Somehow we’re already rounding the bend into mid-spring, just shy of the planting days for the newest Top 500 crop, which will sprout in June in Leipzig—and well before the seeds of the busiest news season of fall have been selected.

Although you might not see it in the general news from the vendor side of the fence this week, there has been a significant uptick this month in terms of new research and development efforts underway at a number of national labs, universities, and even within the vendor community as it relates to HPC. We are regular followers of newly published academic research and have seen a doubling of the number of articles from across the supercomputing spectrum in April thus far.

While the FastForward and coming DesignForward proposal action might be spurring some of the surge of interest in various application, optimization and infrastructure research lately, needless to say, it makes for some exciting reading. We tend to follow the latest published research across a number of peer reviewed journals and from the labs. Among some of the items that caught our eye this week in particular are petascale simulations of earthquakes on the SuperMUC machine, and other items of interest, including capturing black hole events via large-scale simulations.

Let’s hop into some of what happened beyond the research sphere…

Top News Items This Week

Intel has selected Georgia Tech as the site of one of its new Parallel Computing Centers. The IPCC at Georgia Tech will develop new parallel algorithms and software for quantum chemistry and biomolecular simulation.

Research will target large-scale computer systems using Intel Xeon Processors and Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors.  The center will also develop new curricular materials to equip future computer scientists with the skills to fully realize the capabilities of parallel computing resources for scientific applications.

SGI has announced a partnership with GIS Federal, a supplier of high performing innovative solutions for big data, cloud computing and intuitive tools across all intelligence disciplines and NVIDIA, a pioneer in digital computing. The partnership will power a GAIA distributed database for the United States Army Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM), to rapidly render complicated geospatial features and heat maps, providing real-time actionable insights with the goal of saving lives during military operations.

The San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) has implemented a new feature of the Globus software that will allow researchers using the Center’s computational and storage resources to easily and securely access and share large data sets with colleagues.

Described as a “dropbox for science”, Globus is already widely used by resource providers and users who need a secure and reliable way to transfer files. SDSC is the first supercomputer center in the National Science Foundation’s XSEDE (eXtreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment) program to offer the new and unique Globus sharing service.

 Xyratex, now a Seagate company, has a new addition to its ClusterStor family of High Performance Computing (HPC) and Big Data engineered storage solutions – the ClusterStor Secure Data Appliance (SDA). Designed to meet government ICD 503 and Cross Domain Solution (CDS) requirements, the ClusterStor SDA targets multilevel security capabilities, in addition to performance and capacity needs. The ClusterStor SDA will be available through Xyratex reseller partners in 2014.

Chelsio has announced that its T4 based 10GbE adapters have been selected by NEC Corporation for NEC’s HPC Systems for network and storage connectivity in SX-ACE, the latest SX-series Vector Supercomputer, targeted at large data processing applications.

Equipped with the Chelsio T420-CR Storage Adapter, the NEC SX-ACE targets scientific computing applications such as weather forecasting, climate studies, fluid dynamics and material science simulations.

Mellanox has announced that its 10/40GbE adapters for rack servers and 10GbE mezzanine adapters for blades are now available with Dell Fluid Cache for SAN. The Mellanox high speed adapters help enable Dell Fluid Cache to accelerate a wide range of applications.

“Mellanox’s interconnects provide businesses with high performance, flexibility and stability while also addressing issues that plague data centers running powerful workloads,” said Chuck Tybur, vice president, global accounts and Americas OEM sales at Mellanox Technologies. “By combining our technology and Dell Fluid Cache for SAN, we’re helping Dell offer a scalable solution with exceptional efficiency and computing density.”

On the Road

Registration Open for NCSA PSP Meeting

SC14 Submissions for Panels Due April 25

Cluster 2014 Set for September

LANL to Host Supercomputing Challenge Expo

NCSA Presents Blue Waters Symposium for Petascale Science and Beyond