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March 02, 2007
The Week in Review
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Here's a collection of highlights, selected totally subjectively, from this week's HPC news stream as reported at insideHPC.com and HPCwire.
>>Energy in the news this week
Much of this week's news was dominated by word of HPC vendors and service providers starting to do their part to keep the Northern hemisphere from melting and sliding around the bottom of the planet.
At the beginning of the week The Green Grid announced that industry heavyweights Microsoft and Intel joined their ranks, beginning a week of energy-awareness campaigning by the organization. This week marked completion of the organization's formation, and they also announced membership in their board (AMD, APC, Dell, HP, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Rackable Systems, SprayCool, Sun Microsystems, and VMware).
Later in the week The Green Grid released three whitepapers addressing why it is so important to define and propagate the best energy efficiency practices in datacenter operation, construction and design; a framework for improving the efficiency of both new and existing data centers; and the use of the Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) metric, along with its reciprocal the Data Center Efficiency (DCE) metric.
In a move that was probably timed to keep Intel on energy message this week, Intel started talking last Friday about the environmental virtues of quickly replacing old servers. Speaking at a conference on data center design last week, Pat Gelsinger, Intel's senior VP in charge of its digital enterprise group, said, "A six year-old server takes up valuable resources that could be better used, so we have accelerated our refresh rate. Refreshing one data center gave us three times the performance for only four per cent more space utilized."
>>House begins to move on new HPC legislation
The US House of Representatives held hearings on Wednesday to mark up (among others) the HPC R&D Act. H.R. 1068 amends the High Performance Computing and Communications Act of 1991 which established the Networking and Information Technology Research and Development program. The 108th and 109th Congresses both considered similar legislation and failed to act. The bill made it out of committee and now proceeds (hopefully) to a vote.
From coverage at the Computing Research Association's Policy Blog:
"This version differs from the most recent attempt (H.R. 28, introduced in the 109th) in that it doesn't attempt to authorize specific agency activities.... First, it directs the Director of the White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy to develop and maintain a research, development, and deployment roadmap for the provision of federal high-performance computing systems. Second, there's an explicit requirement that the President's advisory committee for IT (now a responsibility of the PCAST) review not only the goals of the NITRD program but the funding levels as well and report the results of that review to Congress every two years."
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