HPCwire: HPC User Forum Tackles Leadership Computing And Storage

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

Leading HPC
Solution Providers

HPCwire >> Features

April 21, 2006

HPC User Forum Tackles Leadership Computing And Storage

Page: 1 of 5
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 All »

At its eighteenth meeting last week in Richmond, Virginia, the HPC User Forum welcomed a record 133 participants from the U.S., Europe and Japan, and treated them to examples of leadership computing and a technical discussion of HPC storage systems and data management.

The HPC community is invited to attend upcoming HPC User Forum meetings: May 29-30 in Bologna, Italy (hosted by CINECA); June 1-2 at ETH in Zurich; and September 18-20 in Denver, Colorado. The European meetings follow a different format and are free of charge. The meetings are co-sponsored by HPCwire.

IDC's Earl Joseph, who serves as executive director of the HPC User Forum, thanked the users for attending and providing 28 excellent end-user presentations, and the vendors who sponsored the meals, including HP, Intel, IBM, Linux Network, The Portland Group and Microsoft. He said the HPC purchasing power of the users at the meeting exceeded $1 billion. For the past three years, the HPC market has been the fastest-growing IT market IDC tracks, achieving 94 percent aggregate growth since 2002 and increasing 24 percent in 2005 alone to reach $9.2 billion in revenues. HP and IBM were virtually tied for first place, with Dell in third position. Clusters have been a disruptive force (71 percent growth in 2005) and now represent nearly half the market, while the capability- and enterprise-class segments continue their modest decline. The workgroup segment, for systems priced at $50,000 and under, has grown 200 percent since 2002.

IDC is interested in hearing about users' impressions of multi-core processors and accelerators. Email Earl Joseph, hpc@idc.com.

Steering Committee Chairman Paul Muzio, VP-Government Programs for Network Computing Services, Inc. and Support Infrastructure Director of the Army High Performance Computing Research Center, welcomed the Richmond participants. He noted that as the HPC industry approaches petascale computing, many users feel storage has lagged behind HPC system capabilities. The storage topic will be continued at the September meeting. Regarding the AHPCRC, he said research areas include light combat vehicles, vehicle armor, bunker busters, penetrators and fuzes. Body armor is a serious concern: it's heavy, warm and needs be more flexible. The goal is to develop lighter, equally survivable armor.

Simon Szykman, director of the National Coordination Office for Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD), noted the Administration's strong support for supercomputing, evidenced by increases in President Bush's 2007 proposed budgets for NSF (12 percent), DOE-Science (35 percent) and NIST (10 percent), and calls for these budgets to be doubled over the next decade. Szykman applauded the HPC User Forum's focus on storage performance as well as cost, showing data that Moore's Law, Linpack, and hard drive capacity and cost have all been increasing at much higher rates than storage technology performance.

Doug Ball said Boeing uses CFD to design major portions of planes today, inside and out. Simulation saves time and money, and test data don't provide as much insight. HPC-based simulation has given Boeing competitive advantages in many areas, for example by reducing the spacing needed between planes at take-off. With reduced spacing, more takeoffs and landings are possible, plus flights are safer. Among remaining challenges: "fly" the Navier Stokes equations and not a database; computationally determine the acoustic signature of an airplane in one day; and true multidisciplinary design optimization.

Takeshi Yamaguchi said the main products of Aisin AW Co., Ltd. are automatic transmissions and GPS navigation systems. Aisin had 50 percent global market share for automatic transmissions in 2005 (5 million units) and developed the first six-speed automatic transmission for Lexus, VW and Porsche, as well as hybrid systems for Ford. Aisin had 40 percent global market share in 2005 for GPS systems. Aisin began using CFD analysis for torque converters in 1996 and most recently acquired a 48-processor Linux Networx system. Models with more than 10 million elements will be needed for detailed interior design of automatic transmissions.

Dolores Shaffer of Science and Technology Associates (SCA) reviewed the DARPA HPCS Program, noting that Phase II vendors will soon be submitting their proposals for Phase III. Some vendors are now trying to achieve petaflop computing in 2008. Users want petascale capability to perform more detailed simulations, with more data, and to do multi-physics multi-scale problems. The memory wall is growing, and system size is an increasing issue. She noted that more users are employing the HPC challenge benchmark suite in their procurements. Summer 2006 is the estimated start timeframe for Phase III, in which one or two vendors will be selected to finish their designs and build prototype systems.

Keith Gray, British Petroleum (BP), reported that exploring the Thunder Horse field in the Gulf of Mexico (potential reserves: 1 billion barrels) will require the same order of investment as a new Intel processor plant. HPC has reduced Thunder Horse migration from 3 weeks to 1 day and made BP the energy-industry leader in 64-bit computing. BP's strategy is to lease computers and remain agile enough to take advantage of platform breakthroughs.

Page: 1 of 5
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 All »

Article Tools

Share Options

(Digg, Technorati, more)

Subscribe

Subscribe to HPCwire

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?

RSS Feeds

Feeds by Topic

Feeds by Industry

Feeds by Content Type

Top Headlines

NSA Plans Massive, 65MW, $2B Data Center in Utah

Jul 06 | The Register | NSA looks to tap into cheap electrical power for new supercomputers. Read more...

Building the Computer That Could Halt Nuclear Armageddon

Jul 06 | TechRadar | Breaking the exaflops barrier will help keep the nation's nuclear weapons safe. And that's just the start. Read more...

Cloudy With a Chance of HPC

Jul 01 | GenomeWeb Daily News | The popularity of cloud computing in the life sciences community was on full display at April's Bio-IT World conference. Read more...

HPC From the Beach

Jul 01 | Linux Magazine | How can getting to the ocean help with HPC computing? Read more...

DARPA Investigates Extreme Supercomputing

Jun 29 | GCN.com | Agency issues RFI for "Ubiquitous High Performance Computing" systems. Read more...

Read more headlines...

Featured Whitepapers

Building High Performance Computing in a Green and Modular Solution Building Block

Apr 14 | | Many HPC IT departments are feeling the rising pressure to deliver more capacity computing and performance while trying to reduce the total cost of ownership. This white paper discusses how an environmentally-friendly and open-standards HPC building block based computing system using flexible interconnect options helps address capacity computing needs.

View the White Paper Library

Multimedia

Webcast: Dell Expands HPC Access and Adoption with Intel Cluster Ready Program

Source: Addison Snell, GM/VP, Tabor Research; sponsored by Dell

Many organizations that could benefit from the use of HPC clusters find that it is complicated to get the systems up and running because of limited IT resources or the complexities of the clusters themselves. Learn how the Intel Cluster Ready program, for which Dell was an original partner, seeks to address this challenge for entry level and mid-range HPC users.

Video White Paper: Architecting a Better Network Storage Solution

BlueArc's Titan architecture represents an evolutionary step in file servers by creating a hardware-based file system that can scale bandwidth, IOPS, and overall data capacity well beyond conventional software-based devices. With its ability to virtualize a massive storage pool of up to four usable petabytes of tiered storage, Titan can scale with growing data requirements, offering a competitive advantage for businesses, researchers, or other enterprises seeking to better manage data growth while still ensuring optimal performance.

Webcast: HPC Development Solutions: Sun Studio & Sun HPC ClusterTools

Sun Studio Compilers and Tools and Sun HPC ClusterTools allow you to create high performance parallel applications for OpenSolaris, Solaris and Linux. Sun Studio Express 11/08 includes MPI performance analysis capabilities and full OpenMP 3.0 compiler support. Learn about all this and the latest in Sun HPC ClusterTools 8.1.