Here is 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
Quadrics prepares to shut down
SiCortex suspends operations
Cray finishes retirement of $80M debt, signals extraordinary financial health
Intel previews 8-core Nehalem-EX
SGI ships computing trailer
Panasas gives POWER to the people
Cisco is its own Unified Compute beta partner
UK MET buys big iron from Big Blue
NASA builds cloud for space program
Forbes on the “Secret weapon” of business
NVIDIA to hosts GPU tech conference
Intel’s Parallel Studio development environment shipping
Survey finds big datacenter managers concerned about green laws
Enterprise IT Planet points to a survey by datacenter firm Digital Realty Trust of senior execs at US companies in charge of datacenters and sustainable computing initiatives:
Sixty-nine percent of those surveyed said they were extremely concerned, or very concerned, about government regulation. Eighty-one percent said that carbon credits were now part of their IT strategy, compared with 18 percent in 2008. Fifty-three percent felt that the industry now has a clear idea of what a green datacenter is, compared with 82 percent who felt that there was no clear definition. Finally, 73 percent identified energy efficiency as a key feature of a green datacenter.
The phrase “we’re from the government, and we’re here to help” keeps me awake at night. And the worry isn’t isolated to the US. Another survey finds that 70% of European datacenter professionals are “extremely concerned or very concerned” over green regs.
IBM adds flash SSDs into POWER lineup
Late last week IBM announced it is adding flash-based SSDs to it POWER line of servers; IBM’s System x and BladeCenter servers and System Storage DS8000 line got their SSD injection some time ago. The company joins many other hardware OEMs taking this step.
IBM’s release doesn’t have many details, but Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Register does:
The SSDs are not the same units it announced in March for its System x and BladeCenter x64-based servers. IBM is taking a 128 GB Zeus-IOP flash drive from STEC, with whom it inked a partnership earlier this month, and formatting it down to 69 GB. The reformatting allows IBM to perform “wear levelling” on the flash memory cells used in the SSD, moving data to cells as they wear out and thereby extending the life of the overall drive significantly.
This is the same approach that others, such as Spansion, are taking with their SSDs to manage wear. Since AIX and the other supported OS’s don’t have features to automatically find and migrate frequently used bytes to SSD, IBM has added their own code to do that
None of these operating systems have features that automatically move data and programs that are frequently used to SSDs from disk drives, so IBM has created a program called SSD Data Balancer that lets system administrators do an analysis of their running workloads and then move data to the SSDs to boost system performance. Over time, IBM expects to put features in AIX, i, and Linux that do this work automatically, tuning data sets to take advantage of the SSDs in systems.
Note: like many things from IBM, the SSDs will set you back:
You can see now why IBM is charging customers using its entry Power 520 and 550 rack servers and BladeCenter JS23 and JS43 blade servers $10,000 a pop for a single SSD, and why those using its larger Power 560 and 570 systems have to pay $13,235 for a single drive. … Compare those SSD prices to a 139 GB (for i 6.1) or 146 GB (for AIX and Linux) 15K RPM SAS drive on Power Systems, which has a list price of $498. So IBM is charging 20 to 26.5 times the cost of disks for its SSD, which delivers three times the improvement in I/O performance over disks.
Germany Boosts Fastest EU Super
The Gauss Centre for Supercomputing in Jülich held a launch event today for its latest upgrade to the IBM BlueGene/P system named Jugene. Federal Education and Research Minister Annette Schavan and North Rhine-Westphalia’s premier Jürgen Rüttgers were on hand to help celebrate the 1PF machine.
“Acquiring JUGENE demonstrates Germany’s bid for leadership in supercomputing,” Schavan said.
The upgrade brings Jugene’s processor count to just over 295,000. Housed in 72 cabinets, this makes for quite a computing resource. Two other machines were also unveiled at the event [albeit dwarfed by Jugene’s announcement].
“The supercomputer JUGENE will secure Europe independent access to a decisive key technology of the 21st century,” Chairman of the Board of Directors of Forschungszentrum Jülich and Coordinator of the European Supercomputing Alliance PRACE Dr. Achim Bachem said in a statement.
For more info, read the full release.
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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].