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

Sun kills its vis gear (again)

A sampling of AMD six-core support

NVIDIA chief: every single workstation will have GPU computing

Top HPC trends from the TOP500

NVIDIA and Supermicro announce 1U supercomputer building block

Saving power? It’s the memory, stupid

Cisco adds pizza boxes to the still-not-shipping UCS

SGI joins the trailerpark crowd

Datacenter cooling research facility

Wyoming approves NCAR facility spending

Swiss National Supercomputing Center installs new XT5

Desktop Grids for e-Science and Industry symposium

Linux-Mag Nehalem HPC optimization seminar

Eadline’s tips for building your own cluster

Douglas Eadline has posted one of the more comprehensive examinations I’ve seen in a long time on how one would start the ball rolling to build an HPC cluster. He goes through the high-level architecture of a typical modern cluster as well as detailed looks at network infrastructure and most importantly, software. Unlike other attempts at a writing a Cluster 101 article, Dr. Eadline presents the various options, technologies and vendors in a very unbiased manner.

If there is one thing to remember about clusters it is they are large systems composed of many individual parts. The goal is to use all of the parts to solve a single problem (i.e. run a program that uses all the component parts at the same time). All the parts must function as intended for the system to work as a “whole.” This aspect is what separates HPC clustering from many other forms of computing – and it is what makes it so exciting.

Doc Eadline breaks down the cluster thought process down into five major points of interest:

1. Clusters Are a System: Clusters are made up of three major hardware components; servers, networks and storage. The key to a successful cluster experience is configuring the three to operate in symphony.
2. The Network(s) Is What Holds The Cluster Together: Without the various management and compute networks, there would be no cluster. Its essential to configure and tune your network based on your computational needs.
3. Software, Software, Software: Operating systems, parallel processing methodologies, compilers, cluster management systems. They all make the cluster world go round.
4. Benchmarks Rule: There is no inherent way to know that your machine is performing correctly without the use of rudimentary benchmarks.
5. We Need More Than Five Topics: Clustering within the high performance computing realm has become an industry within an industry. There is a myriad of information and a grand following of users. If you don’t know the answer, ask!

All HPC greenhorns considering a cluster procurement or building their own should most definitely take notice of Dr. Eadline’s article.

Your fire-powered datacenter

Enterprise IT Planet has an interesting column this week about an obvious source of renewable energy that is often overlooked: good ol’ fashioned fires.

…What you may not know, however, is that burning wood and plants may also one day power your data center or client PC.

If the energy bill passes, utilities will be under a mandate to generate 20% of their electricity using renewable energy by 2020. Solar and wind are excellent candidates, but as I’ve blogged before, solar and wind face a whole host of problems in generating electricity for the heavily-populated Northeast, such as transmission and storage. As this Wall Street Journal article today explains, biomass may be an alternative. Current forecasts call for biomass to generate 4.5% of the U.S. electricity supply by 2030, more than wind or solar.

You may rightly point out that fires generate carbon, which seems to be contraindicated. Extra points for paying attention.

The article maintains that the activity is considered carbon neutral because the plants only release the carbon they absorbed while they were growing, something that would have happened when the plants died anyway. Contrast this with burning coal, which releases carbon that would have otherwise stayed locked up.

Not everyone agrees with this take on the carbon neutrality of burning wood; some say that in order to be carbon neutral you need to follow up your post-harvest burn with a planting of something that will re-capture all the carbon you just released, and this something has to be a quantity more than what you burned. The issue is that the decomposition of a fallen tree (for example) does not release all of its carbon into the atmosphere, as burning does. Rather a bunch of it ends up sequestered in the soil, and you have to overplant your replacement lot to compensate for this.

The arguments quickly make your head hurt; yet another reason to fund fusion research.

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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].