HPCwire: SC09 Roundup

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

HPCwire >> Features

November 25, 2009

SC09 Roundup

by Michael Feldman, HPCwire Editor

Page: 1 of 2
1 | 2 All »

As is the usual case with the annual Supercomputing Conference, the HPC community manages to generate about six months worth of news in the span of five days. That makes for an fun-filled event, but since both journalists and readers have limited bandwidth, there's only so much real-time coverage that can be crammed into a week. Before SC09 recedes too far in the rear-view mirror, it's probably worth recapping some of the news connected to the big trends that emerged at the conference.

GPUs: Here, There, and Everywhere

Of the 60-odd press releases delivered at SC09, at least 15 of them were related to GPU computing, starting with NVIDIA's announcement of its new Fermi-based Tesla-20 series products, which we covered in some depth last week. But there were plenty of other GPU developments at the show, too, including China's GPU-CPU "Tianhe" supercomputer making it into the number 5 position on the TOP500; Japan's 3 petaflop TSUBAME 2.0 Fermi-equipped super scheduled for deployment in October 2010; and the announcement of a new GPU computing collaboration network.

Besides those developments, Penguin Computing added GPU computing to its HPC on-demand service, while PGI and CAPS launched new GPU compiler offerings, and TotalView and Allinea promised GPU debugging support in future products.Microway, Velocity Micro, AccelerEyes, TeamHPC, and even Mellanox also had new GPU computing-related product to talk about.

And that's really just a slice of the GPU stories at the show. The startling aspect to all this activity is that there is little actual production work taking place on GPU-accelerated clusters today. Most of the current deployments are still in the experimental stage. But with the more HPC-capable Fermi GPUs from NVIDIA coming online next year, and with the software ecosystem maturing apace, expect to see production systems start to ramp up in 2010.

InfiniBand Mojo

Speaking of maturing ecosystems, 10 Gigabit Ethernet seems to be picking up steam from both adapter and switch vendors. Despite that, in the HPC space InfiniBand continues to expand its footprint. On the latest TOP500 list, there is exactly one 10 GigE deployment, compared to 181 InfiniBand-connected systems. And although those systems are still in the minority -- most TOP500 machines are still GigE-connected -- that's up from 141 systems just a year ago.

TOP500 systems are not really typical though. Last year, InterSect360 Research reported that 60 percent of the systems they surveyed that were installed since the beginning of 2007 deployed with InfiniBand. A November 2008 survey by IDC found 30 percent of the systems they surveyed had InfiniBand, leading GigE, with 27 percent, and 10 GigE, with 14 percent. All indicators point to continued InfiniBand dominance in high performance computing.

At SC09, InfiniBand leader Mellanox announced its MPI offload technology, which allocates some of the interprocessor communication work to its ConnectX-2 HCA, leaving the CPU free to do more application work. The company also previewed its 120 Gbps per port InfiniBand switch hardware, scheduled for general release in the first half of next year. Meanwhile rival QLogic announced new agreements with SGI, HP, and IBM as it tries to edge into the IB business of Voltaire and Mellanox. Not to be left out, Sun Microsystems also announced a couple of new QDR switches at SC09.

Now that their are four vendors in the IB space (and two of them with their own ASICs), the switch and adapter offerings are more diverse than ever. With QLogic there to counterbalance Mellanox, expect to see even more innovation and more price competition in the months and years ahead.

Page: 1 of 2
1 | 2 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

Australia Commissions Cray Supercomputer

Mar 19 | OfficialWire | New super to support intelligence work Down Under. Read more...

Intel Partners See 'Easy' Upgrade Path With Xeon 5600 Chips

Mar 18 | ChannelWeb | Westmere parts already showing up in HPC machines. Read more...

AMD: OEMs primed for Opteron 6100s

Mar 17 | The Register | But what about the tier ones? Read more...

Arrival of the Desktop Supercomputer

Mar 17 | Cadalyst Magazine | A new generation of workstations is changing the nature of technical computing. Read more...

Scheduling HPC In The Cloud

Mar 17 | Linux Magazine | Latest iteration of Sun Grid Engine able to tap into Cloud. 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