Here is a collection of highlights from this week’s news stream as reported by HPCwire.
Tesla Bio Workbench Enables New Breakthroughs in Biosciences
AMAX Partners with NVIDIA to Launch Bio Workbench Program
Scientists Prepare for Blue Waters
Intel Announces Q4 Net Income at $2.3 Billion, Up 875 Percent
CIR Report: 40/100 GigE Transceiver Markets to Reach $545M by 2014
Emulex OneConnect Approaches One Million IOPS
Altair Releases PBS Works 10.2
CLC bio Releases Enterprise Platform Version 2.0
Xilinx Announces Biggest, Highest Performance FPGA
Phoenix Mission Accomplished with ANSYS Aboard
RNA networks Joins HP Developer and Solutions Program
Cray Announces Selected Preliminary 2009 Results
NetApp, Stanford Embark on Quest to Find Cure for Gastric Cancer
Cornell Deploys Experimental TeraGrid Resource for MATLAB
Yahoo Inaugurates Hadoop Cluster Lab at IIT Bombay
Temple University harnesses GPUs for advanced cleaning power
Temple University researchers are using the power of NVIDIA Tesla GPUs to design better models for shampoos and other cleaning products. The process of testing products in the lab is time-consuming and costly, and computer simulations can lead to detergents that clean better, while being more enviromentally-friendly.
From the release:
“The computer models needed to accurately simulate surfactant properties are extremely demanding in terms of computational power,” said Axel Kohlmeyer of the Institute for Computational Molecular Science at Temple University. “We discovered that by adding just two NVIDIA Tesla C1060 GPUs, each node in our newest cluster can do 16 times more work, and thus multiplies our local compute capacity far beyond what we could previously get through the national supercomputing centers.”
The two-core Tesla GPU cluster was able to do the work of a 128-core Cray XT3 super or a 1024-core IBM BlueGene/L cluster — yet another example of GPU-based clusters providing targeted codes with more power than their CPU-only counterparts.
While this work was performed on a small local GPU cluster, the university team is considering scaling its work using the NCSA Lincoln cluster with a computational output of 47 teraflops made possible by the addition of Tesla S1070 1U GPU systems.
To see a video of the Temple researchers discussing their work, go to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0DhHUMrtmPc.
Holyoke HPC Center Task Force under way
From an article at The Republican, we learn that the Holyoke HPC Center Task Force met for the first time this week with a stated goal of getting the biggest benefit from the $80 million high-performance computing center. Project partners include the State of Massachusettes, the University of Massachusetts, Boston University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and also private firms, Cisco Systems Inc. and EMC Co.
From the article:
The panel has a name befitting its size: The Holyoke High Performance Computing Center Innovation District Design and Development Task Force. It consists of officials, professors and business people from around Western Massachusetts.
“Each one of the people that are on the task force brings something unique to the task force,” Kathleen G. Anderson, city director of Planning and Development, said last week.
…
The task force will strategize on how to attract computing talent, entrepreneurs, investment and companies to Holyoke and the region, anchored by a “world-class, state-of-the-art high performance computing center,” Anderson said.
Currently, the 28-member panel is deciding on where exactly the center will be located. One reason the Holyoke area was selected in the first place is the city’s proximity to three canals, which generate low-cost hydroelectric power.
According to Gregory Bialecki, state secretary of housing and economic development, the site was to be decided on last month, however options are still being reviewed.
The group is getting closer to identifying a site and breaking ground, says Kofi Jones, spokeswoman for the Executive Office of Housing and Economic Development.
The site is expected to be up and running by late next year.