PiCloud Announces Public Availability of Its Serverless Computing Platform

July 19, 2010 - PRLog -- SUNNYVALE, CA – PiCloud, Inc. today announced public availability of its serverless cloud computing platform. The platform provides developers, scientists, and engineers with immediate access to thousands of cores of computational power, a development environment free of data lock-in, and an easy to use API that eliminates all server management.

PiCloud is designed for high performance computing, batch processing, and scientific computing applications written in the Python programming language. PiCloud renders the heavy lifting involved in developing, managing, and maintaining both the software and hardware for a compute cluster a thing of the past. Businesses no longer need to provision servers, nor do they need to develop software to orchestrate the computational power of their servers.

The technological ease of the PiCloud Platform has garnered its private beta release praise from over 1,500 developers worldwide, who have run over 4 million units of computation, as well as from Gartner who presented the company with the title, “Cool Vendor.” PiCloud’s serverless platform is made possible by a new client-cloud software architecture. PiCloud’s library, which developers install, automatically extracts the program’s execution state to seamlessly move computation from any machine to PiCloud’s cluster running on top of Amazon Web Services.

“In the same way that people get instant access to a seemingly infinite electric grid when they plug a lamp into the wall, we want developers to be able to instantly access immense parallel computing power by plugging in our library,” said Ken Elkabany, CEO of PiCloud. “We’re leveling the playing field for developers who don’t have private clusters and system administrators.”

The PiCloud Platform swears by three tenets:
Easy to use: PiCloud’s library enables developers to get on the cloud in as few as two lines of code. The library interfaces with the inner-workings of Python, allowing for cloud integration at the application layer without any changes to developer workflow.
Elastic: PiCloud handles all scaling behind the scenes from one to a thousand cores without any user intervention. Unlike Amazon and other virtual server providers, PiCloud users are charged by millisecond increments, rather than by hourly blocks.
Lock-in free: Unlike Google AppEngine, users do not develop their software around proprietary APIs that impose data lock-in. PiCloud is compatible with all existing data stores, whether they are located on Rackspace, Amazon, or a private datacenter.

A visualization of the platform can be viewed at http://www.picloud.com/tour/

PiCloud was founded by Ken Elkabany and Aaron Staley in 2009 with a grant from Lightspeed Venture Partners.

http://www.picloud.com

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About PiCloud:
PiCloud is a leading provider of batch processing, high performance computing and scientific computing solutions. PiCloud has attracted thousands of developers worldwide with its easy to use, cost effective, elastic, and lock-in free cloud computing platform. With PiCloud, customers can instantly leverage the compute power of Amazon Web Services without having to manage, maintain, or configure virtual servers. By removing servers from the equation, PiCloud enables rapid development and deployment of cloud technologies.
http://www.picloud.com