I met with Mondosoft the other day - great couple of guys and we had a good meeting. I hadn't realised I had left a lasting impression on Robert but I was really pleased to see that the approach the meeting took meant something to them:

http://blog.mondosoft.com/art-of-search/archive/2007/02/28/17.aspx

It's quite surprising to see and hear that many people are afraid of talking to Microsoft (especially in my line of work around HPC and Search) ironic as I am 5ft 2 on a good day :-) In reality you just have to have clear expectations about where you get value and where we get value - if as organisations we are very clear on the boundaries then things normally go fairly well - but this is all down to the people involved and mutual common understanding. I will post again this weekend about one that went wrong but ended up a brilliant success.

I took a further look at Robert's blog and liked his post on the long tail: Exploiting the long tail for search Look forward to seeing posts about MOSS 07 and how we work with Mondosoft to deliver taxonomy integration amongst other things..!!

Enjoy!

Awesome video on You Tube - check it out:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gmP4nk0EOE

A few lines I loved in this:

1. The web changes the way we do things
2. It's not a machine, it is us and learns from us
3. It connects people and joins communities

Simple thoughts, nice simple message - cool!

Enjoy!

We have been excitedly sitting on this for a while now and can finally release the video and casestudy of BAE using Microsoft Compute Cluster Server for streamlining costs around product development.

Why is this so great?

1. Proves Microsoft scales to big businesses in HPC - BAE are 90,000 people and a £40bn business
2. Great reference in the Engineering vertical
3. Continues the amazing market momentum behind Microsoft in HPC (who would have thought it)

Want to learn more then go here:

http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/casestudy.aspx?casestudyid=200910 

Enjoy!

So the whitepaper I have just blogged about has hit the press and is being picked up fairly quickly, one of the nice things I like is the following article which has a really nice few bullets on the key points (for those that dont want to read 58 pages...)

• Eighty-one percent report that more ready access to high-performance computing capability could increase oil and gas production
• Eighty-six percent have computing power at their deskside, and 69 percent prefer computing power at their desktops
• Sixty-one percent believe that having the capability to run additional tasks and iterations will reduce project risk
• Fifty-six percent prefer to schedule their own jobs to a technical computing or HPC cluster rather than refer to a cluster administrator to manage the job queue
• Forty-seven percent say their computing-intensive scientific applications require multiple iterations
• Twenty-five percent of computing-intensive scientific applications still take from overnight to more than a week to run

You can get the full article here:

http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2007/03/07/microsoft-faster-computers-better-oil-gas-production

Enjoy!

Really cool news for all of you working in the HPC space with Microsoft. we have just announced a whitepaper at our Global Energy Forum in Houston, Texas. For those who like brief papers just read the text below -it is 58 pages but written in pure gold dust! Many of the learning's and observations are applicable elsewhere:

Survey: http://www.microsoft.com/industry/manufacturing/oilandgas/default.mspx

News release: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2007/mar07/03-07GEF2007PR.mspx

Better Access to High-Performance Computing Could Increase Oil and Gas Production, Reports Microsoft Survey

Survey of more than 100 oil and gas experts shows industry rapidly moving toward enabling geoscientists to control their own technical computing environments.

HOUSTON — March 7, 2007 — Empowering geoscientists with more deskside high-performance computing power could increase oil and gas production overall, reports a new survey released today by Microsoft Corp. at the Microsoft^® 2007 Global Energy Forum.

The Microsoft High-Performance Computing Oil and Gas Industry Survey 2007, sponsored by Microsoft and conducted by Houston-based Gelb Consulting Group Inc., shows a trend toward geoscientists in the oil and gas industry taking more personal control of their technical computing environments.

“Clearly, this research shows that oil and gas experts know the impact their work has on their companies’ success,” said Craig Hodges, director of the U.S. Energy Industry Unit at Microsoft. “They appreciate having computing power at their fingertips and also require smoother integration with the applications they use in analyzing and reporting the information on which they make critical decisions.”

Nice to see the deskside control of clusters occurring, and even better to see the OEM development of green computing allowing businesses to leverage the deskside clusters in the full data centre environment.

Enjoy!

So this caught my eye today, click on the link below and you will see the distribution of top 500 SuperComputers around the world. Things that I found interesting:

1. The distribution between Northern and Southern hemisphere
2. The huge opportunity to take supercomputing and clustering far far far further - look at the huge scope for internationalising and trading skills worldwide!

the map can be found here: http://www.top500.org/lists/2006/11/top100map

The map does take a while to load so if you get bored waiting here are a couple of screenshots (sorry for the quality...)

Enjoy!

Don’t Search – Find ... Enterprise Search with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007

Organizations need to increase productivity and reduce information overload by providing their employees, partners, and customers the ability to find relevant content in a wide range of repositories and formats.  This session shows how Office SharePoint Server 2007 lets users unlock information, find people, and locate expertise in the enterprise.

Register for 20^th March

Register for 10^th April

Register for 24^th April

Agenda
• Enterprise Search Requirements and Challenges
• MOSS 2007 Search Improvements
• Scalability / Security and Privacy / Manageability / Performance
• Intranet and Document Search
• Line-of-Business Application Search
• People and Knowledge Search
• Relevance

Enjoy!

Summary:

• IBM taking the Windows CCS and Microsoft clustering message way more seriously
• IBM getting the long tail of Clustering and placing much more emphasis in modular clusters - prebuilt for MidMarket customers

Why is this cool:

1. Validates the strategy that I and the HPC team have been banging on about for ages
2. Demonstrates that the challenge of the disruptive business model of scale clustering will take on and even big companies are jumping onboard
3. This will drive other lead OEMs to come on board and will act as a validation of the super innovative smaller OEMs out there who have been doing the same thing for a while :)
4. Finally, smaller companies can enjoy the benefits of clustering at the right price that large companies have been enjoying for years!

What is it:

Last week IBM issued a news release in which Windows CCS played a prominent role. IBM announced:

New initiatives designed to make it easier for clients to use "clusters" of servers for high-performance computing tasks. The company is investing in development, marketing and sales-channel programs that leverage IBM's technology prowess in high-end supercomputing and deep experience delivering industry-focused solutions.

Four key components of IBM's expanded HPC cluster initiatives include:

1) Pre-architected, snap-together solutions for key industries.

2) HPC ValueNet for IBM Business Partners.

3) New benchmarking and tuning centers dedicated to Microsoft Windows Compute Cluster Server.

4) On-Demand Test-Drive Facility

Who picked up on it in the press:

 

IDG: IBM aims to make computing clusters easier
Big Blue launches initiatives to help SMBs integrate servers into clusters for high-performance computing tasks
By John Blau, February 28, 2007
http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/02/28/HNibmcomputingclusters_1.html

eWeek: IBM Pushing Clusters for Midmarket Businesses  
By Scott Ferguson, February 28, 2007
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2098952,00.asp

InformationWeek: IBM Launches High-Performance Computing Initiative
IBM works with Microsoft and other application vendors to expand the use of its hardware in computer clusters and mainframes.
By Antone Gonsalves, February 27, 2007
http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=197009246&subSection=Breaking+News

Electronic News: IBM debuts supercomputing initiative
By Colleen Taylor, February 28, 2007
http://www.edn.com/index.asp?layout=article&articleid=CA6420203&partner=eb&spacedesc=news

HPCWire: IBM Targets Mid-Market for HPC Clusters
February 28, 2007
http://www.hpcwire.com/hpc/1292154.html

Enjoy!

So basically this is a white paper to show the following:

• Make Excel services run quicker
• Allow you to have more relevance and a new story in Financial Services, Life Sciences, Oil and Gas etc etc etc

The full official blarney can be read here:

Abstract

This white paper describes how you can increase the computational power and reliability of Excel 2007 spreadsheets through the use of the Microsoft High Performance Computing platform composed of Microsoft Office Excel 2007, Microsoft® Windows® Compute Cluster Server 2003, and Excel Services, part of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. Specifically, the paper shows how an integrated solution built on this Microsoft platform enables performance and reliability scenarios in the Financial Services, Oil and Gas, and Life Sciences industries where spreadsheets are often used in to make business critical decisions.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=1a42f8c8-0d6d-4780-ae28-6f5b9b680dd7&DisplayLang=en

I look forward to seeing your demos on Excel Services running on CCS - bottle of champagne to the best demo I see - criteria being:

1. You have to build it
2. You have to show it to me.. :-)

Now go forth and do amazing stuff!

I was just reading a new blog that I have recently subscribed to called Execupundit.com - it's truly a great place to read some pragmatic cool advice and the following really got me thinking:

http://www.execupundit.com/2007/02/note-from-boss-to-employees-what-some.html

Sure we are all guilty of sometimes getting frustrated that our boss isn't perfect or doesn't see the full picture (whilst we hide their reading glasses through not communicating well enough :-))

Hmmmm note to self - must try harder, wishing you all a cool weekend! Am off to flog myself with some birch for previously committed offences to past and present bosses...lol

Enjoy!

Oh my word, how good is this...? Intelligent guiding to help you get the answer you want:

So I did the following:

1. Simple search on Pathology
2. Then clicked on pathology with regard to 'Lung Cancer'...
3. Medstory then asked for definitions of Lung Cancer referring to pathology and Lung Cancer and or just Lung Cancer independently

Nice to see that level of intelligence in the app...

Enjoy! 

I did a simple search for 'Pathology' - check out the manner in which the search results were returned:

You can view the results here: http://www.medstory.com/app?service=external&page=Search&c=true&s=Web&tc=h1&q=pathology 

From here you can go to the individual links under the categories highlighted above - all within medical taxonomies - nice! 

So some of you may have seen the announcement in New Orleans about the planned acquisition of Medstory:

This is great news as we clearly demonstrate to our partners and customers around our focus on Search. If you fancy reading a little more then have a look here:

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2007/feb07/02-26MSMedstoryPR.mspx

And also check out their website on www.medstory.com 

Enjoy!