EnterpriseDB announces clustered database in Amazon's EC2

EnterpriseDB announced that their PostgreSQL based database offering will be available inside of Amazon's EC2 cloud. Some details are available from Information Week

Hosted PostgreSQL services have been around for years a database cluster that can rapidly scale is less common. The appeal of Amazon's compute cloud is that you can start of small with low resource utilization and have an application running in the cloud fairly inexpensively. You can then devote more resources to the application on an as-needed basis. EC2 also allows you to keep costs down during less busy times of the month (or year) by paying on a metered basis. Traditionally coming up with a way of scaling the database tier up quickly requires careful application architecture to make the application compatible with replication or partitioning based solutions. Oracle's RAC offers an alternative approach but the cost of scaling a RAC cluster from 2 nodes to 20 in a short period of time exceeds the cash most web companies have on hand.

What I'm interested in seeing is what constraints EnterpriseDB/Elastra puts on the application and database. Elastra claims their cluster is 'infinitely scalable', and EnterpriseDB claims their database is going to be transactional. Over the years I've looked into a lot of ways of clustering databases, especially PostgreSQL based ones, and it always comes down having to accept some set of constraints, limitations often involving trading off transactional consistency versus performance. It will be interesting to see what trade-off's this solution involves and how it works.

Flash adds support for H.264

Interestingly enough, Adobe has added H.264 support in Flash. I wonder what this means for VP 6.2?

220 million pixels is just the beginning

Engineers at the University of California, San Diego have constructed the highest-resolution computer display in the world – with a screen resolution up to 220 million pixels - and they're keeping it all to themselves from the looks of the picture below.

While tiling panels together is not new, the approach that they're taking - of building a cluster of graphics drivers - is pretty intruiging.  The “graphics super cluster” being developed at UCSD consists of 80 NVIDIA Quadro FX 5600 graphics processing units (GPUs). The graphics and computational performance of these cards is quite astounding. The theoretical computational performance of the cluster at almost 40 teraflops.

There's not a lot of discussion about the software they use to drive the system, but others such as Xdmx have worked to extend the X-Windows system to support tiled displays.

While UCSD has only thoughts for scientific applications, we're sure the Entertainment and Advertising industries could come up with a few interesting applications.