Here’s a collection of highlights, selected totally subjectively, from this week’s HPC news stream as reported at insideHPC.com and HPCwire.

10 words and a link

Wyoming includes supercomputer in stimulus wishlist

IBM and ITIF call for $30B US IT investment

Indian Prime Minister pledging to double investment in science

200 TFLOPS Chinese super expected in April

Sun adds Belgian Q-layer to its cloud formation

ISC’09 call for papers and February 1 deadline

Many-Core and Reconfigurable Supercomputing Conference 2009 in Berlin, March

Sun sponsors HPC Symposium in the Great White North

Upcoming Red Hat HPC stack webinar Jan 15

ORNL accepts Jaguar, Cray reduces debt load even further

Cray has announced that the one petaflop Jaguar supercomputer installed at Oak Ridge National Lab officially passed its acceptance tests at the end of 2008. For those wondering, large HPC procurements often require the vendor to meet a set of contracted performance and reliability goals in order to truly write a check for the hardware and software. The vendor organization can seldom revenue the project until final acceptance is complete. This means that the Jaguar supercomputer project generated on the order of $100 million in revenue for the fourth quarter of 2008.

“We are extremely pleased to announce the acceptance of ‘Jaguar,’ the first system in the world to achieve sustained petaflops performance on a real-world application,” said Cray CEO, Peter Ungaro. “Thanks to the hard work and dedication of many people across Oak Ridge, the U.S. Department of Energy and Cray, the scientific community now has access to one of the most powerful computing systems in the world, leveraging unique Cray technology to open new possibilities for discovery and major scientific breakthroughs.”

Cray also found that its declining common stock price in the fourth quarter forced its market capitalization below the “net assets” of the company. This resulted in a non-cash write-down of the November 30th Goodwill balance of roughly $55.4 million. On December 24th, the company also repurchased $6 million in principal amount of its 3.0% Convertible Senior Subordinated Notes due 2024. The company began the fourth quarter with $80 million in Notes and ended it with $27.727 million. (More on past repurchases here.)

All in all, Cray’s been on a good run as of late. For more info, read the entire press release here.

The dangers of a monoculture for the future of HPC

Joe Landman pointed to this presentation [PDF] by Paul Lu at U of Alberta on the emerging monocultures in HPC (x86, InfiniBand, Linux) and the risks posed by the elimination of diversity. It’s an interesting, easy read that will provoke thought.

Paul describes the current line of procurement reasoning that optimizes each purchase separate of all others and emphasizes price/performance above all else as knowing “the price of everything, but the value of nothing.” I could NOT agree with this more. He goes on (slide 37) to recommend that we take concrete steps (as in, on purpose) in procurements to ensure diversity in our community:

• But, if the cluster was, say, 10% smaller, will people actually notice?
• So, leave room (and budget) as investment in diversity
  • For example, SMPs
    • Great for many applications now. They will get used!
    • Develop expertise for multi/manycores in foreseeable future
  • For example, different OSes
    • Linux is great, but it is being pulled in many directions
    • Other code bases should not be abandoned

This is dead on. To this list I would add that we need to shave off a slice of funding for cycles and use it to fund more effective (e.g., user interfaces) and more efficient (e.g., programming models and computational support systems) mechanisms for delivering HPC services to users.

Survey finds banks plan to increase HPC spend in 2009

IT analysis firm Waters published results from a survey earlier this week detailing the 2009 spend plans by banks for HPC. The survey was conducted by Platform Computing at the City#Grid exhibition in London last month.

Platform’s survey of senior IT executives at 35 financial services firms highlights that cost reduction (54 percent) and meeting the increased risk management need (23 percent) are the primary reasons for banks to invest in HPC solutions in 2009.

According to the survey, “virtualization” will be the watchword for banks in 2009 as it is considered the infrastructure priority by the majority of banks (54 percent) in 2009 compared to HPC (17 percent), cloud computing (14 percent) and service-oriented architecture (12 percent).

The same pool of executives thinks that cloud computing isn’t going to really take off until 2010, mostly because it is early and ill-defined.

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John West is part of the team that summarizes the headlines in HPC news every day at insideHPC.com. You can contact him at [email protected].