full solution.

Online Upgradability

This is probably the most complex problem after high availability. When you have a cluster of thousands of hosts, live upgradability is a key requirements. When you release a new software revision, you need to be able to upgrade is across the servers in a controlled way, with the ability of rolling it back whenever you want – at the instant that you want, across the exact number of servers that you want. You would also need to control database and cache coherency and invalidation across the cluster is a controlled way. Again, this cannot be solved in a very generic way; every software stack has its own specificity, which needs to be solved in its own specific ways.

Live testability

Testing your application in a controlled way with real traffic and data is another key aspect of SaaS design. You should be able to sample real traffic and use it for testing your application without compromising on user experience or data integrity. Lab testing has severe limitations, especially when you are testing performance and scalability of your application. Real traffic patterns and seasonality of data can only be tested with real traffic. Don’t start your beta until you have tested on real traffic.

Monitor-ability

The more servers and applications that you add to your cluster the more things can fail and in very different ways. For example – network (NIC), memory, disk and many other things. It is extremely important to monitor each of these, and many more, constantly, with alarms using different communication formats (email, SMS, etc.). There are many online services that can be used for monitoring services, and they provide a host of difference services and have widely varying pricing. Amazon too recently introduced CloudWatch, which can monitor various aspects of a host such as CPU Utilization, Disk I/O, Network I/O etc.

As you grown your cluster of server you will need to think of these design aspects and keep on tuning your system. And, like the guys at YouTube said:

Recipe for handling rapid growth

    while (true)
    {
        identify_and_fix_bottlenecks();
        drink();
        sleep();
        notice_new_bottleneck();
     }

About the Author – Mukul Kumar

Mukul Kumar is the Co-Founder & Senior Vice President Engineering at PubMatic. PubMatic, an online advertising company that helps premium publishers maximize their revenue and protect their brands online, has its Research & Development center in Pune.

Mukul is responsible for PubMatic’s Engineering team and resides in Pune, India. Mukul was previously the Director of Engineering at PANTA Systems, a high-performance computing startup. Before that he was at VERITAS India, where he joined as the 13th employee and helped it grow to over 2,000 individuals. Mukul has filed for 14 patents in systems software, storage software, and application software. Mukul is a graduate of IIT Kharagpur with a degree in Electrical Engineering.

Mukul is very passionate about technology, and building world-class teams. His interests include architecting scalable and high-performance web-applications, handling and mining massive amounts of data and system & storage architecture.

Mukul’s email address is mukul at pubmatic.com.

Web Scalability and Performance – Real Life Lessons (Pune TechWeekend #3)

Last Saturday, we had TechWeekend #3 in Pune, on the theme of Website Scalability and Performance.  Mukul Kumar, co-founder, and VP of Engineering at Pubmatic, talked about the hard lessons in scalability they learnt on their way to building a web service that serves billions of ad impressions per month.

Here are the slides used by Mukul. If you cannot see the slides, click here.
Web Scalability & Performance

The talk was live-tweeted by @punetechlive and @d7ylive. Here are a few highlights from the talk:

  • Keep it simple: If you cannot explain your application to your sales staff, you probably won’t be able to scale it!
  • Use JMeter to monitor performance, to a good job of scaling your site
  • Performance testing idea: Take 15/20 Amazon EC2 servers, run JMeter with 200threads on each for 10 hours. Bang on your website! (a few days later, @d7y pointed out that using openSTA instead of JMeter can give you upto 500 threads per server even on old machines.)
  • Scaling your application: have a loosely coupled, shared nothing, stateless, distributed architecture
  • Mysql scalability tip: Be careful before using new features, or new versions. Or don’t use them at all!
  • Website scalability: think global. Some servers in California, some servers in London, etc. Similarly, think global when designing your app. Having servers across the world will drive architecture decisions. When half your data-center is 3000 miles from the other half, interesting, non-trivial problems start cropping up. Also, think carefully about horizontal scaling (lots of cheap servers) vs vertical scaling (few big fat servers)
  • memcache tip: pre-populate memcache with most common objects
  • Scalability tip: Get a hardware load balancer (if you can afford one). Amazon AWS has some load-balancers, but they don’t perform so well
  • Remember the YouTube algo for scaling:
    while(1){
    identify_and_fix_bottlenecks();
    eat_drink();
    sleep();
    notice_new_bottleneck();
    }

    there’s no alternative to this.
  • Scalability tip: You can’t be sure of your performance unless you test with real load, real env, real hardware, real software!
  • Scalability tip – keep the various replicated copies of data loosely consistent. Speeds up your updates. But, figure out which parts of your database must be consistent at all times, and which ones can have “eventual consisteny”
  • Hard lessons: keep spare servers at all times. Keep servers independent – on failure shouldn’t affect other servers
  • Hard lessons: Keep all commands in a script. You will have to run them at 2am. Then 3am. Then 7am.
  • Hard lessons: Have a well defined process for fault identification, communication and resolution (because figuring these things out at 2am, with a site that is down, is terrible.)
  • Hard lessons: Monitor your web service from 12 cities around the world!
  • Hard lesson, Be Paranoid – At any time: servers can go down, DDOS can happen, NICs can become slow or fail!

Note: a few readers of of the live-tweets asked questions from Nashik and Bombay, and got them answered by Mukul. +1 for twitter. You should also start following.

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TechWeekend #3: Website Performance, Scalability and Availability: Sept 5

Scalability (Source: Domas Mituzas, Wikipedia)
Click on the image to see other PuneTech articles on Scalability (Image Source: Domas Mituzas, Wikipedia)
What: TechWeekend featuring “Website Scalability and Performance” by Mukul Kumar, VP Engineering at Pubmatic, and “Website Availability and Recovering from Failures and Disasters” by Sameer Anja, Associate Director at KPMG
When: Saturday, 5th Sept, 4pm
Where: Symbiosis Institute of Computer Studies and Research, Atur Centre, Model Colony. Map.
Registration and Fees: This event is free for all to attend. Please register here.

Website Scalability and Performance – Mukul Kumar

Mukul will talk about the various aspects of what it takes to run a very high traffic website – something that he has a lot of experience with at Pubmatic, the ad optimization service for web publishers, where they serve over a billion requests per month.

Mukul Kumar (mukul.kumar [at] pubmatic [dot] com) is a Co-Founder and VP of Engineering at Pubmatic, and Mukul is responsible for PubMatic’s engineering team and resides in Pune, India. Mukul was previously the Director of Engineering at PANTA Systems, a high performance computing startup. Previous to that he joined VERITAS India as the 13th employee and helped it grow to over 2,000 individuals as Director of Engineering for the NetBackup group, Veritas’ main product. He has filed for 14 patents in systems software, storage software, and application software and proudly proclaims his love of Π and can recite it to 60 digits. Mukul is a graduate of IIT Kharagpur with a degree in electrical engineering.

Website Availability and Recovery from Disasters – Sameer Anja

While everyone looks at security and focuses on confidentiality, privacy and integrity; an oft neglected parameter is of availability. While “neglected” may be seem like a strong term, the truth is that we overlook basic data on availability and do not even implement simple to-dos which would help in remediating the situation. The session is aimed at identifying such simple remedies, look at impacts, the assessment model and put forward various scenarios and possible solutions available. The session does not focus on specific products and instead endeavours to use existing technologies used for web site development and how they can be used for ensuring availability. Some principles of disaster recovery will also be covered.

Sameer is a Senior Manager in the IT Advisory practice and is working with KPMG since January 2007 and has 12+ years of work experience in the areas of Information Security, Product design and development, system and network administration. Worked on process and technology areas of Information Security. Worked on Governance and Compliance areas like SOX, Basel II, ISO 15048, SSE -CMM, Data Privacy apart from ISO 27001, Identity Management and Business Continuity design and testing. Experience working with startups and established setups. Speaker at various conferences/ seminars within India and abroad. Trained for six sigma green belt.

POCC Meeting Report – SEO, Web Scalability and Olio

Dhananjay Nene wrote this detailed report on the Pune OpenCoffee Club meeting last Saturday, which covered Search Engine Optimization by Dimakh Sahasrabuddhe, and Web Scalability by Hashamkha Pathan of SUN. We have reproduced it here with his permission for the benefit of PuneTech readers.

Went to the Pune OpenCoffee Club meet yesterday. It was supposed to focus on Search Engine Optimisation, Web Scalability and Sun Startup Essentials Program.

Search Engine Optimisation – Dimakh Sahasrabuddhe, Dimakh Consultants

I really liked this session. It is always refreshing to see a very down to earth speaker explain things broken down in a very simple way (tinge of jealousy at my end ?). While I feel like a ??? ????? (half doctor or amatuer) on this topic since I know only parts of it, I came back with some more insights into the space and some comfort in knowledge that the little I knew wasn’t way off the mark.

Anyways, here’s what Dimakh had to say on the topic :

Make sure you know what keywords you are conducting the SEO. Don’t forget the site name itself in the process. For good SEO, focus on the following issues (listed in a descending priority as per Dimakh, he said Google hasn’t ever published the priorities)

  • Content : It is important to make sure your content is in tune with the desired topics and keywords. Make sure the keywords (and sometimes even the phrases) you want to optimise for are covered in the content. Google does look at the keyword density in the content and that can influence your site rankings.
  • Domain : It is preferable to have the important word or two about your site in the domain itself. eg. You may consider having a site domain as sushrut-icecream-parlour.com instead of sushrut.com (I am not sure if he would’ve preferred the hyphens there – just applying my own thoughts here).
  • Filename : Make sure your filenames (ie. those in the URL) actually reflect the content.
  • Tags : Ensure that the tags (meta?) reflect the content appropriately
  • Alt Tags : Use the alt tags to enrich the information available to the search engine to better understand the images or hyperlinks. Keep them short but give enough info to the search engine eg. in a link to a file called enquiry.html, have the alt tag mention “Enquiry for Motors”.
  • Internal Links : Make sure it is easy for the spider to traverse through your site using the various links. Sometimes you may want to provide an alternative navigation mechanism if the default mechanism is not easily understood by a search engine (I assume he was referring to things like a Flash based navigation)
  • External Links : I really couldn’t understand what he implied here (probably because I got a little lost into thinking when I should’ve been listening), but some could help fill out the stuff in the comments below.

Finally Dimakh mentioned Seo Root and Google Rankings as sites to visit for further learnings. On the whole a very helpful session. One more karma point Pune Open Coffee Club earned in my books.

Web Scalability by Sun Microsystems :

(I missed the first couple of mins, hence didn’t catch the presenter names). (The presenter was Hashamkha Pathan from Sun. -Navin) The presentation focused on a toolkit designed for prototyping various technical and architectural issues around web 2.0 applications called Olio. Its a very nice and capable tool which in the words of the web site can be used for the following activities :

  • Understand how to use various web2.0 technologies such as AJAX, memcached, mogileFS etc. in the creation of your own application. Use the code in the application to understand the subtle complexities involved and how to get around issues with these technologies.
  • Evaluate the differences in the three implementations: php, ruby and java to understand which might best work for your situation.
  • Within each implementation, evaluate different infrastructure technologies by changing the servers used (e.g: apache vs lighttpd, mysql vs postgre, ruby vs Jruby etc.)
  • Drive load against the application to evaluate the performance and scalability of the chosen platform.
  • Experiment with different algorithms (e.g. memcache locking, a different DB access API) by replacing portions of code in the application.

An excellent piece of content that was poorly targeted imho. Sun has an extended amount of experience dealing with enterprise architects, and this was a really wonderful presentation which most enterprise architects would’ve understood easily. This particular community of people often need to do their homework very well, and usually are allowed a fair amount of time and money to do their homework, and in many cases also have access to a body of people who are also equally capable in working out various issues related to architecture.

I really think this is a useful tool which can be used by startups but that they shall need to spend the time to understand the tool and what it could do for them. However it is not a point and shoot kind of a tool. Based on the questions I could very easily understand that most persons very quickly ended up assuming that the tool could do much more than what the tool authors ever intended, and then felt disappointed. This was really a situation of positioning gone awry and I think Sun will need some more effort in positioning the presentation in its early stages to prevent disappointment later.

Finally as in a question I did ask quite explicitly, the reason why it makes sense for Sun to invest in and open source such a tool, is that this tool really forces you to do your homework well in the first place. If you were to do your homework well in the first place and focus on performance and scalability early on, the tool usage would tell you to either focus on Java or more infrastructure to handle high load or low read percentage scenarios. These are very reasonable and sensible outputs of the tool. What olio does not tell you is the set of tradeoffs which are outside its scope, impact of the various choices of languages and toolkits on spead of release, agility, robustness and maintainability – that is something that the startup architect will need to come to some decision independently.

Finally sun talked about its Startup Essentials Program which offered various promotional incentives to startups. Very useful incentives, though I would advise people to evaluate if usage of such incentives introduces a small degree of lockin onto open solaris (I like opensolaris – just would ensure that I would use it in a manner that doesn’t introduce too much lock in), and also the post production cost implications including support. There were a fair degree of questions through the session, and I think as an audience it makes sense to pause and take the matter offline if the proceedings continue to be stuck at a stage after two or three questions.

Update: A presentation similar to the one presented can be found on Olio site at Olio Presentation

In parting

All in all a very useful session, and a left me with the desire to attend more sessions subsequently. Thanks POCC and all the organisers.

About the Author – Dhananjay Nene

Dhananjay is a Pune-based software Engineer with 17 years in the field. Passionate about software engineering, programming, design and architecture. For more info, check out his PuneTech wiki profile. He blogs about software engineering and programming languages at /var/log/mind, and other more general topics at /home/dhananjay.

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Commercial work pilots begin on Eka, Tata’s supercomputer

The Financial Express reports that Eka, the 4th fastest supercomputer in the world, built in Pune by the Tata’s Computation Research Lab (CRL), has begun running pilot projects for various commercial entities. Excerpts:

According to sources close to the development, the main application areas are in aerospace and aerodynamics, automotive design and engineering, academics, animation, weather forecasting and so on

and

Although the company would use some of these application in house, be it for Tata Motors or Tata Elxsi, much of the revenues would flow in from outside the Tata Group, mostly from abroad. 

These would include aircraft design companies like Boeing, Lockheed and Airbus.

See also:
Building the world’s 4th largest supercomputer

Building EKA – The world’s fastest privately funded supercomputer

Eka, built by CRL, Pune is the world’s 4th fastest supercomputer, and the fastest one that didn’t use government funding. This is the same supercomputer referenced in Yahoo!’s recent announcement about cloud computing research at the Hadoop Summit. This article describes some of the technical details of Eka’s design and implementation. It is based on a presentation by the Eka architects conducted by CSI Pune and MCCIA Pune.

Interconnect architecture

The most important decision in building a massively parallel supercomputer is the design of how the different nodes (i.e. processors) of the system are connected together. If all nodes are connected to each other, parallel applications scale really well (linear speedup), because communication between nodes is direct and has no bottlenecks. But unfortunately, building larger and larger such systems (i.e. ones with more and more nodes) becomes increasingly difficult and expensive because the complexity of the interconnect increases as n2. To avoid this, supercomputers have typically used sparse interconnect topologies like Star, Ring, Torus (e.g. IBM’s Blue Gene/L), or hypercube (Cray). These are more scalable as far as building the interconnect for really large numbers of nodes is concerned. However, the downside is that nodes are not directly connected to each other and messages have to go through multiple hops before reaching the destination. Here, unless the applications are designed very carefully to reduce message exchanges between different nodes (especially those that are not directly connected to each other), the interconnect becomes a bottleneck for application scaling.

In contrast to those systems, Eka uses an interconnect designed using concepts from projective geometry. The details of the interconnect are beyond the scope of this article. (Translation: I did not understand the really complex mathematics that goes on in those papers. Suffice it to say that before they are done, fairly obscure branches of mathematics get involved. However, one of these days, I am hoping to write a fun little article on how a cute little mathematical concept called Perfect Difference Sets (first described in 1938) plays an important role in designing supercomputer interconnects over 50 years later. Motivated readers are encouraged to try and see the connection.)

To simplify – Eka uses an interconnect based on Projective Geometry concepts. This interconnect gives linear speedup for applications but the complexity of building the interconnect increases only near-linearly.

The upshot of this is that to achieve a given application speed (i.e. number of Teraflops), Eka ends up using fewer nodes than its compatriots. This means it that it costs less and uses less power, both of which are major problems that need to be tackled in designing a supercomputer.

Handling Failures

A computer that includes 1000s of processors, 1000s of disks, and 1000s of network elements soon finds itself on the wrong side of the law of probability as far as failures are concerned. If one component of a system has a MTBF (mean time between failures) of 10000 hours, and the system has 3000 components, then you can start expecting things to fail once every 10 hours. (I know that the math in that sentence is probably not accurate, but ease of understanding trumps accuracy in most cases.)

If an application is running on 500 nodes, and has been running for the last 20 hours, and one of the nodes fails, the entire application has to be restarted from scratch. And this happens often, especially before an important deadline.

A simple solution is to save the state of the entire application every 15 minutes. This is called checkpointing. When there is a failure, the system is restarted from the last checkpoint and hence ends up losing only 15 minutes of work. While this works well enough, it can get prohibitively expensive. If you spend 5 minutes out of every 15 minutes in checkpointing your application, then you’ve effectively reduced the capacity of your supercomputer by 33%. (Another way of saying the same thing is that you’ve increased your budget by 50%.)

The projective geometry architecture also allows for a way to partition the compute nodes in such a way that checkpointing and status saving can be done only for a subset of the nodes involved. The whole system need not be reset in case of a failure – only the related subset. In fact, with the projective geometry architecture, this can be done in a provably optimal manner. This results in improved efficiency. Checkpoints are much cheaper/faster, and hence can be taken more frequently. This means that the system can handle failures much better.

Again, I don’t understand the details of how projective geometry helps in this – if someone can explain that easily in a paragraph or two, please drop me a note.

The infrastructure

The actual supercomputer was built in just 6 weeks. However, other aspects took much longer. It took an year of convincing to get the project funded. And another year to build the physical building and the rest of the infrastructure. Eka uses

  • 2.5MW of electricity
  • 400ton cooling capacity
  • 10km of electrical cabling
  • 10km of ethernet cabling
  • 15km of infiniband cabling

The computing infrastructure itself consists of:

  • 1800 blades, 4 cores each. 3Ghz for each core.
  • HP SFS clusters
  • 28TB memory
  • 80TB storage. Simple SATA disks. 5.2Gbps throughput.
  • Lustre distributed file-system
  • 20Gbps infiniband DDR. Eka was on the cutting edge of Infiniband technology. They sourced their infiniband hardware from an Israeli company and were amongst the first users of their releases – including beta, and even alpha quality stuff.
  • Multiple Gigabit ethernets
  • Linux is the underlying OS. Any Linux will work – RedHat, SuSe, your favorite distribution.

Its the software, stupid!

One of the principles of the Eka project is to be the one-stop shop for tackling problems that require huge amounts of computational powers. Their tagline for this project has been: from atoms to applications. They want to ensure that the project takes care of everything for their target users, from the hardware all the way up to the application. This meant that they had to work on:

  • High speed low latency interconnect research
  • System architecture research
  • System software research – compilers etc.
  • Mathematical library development
  • Large scientific problem solving.
  • Application porting, optimization and development.

Each of the bullet items above is a non-trivial bit of work. Take for example “Mathematical library development.” Since they came up with a novel architecture for the interconnect for Eka, all parallel algorithms that run on Eka also have to be adapted to work well with the architecture. To get the maximum performance out of your supercomputer, you have to rewrite all your algorithms to take advantages of the strengths of your interconnect design while avoiding the weaknesses. Requiring users to understand and code for such things has always been the bane of supercomputing research. Instead, the Eka team has gone about providing mathematical libraries of the important functions that are needed by applications specifically tailored to the Eka architecture. This means that people who have existing applications can run them on Eka without major modifications.

Applications

Of the top 10 supercomputers in the world, Eka is the only system that was fully privately funded. All other systems used government money, so all of them are for captive use. This means that Eka is the only system in the top 10 that is available for commercial use without strings attached.

There are various traditional applications of HPC (high-performance computing) (which is what Eka is mainly targeted towards):

  • Aerodynamics (Aircraft design). Crash testing (Automobile design)
  • Biology – drug design, genomics
  • Environment – global climate, ground water
  • Applied physics – radiation transport, supernovae, simulate exploding galaxies.
  • Lasers and Energy – combustion, ICF
  • Neurobiology – simulating the brain

But as businesses go global and start dealing with huge quantities of data, it is believed that Eka-like capabilities will soon be needed to tackle these business needs:

  • Integrated worldwide supply chain management
  • Large scale data mining – business intelligence
  • Various recognition problems – speech recognition, machine vision
  • Video surveillance, e-mail scanning
  • Digital media creation – rendering; cartoons, animation

But that is not the only output the Tatas expect from their investment (of $30 million). They are also hoping to tap the expertise gained during this process for consulting and services:

  • Consultancy: Need & Gap Analysis and Proposal Creation
  • Technology: Architecture & Design & Planning of high performance systems
  • Execution: Implement, Test and Commissioning of high performance system
  • Post sales: HPC managed services, Operations Optimization, Migration Services
  • Storage: Large scale data management (including archives, backups and tapes), Security and Business Continuity
  • Visualization: Scalable visualization of large amounts of data

and more…

This article is based on a presentation given by Dr. Sunil Sherlekar, Dr. Rajendra Lagu, and N. Seetha Rama Krishna, of CRL, Pune, who built Eka. For details of their background, see here. However, note that I’ve filled in gaps in my notes with my own conjectures, so errors in the article, if any, should be attributed to me.