HPCwire: HPC Users Hold Dialogue Meetings in Europe

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June 09, 2006

HPC Users Hold Dialogue Meetings in Europe

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The 19th and 20th HPC User Forum meetings, held in Bologna and Zurich last week and co-sponsored by HPCwire, brought together more than 100 U.S. and European participants to discuss leading-edge research, market dynamics and vendor strategies. Local hosts for the meetings were CINECA (Bologna) and ETH (Zurich). Vendor-sponsors included Cray, Dell, Hewlett Packard, IBM, Intel, Lenovo and Sun Microsystems.

Attendees were welcomed by IDC's Earl Joseph, executive director of the HPC User Forum, and by Steering Committee Chairman Paul Muzio, who is VP-Government Programs for Network Computing Services, Inc. and Support Infrastructure Director of the Army High Performance Computing Research Center (AHPCRC). Other participating Steering Committee members were Paul Buerger, OSC; Steve Finn, BAE Systems; Jim Kasdorf, PSC; and Robert Singleterry, NASA Langley.

Sanzio Bassini, CINECA, welcomed attendees to the Bologna meeting. CINECA plans to install a 5,000-core Opteron blade system and a 1024-core HP blade system that will rank high on the Top500 list. About half of CINECA'S utilization is from industry/private organizations, half from academia and national research agencies.

Earl Joseph gave an HPC Market Update, noting that the market grew 94 percent since 2002 and 24 percent in 2005 to reach $9.2 billion. HP and IBM are virtually tied for first place, with Dell number three. Cluster performance now fits many job sizes. Price continues to be the key driver, but many buyers will pay up to 20 percent extra for special features. He invited everyone to attend the ISC 2006 conference in Dresden. IDC included the conference brochure in everyone's handouts.

Mario Caponnetto explained the use of CFD to design Luna Rossa, Italy's challenger for the America's Cup yacht race. With CFD, you can model flow better than experimentally, both in calm water and waves. Luna Rossa V was launched in Valencia in March. After 16 races, Luna Rossa is first.

Sukumar Chakravathy, Metacomp, discussed CFD analysis of the American Challenger rocket car, which aims to recapture the world land-speed vehicle record for the U.S. This vehicle has much in common with a rocket and an airplane, a few things in common with a car. The code used is CFD++ from Metacomp.

Martin Walker (Bologna) and Frank Baetke (Zurich) said Hewlett Packard is focusing primarily on high-growth segments, i.e., Linux clusters. HP is addressing the cooling challenge with an advanced heat exchanger called Sidewinder and is leveraging its inkjet technology expertise to selectively cool the hottest parts of printed circuit boards.

Catalin Morosanu stressed Intel's strong commitment to HPC, noting that 333 of the Top 500 systems are based on Intel. The company plans to launch its next platform, Woodcrest, very soon, and in July will launch Montecito, which doubles Itanium performance per socket (dual core) while reducing power consumption.

Arthur Thomas, Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics, reviewed the Vital-IT Project, a world-class HPC center dedicated to the life sciences, based on a joint venture between academic and industrial partners (Intel, HP, Oracle). Vital-IT will promote new collaborations with industry and conduct important R&D.

Claude Arlandini said CILEA is a consortium of 10 universities in the Milan-Lombardy region that offers a wide choice of IT services to academia, the public administration sector and industry. CILEA has a strong commitment to life sciences research.

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