Data Center Industry Links for December 30th

Recounting EC2 One Year Later - Guy Rosen at Jack of All Clouds updates his research on instance growth at Amazon EC2. "Based on the results, activity on EC2 has been multiplying several times over every year," with about 70,000 instances launched daily in 2010.

National Snow and Ice Data Center Gets a Cool Makeover - The National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) has undergone a $600,000 renovationto add better equipment and an innovative evaporative cooling technology. The retrofit it aims to make the NSIDC computing center one of the most energy-efficient data centers in the United States. From National Geographic.

Disney Command Center Aims to Keep Lines Moving - Disney has long been a leader in technological innovation.Behind-the-scenes systems — typically kept top secret by the company as it strives to create an environment where things happen as if by magic — are highly computerized. Ride capacity is determined in part by analyzing hotel reservations, flight bookings and historic attendance data. From the New York Times.

Better Benchmarking for Supercomputers - It's time, the researchers say, for high-performance computers to be rated not just in petaflops (quadrillions of floating-point operations per second) but also in "gigateps" (billions of traversed edges per second). An "edge" here is a connection between two data points. From IEEE Spectrum.

Colohouse Names Chief Operating Officer - Colohouse Miami Colocation and Data Center has named Felipe Rodriguez, formerly from National Healthcare Corporation, as its chief operating officer. He led the advanced systems design and engineering division at his previous position at National Healthcare Corporation. From TMCnet.