Summer is officially upon us, with a quieting down from the research and academic side of HPC and an equally hushed vendor community that is likely staying tight-lipped until the upcoming busy news week in Germany.
We’ve caught wind of a few announcements coming up at the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC ’14) at the end of July, which might explain the rather quiet news sphere. We will assume that the vendor and user communities are holding their items for the busy week, especially since many are confident there will not be any overshadowing surprise Top 500 news.
Although slower than usual, there were a handful of top news items we’ve selected for the week…
Blue Waters Central to Solar Wind Research A scalable code developed at The University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) is allowing scientists at the Department of Space Science and Center for Space Plasma and Aeronomic Research (CSPAR) to delve into solar wind studies at massive scale.
DataDirect Networks has announced availability of a new storage offering that has capacity of more than 5 PBs in a single rack. The SS8460 disk drive enclosures, in conjunction with the SFA 12K and SFA7700 storage platforms, now can handle up to 84 drives with 6 TB drives in just 4U rack space. “With this latest 5 PB offering, we continue to maintain our density lead in the market, as well as our position as the de facto choice for high performance storage for HPC, FSI and large enterprise customers,” said Molly Rector, Chief Marketing Officer, DDN.
The Active Archive Alliance announced that the NASA Ames is utilizing an active archive to manage and store its high volume data. Ames was an early adopter of active archiving, and has continued to deploy the latest active archive solutions to preserve the massive data volumes it generates and to ensure that its stored data remains secure, reliable and healthy. Its current active archive is architected using Spectra Logic’s enterprise tape libraries integrated with the SGI DMF tiered storage virtualization system.
Univa has struck a technical partnership with a Formula One team. Sahara Force India will make use of Univa Grid Engine for their support of tight timelines in their engineering design simulations that target improved racing performance “Almost every area of the team relies on simulation tools to help develop the car and it is here that our relationship with Univa will be of great value,” said Otmar Szafnauer, Chief Operating Officer of Sahara Force India.
GiDEL, which specializes in reconfigurable technology utilizing FPGAs, unveiled boards that allow customers to combine the OpenCL programming model with Altera’s massively parallel FPGA architecture. “The FPGAs technology has been available for decades yet limited in usage.” said Reuven Weintraub, President and CTO of GiDEL, “Now, with the development of the OpenCL for FPGA, this platform-independent language enables more programmers to utilize the power of FPGA based architecture.” The company plans to show their wares at ISC this month.
Super Micro has announced NVMe servers supporting the new Intel Solid-State Drive PCIe Family. The company has early qualification and optimization of Intel’s SSD PCIe family on its 1U WIO, 2U Data Center Optimized (DCO), 2U EX DP 32 DIMM, 2U TwinPro, 3U 11x PCI-E slot and 4U FatTwin SuperServers providing a range of NVMe options targeting the most data intensive applications for VDI, Very Large Database (VLDB) and Hyperscale Computing applications. The company says they can deliver up to 6x IOPS throughput improvement over existing SATA 6Gb/s SSDs.
On the Road
Application Deadline for Initiatives Comprising SC14 HPC Interconnections Program is June 15
Altair Announces Global ATC and ATCx Conference Series
And of course, we look forward to seeing so many of you in a couple of weeks in Germany!