The Week in Review – 07/08/2010

By Tiffany Trader

July 8, 2010

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

EPA Launches Environmental Modeling Clearinghouse

Ames Laboratory Wins R&D 100 Award for 3D Virtual Simulation Software

Mississippi State Supercomputer Among World’s Greenest

World-Class Computing Continues to Increase at NDSU

Transaction Processing Performance Council Announces First Results

SC10 Technical Program and Registration Now Live

Rice Program Takes on Protein Puzzle

Internet2 Names New CEO: H. David Lambert

Engineers Learn How to Accelerate Product Design with Advancements in Simulation

NCSA: Sky Yields Big Data

Ateji PX Shakes Up Java Multicore Programming

Saudi Aramco Develops Tool to Rank Your Supercomputer

IBM Supercomputers Are Most Energy Efficient on Green500

National Research and Education Partnership Awarded $62.5M for 100 Gbps Network Backbone

IBM Partners with University of Missouri on Genomics Research Initiative

OCF Upgrades University of Edinburgh’s ‘Eddie’ Supercomputer

UK HPC integrator OCF plc has completed significant upgrades to the University of Edinburg’s HPC system, known as ”Eddie” (get it?). The enhancements have more than doubled the computing power available to multi-disciplinary researchers, enabling them to run more complex computer simulations, more quickly. The new Eddie will benefit innovations in fields such as bioinformatics, speech processing, particle physics, material physics, chemistry, cosmology, medical imaging and psychiatry.

Reflecting a current, and much needed, trend, the new system will generate less heat, despite its increased power, and will actually use less energy than its previous iteration. This is due in part to energy-efficiency upgrades in the Intel Westmere platform, as well as water-cooling features that remove all of the heat generated by the system close to the source. Additionally, the Scottish air helps cool the water year-round.

This is the first UK deployment of Intel’s Westmere E5620 Quad Core processors in IBM iDataPlex servers. According to the press release, the HPC system design incorporates the following:

  • IBM System x iDataPlex servers, running Intel’s latest CPU Westmere E5620 Quad Core processors.
  • 40 TB of high performance data storage using IBM System Storage DS5100 and a combination of fibre channel and solid state drives, fully integrated with an existing 90 TB of SATA storage using IBM’s General Parallel File System (GPFS).
  • A combination of BLADE Network Technologies GB8124R 24-port 10Gb Ethernet switches and Qlogic 12300 36-port QDR InfiniBand switches, also BLADE Network Technologies G8000 1Gb Ethernet switches.

The new-and-improved Eddie went live this month, and another renovation is already scheduled for  2011, with a plan to increase computing power five-fold. Design, build, configuration, implementation and support of the system upgrade will again be provided by OCF.

First-of-a-Kind Water-Cooling Techology Deployed

For those of you keeping an eye on the novel water-cooling technology that is Aquasar, the system is now fully operational. IBM announced this week that it has delivered an innovative hot water-cooled supercomputer to the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH Zurich). The system, dubbed Aquasar, consumes up to 40 percent less energy than a comparable air-cooled machine, and by using the waste heat to supply warmth to university buildings, cuts carbon dioxide emissions up to 85 percent.

Aquasar began developement a year ago as part of IBM’s First-Of-A-Kind (FOAK) program. The supercomputer consists of special water-cooled IBM BladeCenter servers and also includes traditional air-cooled IBM BladeCenter servers, to allow for direct comparisons. Together, the system has six teraflops of power and an energy-efficiency of 450 megaflops per watt. Nine kilowatts of thermal power, waste heat from the system, are fed into the ETH Zurich’s building heating system.

Water is an excellent coolant, with the ability to remove heat about 4,000 times more efficiently than air. An overview of the liquid-cooling process is included in the announcement:

The processors and numerous other components in the new high performance computer are cooled with up to 60 degrees C [140 degrees F] warm water. This is made possible by an innovative cooling system that comprises micro-channel liquid coolers which are attached directly to the processors, where most heat is generated. With this chip-level cooling the thermal resistance between the processor and the water is reduced to the extent that even cooling water temperatures of up to 60 degrees C ensure that the operating temperatures of the processors remain well below the maximally allowed 85 degrees C [185 degrees F]. The high input temperature of the coolant results in an even higher-grade heat at the output, which in this case is up to 65 degrees C.

For more information, including a short video, check out a prior announcement here.

Aquasar is installed at the Department of Mechanical and Process Engineering at ETH Zurich.

Subscribe to HPCwire's Weekly Update!

Be the most informed person in the room! Stay ahead of the tech trends with industry updates delivered to you every week!

MLPerf Inference 4.0 Results Showcase GenAI; Nvidia Still Dominates

March 28, 2024

There were no startling surprises in the latest MLPerf Inference benchmark (4.0) results released yesterday. Two new workloads — Llama 2 and Stable Diffusion XL — were added to the benchmark suite as MLPerf continues Read more…

Q&A with Nvidia’s Chief of DGX Systems on the DGX-GB200 Rack-scale System

March 27, 2024

Pictures of Nvidia's new flagship mega-server, the DGX GB200, on the GTC show floor got favorable reactions on social media for the sheer amount of computing power it brings to artificial intelligence.  Nvidia's DGX Read more…

Call for Participation in Workshop on Potential NSF CISE Quantum Initiative

March 26, 2024

Editor’s Note: Next month there will be a workshop to discuss what a quantum initiative led by NSF’s Computer, Information Science and Engineering (CISE) directorate could entail. The details are posted below in a Ca Read more…

Waseda U. Researchers Reports New Quantum Algorithm for Speeding Optimization

March 25, 2024

Optimization problems cover a wide range of applications and are often cited as good candidates for quantum computing. However, the execution time for constrained combinatorial optimization applications on quantum device Read more…

NVLink: Faster Interconnects and Switches to Help Relieve Data Bottlenecks

March 25, 2024

Nvidia’s new Blackwell architecture may have stolen the show this week at the GPU Technology Conference in San Jose, California. But an emerging bottleneck at the network layer threatens to make bigger and brawnier pro Read more…

Who is David Blackwell?

March 22, 2024

During GTC24, co-founder and president of NVIDIA Jensen Huang unveiled the Blackwell GPU. This GPU itself is heavily optimized for AI work, boasting 192GB of HBM3E memory as well as the the ability to train 1 trillion pa Read more…

MLPerf Inference 4.0 Results Showcase GenAI; Nvidia Still Dominates

March 28, 2024

There were no startling surprises in the latest MLPerf Inference benchmark (4.0) results released yesterday. Two new workloads — Llama 2 and Stable Diffusion Read more…

Q&A with Nvidia’s Chief of DGX Systems on the DGX-GB200 Rack-scale System

March 27, 2024

Pictures of Nvidia's new flagship mega-server, the DGX GB200, on the GTC show floor got favorable reactions on social media for the sheer amount of computing po Read more…

NVLink: Faster Interconnects and Switches to Help Relieve Data Bottlenecks

March 25, 2024

Nvidia’s new Blackwell architecture may have stolen the show this week at the GPU Technology Conference in San Jose, California. But an emerging bottleneck at Read more…

Who is David Blackwell?

March 22, 2024

During GTC24, co-founder and president of NVIDIA Jensen Huang unveiled the Blackwell GPU. This GPU itself is heavily optimized for AI work, boasting 192GB of HB Read more…

Nvidia Looks to Accelerate GenAI Adoption with NIM

March 19, 2024

Today at the GPU Technology Conference, Nvidia launched a new offering aimed at helping customers quickly deploy their generative AI applications in a secure, s Read more…

The Generative AI Future Is Now, Nvidia’s Huang Says

March 19, 2024

We are in the early days of a transformative shift in how business gets done thanks to the advent of generative AI, according to Nvidia CEO and cofounder Jensen Read more…

Nvidia’s New Blackwell GPU Can Train AI Models with Trillions of Parameters

March 18, 2024

Nvidia's latest and fastest GPU, codenamed Blackwell, is here and will underpin the company's AI plans this year. The chip offers performance improvements from Read more…

Nvidia Showcases Quantum Cloud, Expanding Quantum Portfolio at GTC24

March 18, 2024

Nvidia’s barrage of quantum news at GTC24 this week includes new products, signature collaborations, and a new Nvidia Quantum Cloud for quantum developers. Wh Read more…

Alibaba Shuts Down its Quantum Computing Effort

November 30, 2023

In case you missed it, China’s e-commerce giant Alibaba has shut down its quantum computing research effort. It’s not entirely clear what drove the change. Read more…

Nvidia H100: Are 550,000 GPUs Enough for This Year?

August 17, 2023

The GPU Squeeze continues to place a premium on Nvidia H100 GPUs. In a recent Financial Times article, Nvidia reports that it expects to ship 550,000 of its lat Read more…

Shutterstock 1285747942

AMD’s Horsepower-packed MI300X GPU Beats Nvidia’s Upcoming H200

December 7, 2023

AMD and Nvidia are locked in an AI performance battle – much like the gaming GPU performance clash the companies have waged for decades. AMD has claimed it Read more…

DoD Takes a Long View of Quantum Computing

December 19, 2023

Given the large sums tied to expensive weapon systems – think $100-million-plus per F-35 fighter – it’s easy to forget the U.S. Department of Defense is a Read more…

Synopsys Eats Ansys: Does HPC Get Indigestion?

February 8, 2024

Recently, it was announced that Synopsys is buying HPC tool developer Ansys. Started in Pittsburgh, Pa., in 1970 as Swanson Analysis Systems, Inc. (SASI) by John Swanson (and eventually renamed), Ansys serves the CAE (Computer Aided Engineering)/multiphysics engineering simulation market. Read more…

Choosing the Right GPU for LLM Inference and Training

December 11, 2023

Accelerating the training and inference processes of deep learning models is crucial for unleashing their true potential and NVIDIA GPUs have emerged as a game- Read more…

Intel’s Server and PC Chip Development Will Blur After 2025

January 15, 2024

Intel's dealing with much more than chip rivals breathing down its neck; it is simultaneously integrating a bevy of new technologies such as chiplets, artificia Read more…

Baidu Exits Quantum, Closely Following Alibaba’s Earlier Move

January 5, 2024

Reuters reported this week that Baidu, China’s giant e-commerce and services provider, is exiting the quantum computing development arena. Reuters reported � Read more…

Leading Solution Providers

Contributors

Comparing NVIDIA A100 and NVIDIA L40S: Which GPU is Ideal for AI and Graphics-Intensive Workloads?

October 30, 2023

With long lead times for the NVIDIA H100 and A100 GPUs, many organizations are looking at the new NVIDIA L40S GPU, which it’s a new GPU optimized for AI and g Read more…

Shutterstock 1179408610

Google Addresses the Mysteries of Its Hypercomputer 

December 28, 2023

When Google launched its Hypercomputer earlier this month (December 2023), the first reaction was, "Say what?" It turns out that the Hypercomputer is Google's t Read more…

AMD MI3000A

How AMD May Get Across the CUDA Moat

October 5, 2023

When discussing GenAI, the term "GPU" almost always enters the conversation and the topic often moves toward performance and access. Interestingly, the word "GPU" is assumed to mean "Nvidia" products. (As an aside, the popular Nvidia hardware used in GenAI are not technically... Read more…

Shutterstock 1606064203

Meta’s Zuckerberg Puts Its AI Future in the Hands of 600,000 GPUs

January 25, 2024

In under two minutes, Meta's CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, laid out the company's AI plans, which included a plan to build an artificial intelligence system with the eq Read more…

Google Introduces ‘Hypercomputer’ to Its AI Infrastructure

December 11, 2023

Google ran out of monikers to describe its new AI system released on December 7. Supercomputer perhaps wasn't an apt description, so it settled on Hypercomputer Read more…

China Is All In on a RISC-V Future

January 8, 2024

The state of RISC-V in China was discussed in a recent report released by the Jamestown Foundation, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank. The report, entitled "E Read more…

Intel Won’t Have a Xeon Max Chip with New Emerald Rapids CPU

December 14, 2023

As expected, Intel officially announced its 5th generation Xeon server chips codenamed Emerald Rapids at an event in New York City, where the focus was really o Read more…

IBM Quantum Summit: Two New QPUs, Upgraded Qiskit, 10-year Roadmap and More

December 4, 2023

IBM kicks off its annual Quantum Summit today and will announce a broad range of advances including its much-anticipated 1121-qubit Condor QPU, a smaller 133-qu Read more…

  • arrow
  • Click Here for More Headlines
  • arrow
HPCwire