HPCwire: Parting Shots at 2007

The Leading Source for Global News and Information Covering the Ecosystem of High Productivity Computing

HPCwire >> Blogs

Blog: From the Editor

December 21, 2007

Parting Shots at 2007

For our last issue of the year, I'll take a look at some of the stories and developments that caught my attention in 2007 -- the big hits, the near-misses, and the strikeouts.

Intel Shifts Into High Gear, AMD Loses Traction

Intel fired on all cylinders this year, while AMD struggled to coalesce its new CPU and GPU business. Intel became the first chipmaker to produce commercial silicon at the 45nm process node. Intel's release of its Penryn processors in November capped a blitz of new offerings that caught AMD flat-footed. AMD's botched launch of its quad-core Opterons left frustrated OEMs and customers in its wake. Suggested holiday viewing for AMD CEO Hector Ruiz: "It's a Wonderful Life."

Sun Opens Up

In 2007, redshifting Sun got more serious about high-end computing with its Constellation supercluster and "Thumper" storage offerings. As a result of the more liberal regime under CEO Jonathan Schwartz, Sun Microsystems cozied up to Intel, Dell, IBM, and even (gasp!) Microsoft. Sun kept busy most of the year promoting open software (and hardware). In September, the company bought the Lustre parallel file system, and vowed to keep it open source too. What's next? Free servers?

Quantum Lurch

D-Wave Systems demo'ed a 16-qubit and 28-qubit quantum computer this year. The company plans to have an online service for quantum computing ready by the end of 2008. D-Wave says that by the middle of 2009 their online service will be available for pricing and risk analysis for the financial community. This will be followed by a quantum simulation capability for chemical, material and life science applications. Does this all make sense? If it does, it can't really be quantum physics.

A Tool Maker Disappears Into the Cloud

PeakStream, the once cutting-edge software tool provider that was going to make multicore, GPGPU and Cell processor application development available for the masses, got swallowed up by Google (which has spent the last couple of years buying acres of intellectual property). Fortunately, another company had been working the same paradigm, but a few months behind PeakStream. Enter RapidMind, stage right.

Next-Generation Supers

The usual suspects announced their latest and greatest supercomputers. IBM unleashed Blue Gene/P, the petaflop-era kicker to Blue Gene/L. Cray followed its "Adaptive Computing" instincts with the XT5 and the XT5h hybrid. NEC stayed on the vector path with the SX-9. Sun installed its half petaflop Constellation supercluster at TACC. Applications wanted.

GPGPU Gets Ready for Prime Time

NVIDIA mounted an aggressive campaign to take the early lead in the nascent GPGPU market. In February, the company launched its CUDA development tools for GPU programming and then in June brought out its spring line of Tesla GPU computing hardware. AMD made some noise with its R600 GPU and is now planning for double precision GPU computing next year with its FireStream Stream Processor and associated SDK. Intel is looking to do a GPGPU end-around with its upcoming "Larrabee" manycore products. Stay tuned; it's going to be a knock down, drag-out fight.

FPGAs, Ready and Willing

Lots of small players (Celoxica, DRC Computer Corp, SRC Computers, Nallatech, Mitrionics) looked to take reconfigurable high performance computing to the next level. Results were mixed, but Intel, AMD, HP, SGI and Cray gave them a boost up by making it easier to plug these devices into servers. So far, there are no FPGA systems in the TOP500. The next generation of FPGA chips with more silicon real estate may help. Software standards anyone?

ClearSpeed Eases On the Accelerator

The underdog in the HPC accelerator competition, ClearSpeed has managed to hook up with some of the larger HPC OEMs to garner more visibility. Resellers include HP, IBM and Sun Microsystems, as well as Tao Computing, a Korean supplier of HPC systems. ClearSpeed's main claim to fame is the deployment of its accelerator boards in the TSUBAME super at Tokyo Tech. With all the talk of GPU computing, FPGAs and the Cell processor, as of today TSUBAME represents the only accelerated super on the TOP500 list. Go figure.

Copper Killers

In anticipation of more widespread deployment of InfiniBand and 10 Gigabit Ethernet, a bunch of vendors announced optical cable assemblies for cluster interconnects. Intel, Luxtera, Zarlink, Finisar and XLoom all came out with products aimed at slightly different markets and price points. All will be shipping in 2008. The good news for optical cable vendors: the days of copper cables are numbered; the bad news: no one knows what that number is.

InfiniBand Goes Public

Riding the momentum of expanded InfiniBand penetration in HPC, IB vendors Mellanox and Voltaire executed initial public offerings in 2007. IDC's rosy outlook for InfiniBand predicts factory revenue for switches and adapters to grow from $62.3 million in 2006 to $224.7 million in 2011. Furthermore, the analyst firm believes InfiniBand will grow from its HPC base into the larger enterprise market. Vendors selling 10GbE wares are targeting the same applications and are planning to rain on InfiniBand's parade. (For more on this topic, read our feature piece on the InfiniBand-10GbE showdown in this issue.)

TOP500's Extreme Makeover

The latest edition of the TOP500 list, which came out in November, reflected a global fascination with all things HPC. Three of the top five machines come from outside the United States, i.e., Germany, Sweden and India. The number one system is still the IBM Blue Gene/L at Lawrence Livermore, which was recently upgraded from 260 to 478.2 teraflops. The number two system is a 167 teraflop Blue Gene/P installed at Forschungszentrum Juelich. SGI came in at number three with a 126 teraflop Altix ICE cluster that is headed to the New Mexico Computing Applications Center. HP got back in the high-end game with two 100-plus teraflop systems, which claimed the number four and five spots. Even the machines at the bottom of the list were no slackards. Number 500 was a 5.9 teraflop system from the UK.

HPC Growth Spurt Continues

If you can believe the latest numbers from IDC, the HPC business is bulking up like an athlete on steroids. Double-digit growth has become the norm, especially at the low end of the market, where clusters costing less than $50K now give lots of small groups access to mainstream supercomputing. IDC estimated overall HPC server revenue at over $10 billion in 2006 and projected $15 billion in server sales by 2011. That doesn't even count the associated revenue in storage, networking, software and services. More to the point, HPC is outpacing the overall server market, which, without the HPC revenue factored in, is achieving only lackluster growth. All signs point to these trend continuing.

Manycore Angst

Published a year ago this week, "The Landscape of Parallel Computing Research: The View from Berkeley" became a wake-up call to the computing community about the perils and pitfalls of our manycore destiny. Was anyone listening? Maybe. In the past year, both Intel and Microsoft spent a gazillion dollars for parallel computing R&D and education. Universities like Purdue, LSU, the University of Manchester, MIT and many others are expanding their HPC curriculums for the next crop of students. By the time these kids start to graduate in 2010, the manycore chips will be spilling out of the fabs.

That's All Folks

That should do it for 2007. It's been a privilege for all of us here at HPCwire to help keep you informed about this great and growing HPC community. I'd like to thank you, our readers, as well as our contributors and sponsors, for all your support. We'll be taking a one-week holiday break to recharge our batteries before jumping into the new year with both feet. Our next issue will be published on January 4th. Until then...

-----

As always, comments about HPCwire are welcomed and encouraged. Write to me, Michael Feldman, at editor@hpcwire.com.

Posted by Michael Feldman - December 21 @ 12:00AM

(Digg, Technorati, more)

Discussion

There are 0 discussion items posted.

Join the Discussion

You must be a registered user in order to comment on HPCwire stories.

Members enjoy:

	Access to Special Content, including Podcasts, Webcasts, and Whitepapers and more!
	Ability to take an active role in the discussions that are shaping the HPC technology discipline!
	Special offers available only to HPCwire members!

Become a Registered User Today!

Registered Users Log in Here to Comment

Email Address:	Password (case sensitive)

Remember me	Forgot Password?

Michael Feldman

Michael Feldman is the editor of HPCwire.

More Michael Feldman

Feature Articles

The Week in Review

The ACM Turing Award goes to the creator of the modern personal computer; and Voltaire announces a mid-range InfiniBand switch and new technology that accelerates distributed applications. We recap those stories and more in our weekly wrapup.
Read More...

Florida State Gives Virtual SMPs a Spin

The prospects for virtual SMP technology got another boost last month when Florida State University announced it had installed a new HPC system from 3Leaf Systems. The servers are being housed at the university's HPC facility and will be used across a range of scientific disciplines.
Read More...

HPC Powers Bobsled Team to Olympic Gold

For the first time in 62 years, the four-man Olympics bobsled team from the US captured the gold medal, setting a course world record in the process. The winning bobsled had some state-of-the-art engineering behind it, including CFD software from Exa Corporation. As it turned out, that software may have proved to be the margin of difference in the race.
Read More...

Read more HPCwire features...

Top Headlines

GP-GPUs: OpenCL Is Ready For The Heavy Lifting

Mar 11 | Linux Magazine | CUDA may be the rage, but OpenCL is a standard that has some features you may need. Read more...

Can Free Software Drive the Fourth Paradigm?

Mar 09 | Free Software Magazine | Data-driven computing will need open software. Read more...

Graphics Card Maker Turns to High-Performance Bioinformatics

Mar 09 | Bio-IT World | Tahoe Informatics founder eyes GPUs, CUDA software. Read more...

CFD: Light at the End of the Tunnel?

Mar 08 | Sporting Life | Formula One engineers differ on benefits of CFD. Read more...

AMD Tries to Draw Intel Into Chip Battle

Mar 08 | InfoWorld | AMD offers up 48-core server prize. Read more...

Read more headlines...

Featured Whitepapers

Virtualization for Aggregation And The vSMP Architecture™

Jan 12 | | In-depth look at vSMP Foundation server virtualization technology, technical implementation, use cases and capabilities. The technical whitepaper provides an architectural overview and details on the three vSMP Foundation products: vSMP Foundation for SMP, vSMP Foundation for Cluster and vSMP Foundation for Cloud.

Copper Cable Technologies for High Performance Computing

Jan 18 | | This white paper discusses Gore’s copper cable assemblies, and how they continue to exceed the standards for providing reliable, cost-effective solutions for high-performance computer applications.

View the White Paper Library

Multimedia

Webcast: Virtualized Data Center Roundtable

Join this online panel discussion for live Q&A with leading industry experts, analysts, and end-users to discuss the latest innovations, best practices, barriers to implementation, and measurable benefits of server virtualization with a particular focus on today's real world solutions.

Webcast: Watch SC09 Birds of a Feather Video: Scalable Fault-Tolerant HPC Supercomputers

Learn about scalable fault-tolerant architectures and examples of energy efficient and scalable supercomputing clusters using dual QDR InfiniBand to combine capacity computing with network failover capabilities with the help of programming languages such as MPI and a robust Linux cluster management package.

Webcast: High Performance Computing for a Smarter Planet

LIVE@SCO9: The IBM team discusses new innovations in hardware, software and services that help clients better understand their workloads and get insight from their R&D efforts. Technology demonstrations include the soon-to-be-released Power7 HPC processor, the DCS990 system with 2.4 petabytes of storage, the xCAT management tool, secure HPC cloud computing and more. Winners of two HPCwire Readers' and Editors’ Choice Awards! Take the IBM virtual tour at SC09 or more information go online to: http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/deepcomputing/sc09.html