The Week in Review – 03/04/2010

By Tiffany Trader

March 4, 2010

Here is a collection of highlights from this week’s news stream as reported by HPCwire.

IBM Interconnect Communicates Using Pulses of Light

ARSC Included in $45M DoD Award for New Supercomputers

Microway, AccelerEyes Ship GPU Bundle for NVIDIA Tesla and MATLAB

New Organization to Coordinate European Scientific Computing Grids

Fixstars Releases Yellow Dog Enterprise Linux for CUDA

University of Illinois, Chicago Wins SC09 Bandwidth Challenge Using Force10 Switch

Michelin Simulation Software Powered by Open Inventor

NCSA to Provide Ember as Shared-Memory Resource for Nation’s Researchers

Supermicro Showcases Latest Innovations in Server Technology at CeBIT

World Community Grid Powers Development of New Class of Aids Drugs

Purdue ‘nanoHUB’ Tops 100,000 Annual Users, Popularity Growing

Fujitsu, JAEA Unveil Fastest Supercomputer in Japan

NVIDIA GPUs Power All 2010 Best Visual Effects Academy Award Nominees

Georgia Tech Creates Institute for Data and High Performance Computing Research

Submissions Now Being Accepted for the SC10 Technical Program

Shell and IBM Target Oil and Natural Gas Recovery

HP Opens New Lab Facility in Singapore

Cray, Microsoft Research Team on Cloud Computing

This week Cray announced that its custom engineering group will work with Microsoft Research on an advanced cloud computing prototype. The group’s mission is to provide datacenters with advanced system designs that reduce total cost of ownership while boosting performance. Using high-density packaging and innovative cooling techniques, the team aims to increase the energy-efficiency and lower the operating costs of cloud computing infrastructure.

From the announcement:

“This is an ideal project for our custom engineering group as it allows us to leverage our company’s intellectual property in system design and, most specifically, packaging and system infrastructure,” said Chuck Morreale, Cray’s vice president of custom engineering.

This project marks the custom engineering group’s first foray into the commercial marketplace.

IBM Donates Supercomputer to Rice University

IBM donated a supercomputer to Rice University this week to help scientists achieve breakthroughs in cancer research, AIDS and other complex diseases. The $7.6 million IBM Shared University Research award’s star component is IBM’s POWER7-based supercomputer, which will be used for advanced biomedical research by researchers from Rice, IBM and collaborating parters from the Texas Medical Center. The award also includes software, services and life sciences expertise from IBM.

The cutely-named “BlueBioU” supercomputer is Rice’s first system to take advantage of the new IBM POWR7 microprocessors. It is capable of 18.8 teraflops, which makes it as powerful as the combined total of Rice’s existing supercomputers. The Linux-based system is uniquely designed for parallel processing, and the platform’s 608 POWER7 processors are capable of simultaneously running 2,432 tasks.

According to the announcement, Baylor College of Medicine (BCM), a Texas Medical Center partner and a BlueBioU collaborator, plans to use the system to explore the entire spectrum of genomic change in cancer through the application of genome analysis technologies, such as large-scale genome sequencing. BCM’s Kim Worley, associate professor of molecular and human genetics, explains further:

“We are unlocking the mysteries of human cancer by analyzing the genomes of 50 patients with ovarian cancer to discover the mutation profile underlying their disease. If successful, we will analyze 1,000 patients with different cancers over the next year. This project will have a huge impact on our understanding of the biology of cancer and may identify potential future treatment avenues.”

The BlueBioU supercomputer is housed at Rice’s $16 million datacenter, which is connected to the Rice campus and to Texas Medical Center partners via a new $22 million network.

Computers Like Us

Today the Kavli Foundation announced a recent dialogue among three pioneering researchers that explores the synergy between nanoscience and neuroscience:

Recently, three renowned researchers — one neuroscientist and two nanoscientists — discussed how their once diverging disciplines are now joining to understand how the brain works at its most basic cellular level, and the extraordinary advances this merger seems to promise for fields ranging from computer technology to health.

The full story with transcript is available here. The conversation tackles ambitious subject matter, such as:

Is it possible to build supercomputers that can replicate the human brain, or to develop nanotechnology that can lead to an implantable chip for interfacing with neurons and other types of cellular networks?

Creating computers that emulate the brain (and its inverse, brains that emulate computers) is one of the grand challenges of science that many believe will influence the future of high performance computing. Ventures such as the Blue Brain Project and the Mind Machine Project (recently profiled on the MIT news Web site) could be the frontrunners to an AI future. Will the Singularity happen in our lifetime?

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