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

Conquering the Chaos in Modern, Multiprocessor Computers

Asian Scientists Shake Up Earthquake Research

SGI Altix ICE Sets New Record in Performance and Scalability

NAG Marks 40th Anniversary, Expands Student Awards Program

Viglen to Help Scientists Analyze Big Bang Conditions at the LHC

SGI Chief Technology Officer to Speak at Annual HPCC Conference

Tech-X Opens Subsidiary in Switzerland

Spectra Logic Protects Critical Biomedical Research Data

Imec, Synopsys Collaborate on 3D Stacked IC Development

Scale Computing Secures $9M Series B Investment

International Recognition for Australian Supercomputer Debuggers

Tilera Receives Investment from Broadcom

3PAR to Deliver Autonomic Storage Tiering for High-End Arrays

Cloud to Tackle Trillion-Euro Money Laundering Problem

Turing Award Goes to Creator of Personal Computer

The very nature of HPC is that it progresses over time. What was once cutting-edge becomes commonplace. Each innovation is only possible because of innovations and innovators who came before. As the saying goes: We stand on the shoulders of giants. Well, this week, one of those “giants” was awarded the ACM Turing Award for a lifetime of achievements. The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) granted the “Nobel Prize of Computing,” as the Turing Award is often called, to Charles P. Thacker, the creator of the first modern personal computer.

The A.M. Turing award is named after the famous British mathematician Alan M. Turing. Since its inception in 1966, the Turing Award has been bestowed upon computer scientists and engineers whose work has been responsible for great advances in the information technology industry. The recognition comes with a $250,000 prize with financial backing from Intel and Google.

From the announcement:

“Charles Thacker’s contributions have earned him a reputation as one of the most distinguished computer systems engineers in the history of the field,” said ACM President Professor Dame Wendy Hall. “His enduring achievements — from his initial innovations on the PC to his leadership in hardware development of the multiprocessor workstation to his role in developing the tablet PC — have profoundly affected the course of modern computing.”

Mr. Thacker is also the co-inventor of the Ethernet local area network and a founding member of three major research labs.

The announcement contains more information on Mr. Thacker’s many contributions to computer history. For more information on the the ACM’s A.M. Turing Award, go to http://www.acm.org/awards/taward.html.

Voltaire Intros Grid Director 4200, Accelerates MPI Collective Operations

Voltaire has expanded its family of 40 Gb/s platforms with the addition of the Grid Director 4200, a mid-range 40 Gb/s Infiniband switch. The 4200 hosts up to 162 ports, delivering 11.52 Tb/s bandwidth, and 100-300 nanoseconds of port-to-port latency. The switch is well suited for mid-sized clusters running scientific, commercial HPC and enterprise applications.

This new switch targets middle-of-the-road outfits with modest needs, and strategically fits in between the company’s high-end Grid Director 4700, aimed at HPC/supercomputing centers, and the Grid Director 4036E, a self-contained, 1U device intended for financial services companies.

Voltaire also announced the Fabric Collective Accelerator, a new hardware and software solution that accelerates distributed application group communications in scale-out fabrics.

The press release explains the technology:

Voltaire’s patent-pending Fabric Collective Accelerator (FCA) accelerates MPI collective operations by using Voltaire switches and their on-board processors to offload significant parts of group communication onto the switching fabric while Voltaire Unified Fabric Manager (UFM) orchestrates an efficient, topology-based collective flow. Working in concert, these products ensure that all bottlenecks are removed, at both the server and interconnect levels. The computational acceleration is achieved transparently without requiring changes to the application.

Voltaire tested high performance computing applications, such as reservoir modeling, fluid dynamics and crash analysis, and reported that the FCA boosted performance by a factor of 10.

Availability for the Grid Director 4200 is listed as the end of March 2010, and the FCA as early second quarter of 2010.