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

Do your part in recognizing the rock stars of HPC

Q&A with SiCortex founder Matt Reilly on what happened

Feeling lost and alone? Join the SiCortex users group

Using ice to cool datacenters

Greenpeace starts poking IT CEOs on their green record

Earth Simulator breaks efficiency record

House committee passes national climate service bill

Switzerland’s national HPC strategy

Yahoo! adds three overseas research institutes to Cirrus cloud project

Yahoo! releases the version of Hadoop it uses

Computing research that changed world video presentations up

Supercomputer used to find largest ever black hole

QLogic starts shipping quad data rate IB switches

Research points the way to new, dense, billion year memory

Japan works on clustering SX-9s over a wide area

TACC builds TeraGrid’s largest data store

IBM’s System S headed for real-time monitoring electromagnetic weather

LSU Hosts Beowulf Boot Camp

Sun Hosts HPC Software Workshop

2009 Symposium on Application Accelerators in High-Performance Computing

MIT offers multicore programming short-course

ORNL’s Jaguar Poised to Get Speedy Upgrade

According to Frank Munger’s blog, Oak Ridge National Lab’s Jaguar supercomputer is poised to get a serious upgrade. The XT5 supercomputer, currently ranked second on the Top500 list, will upgrade its core processors to the latest AMD 6-core Istanbul from its current quad core powerplant. Jeff Nichols, ORNL’s interim associate lab director for scientific computing, said the new silicon are expected to arrive later this summer and bump performance to “well over 2 petaflops.”

“The big question is how much science are we going to get out of it, and that is the ultimate driver — to get the most science that we can for the Department of Energy’s Office of Science,” Nichols said.

The upgrade comes at the hands of a recent influx of stimulus funds. The 200 cabinet Jaguar system will share the funds with its 88 cabinet cousin, Kraken. The smaller, 600 teraflop, machine is expected to get roughly a 70 percent performance bump.

Biggest Sun Super in Europe Goes Online

There has been a lot of news on this. I want to mention it briefly, but you can read more at the link below, and a video interview with Thomas Lippert, the director of the Jülich Supercomputer Center here.

The latest Sun supercomputing deployment in Europe, deemed JuRoPA2, officially went online last Friday. Forschungszentrum Julich of Germany is the proud owner of the new 2,208 node cluster. The Sun Blade X6275 nodes are supported by the Sun Constellation System and communicate via six newly developed “Project M9” InfiniBand switches. The new switches are 648 ports each at quad data rate. Also included in the new installation is 500TB of scratch goodness supported by a Lustre file system.

For more info on the new Sun digs in Germany, read the full release.

State of Massachusetts Working on Green HPC Center

According to recent reports from Boston Xconomy, the state of Massachusetts has recently formed a coalition including university, industry and government individuals tasked with planning and executing the construction of a new high performance computing center in the western part of the state. The report cites several inside sources saying that the new center will fall within the city limits of Holyoke, Mass. Individuals close to the deal have also said that there has been a real focus on creating a “green” HPC center from the ground up.

Further updates to the original post cite an article posted in Wednesday’s Boston Globe. The article quotes a state official saying that the expected cost of the project will be roughly $100 million, sought from federal stimulus funds. The execution team will be led by MIT and the University of Massaschusetts, with industry participation and guidance from EMC and Cisco.

“At this stage, the partners have only agreed to participate in an intensive 120-day planning project that’s intended to work out details such as siting, organization, and funding,” the Globe says. “But the backers say the computer center will create an important resource for the state’s high-tech industry and academic institutions.”

Pay very close attention to the industry participants. Notice that there are no major HPC players named in the article. Does this mean that traditional enterprise heavyweights like EMC and Cisco are going after HPC funding? It certainly wouldn’t be outside the realm of possibility. Noting the recent release of Cisco’s datacenter server hardware and EMC’s deep pockets in enterprise storage, they could certainly form an HPC force to be reckoned with.

SC09 Summer Education Workshops

Over the email transom, news that SC09 is accepting registrations from faculty right now for its summer workshop series. The workshops are aimed at undergraduate faculty who want to learn the tools and techniques needed to bring computational science into their curricula.

Workshop topics and dates

Introduction to Computational Thinking
July 5-11: Atlanta University Center
August 2-8: University of Arkansas

Computational Biology for Biology Educators
June 7-13: University of California Merced

Computational Physics for Physics Educators
June 14-20: Widener University

Parallel Programming and Cluster Computing
June 7-13: Kean University
July 5-11: Louisiana State University
August 9-15: University of Oklahoma

Computational Sciences in the Grades 6-12 Classroom
July 12-18: University of Florida

Computational Engineering for Engineering Educators
July 12-18: Ohio Supercomputer Center

More info at sc09.sc-education.org/workshops/.

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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].