Rob Gillen's WebLog

This past Friday I had the privilege of speaking on WiFi security at CodeStock 2012. I had a blast both preparing for the talk and delivering it and I hope it was beneficial to some of those who attended.

[Cross posted from here: http://rob.gillenfamily.net/post/External-File-Upload-Optimizations-for-Windows-Azure.aspx]

I’ve been getting my test harness and reporting tools setup for some performance baselining that I’m doing relative to cloud computing providers and when I left the office on Friday I set off a test that was uploading a collection of binary files (NetCDF files if you care) to an Azure container. I was doing nothing fancy… looping through a directory, for each file found, upload to the container using the defaults for BlobBlock and then record the duration (start/finish) for that file and the file size. The source directory contained 144 files representing roughly 58 GB of data. 32 of the files were roughly 1.5 GB each and the remainder were about 92.5 MB.

I’ve been working on moving a large collection data to, from, and around Azure as we are testing the data profile for scientific computing and large-scale experiment post-processing and, in order to verify the data we uploaded and processed turned out as we wanted tit to, I built a simple visualization app that does a real-time query against the data in Azure and displays it. Originally the app was built as a simple WPF desktop application, but I got to thinking that it would be particularly interesting on the Surface and therefore took a day or two to port it over. The video below is a walkthrough of the app – the dialog is a bit cheesy but the app is interesting as it provides a very tactile means of interacting with otherwise stale data.

It’s late on the Friday afternoon before Christmas week which means things are pretty quiet around the office. This quiet has the net-effect of allowing me to get quite a bit done. The last few days have been very productive with respect to our research project and Azure work (more on that coming soon) which is now in full swing. We are currently working on collecting performance data from our codes running in Azure (and soon in the Amazon cloud) and are also doing some testing of transfer speeds of data both to/from the cloud as well as between compute and storage in the cloud.

[Cross-posted from here]

[Cross-posted from here]

[Cross-posted from here]