http://www.hpcwire.com/features RSS Feed for Features en-us Fri, 16 May 2008 02:53:35 GMT 2008-05-16T02:53:35Z en-us http://www.hpcwire.com/features/The_New_Science_of_Visual_Analytics.html When Jim Thomas set out to find new ways to deal with the mountains of information our society generates, he didn't just create a new organization, he created a new science. In this article we'll take a look at how the National Visualization and Analytics Center is transforming the problem of finding needles in haystacks into an opportunity for a more secure future. Fri, 16 May 2008 01:08:56 GMT http://www.hpcwire.com/features/The_New_Science_of_Visual_Analytics.html 2008-05-16T01:08:56Z http://www.hpcwire.com/features/The_Week_in_Review_20080516.html ORNL Jaguar doubles its performance; the SC08 Cluster Challenge is gearing up; the University of Central Florida uses Army dollars to purchase an IBM super; and IBM's RoadRunner prepares to break the petaflop barrier. John West recaps those stories and more in our weekly wrap-up. Fri, 16 May 2008 02:53:35 GMT http://www.hpcwire.com/features/The_Week_in_Review_20080516.html 2008-05-16T02:53:35Z http://www.hpcwire.com/features/Revaluating_FPGAs_for_64-bit_Floating-Point_Calculations.html We now have generally available 2.5 GHz quad-core Opterons and Virtex-5 LX330, SX95T and recently announced SX240T FPGAs. In addition to this, Xilinx is releasing a new version of their floating-point cores that reduces the amount of logic and DSP slices needed for building floating-point function units. Taken together it is time to revisit Opteron floating-point performance versus FPGA performance. Thu, 15 May 2008 02:35:53 GMT http://www.hpcwire.com/features/Revaluating_FPGAs_for_64-bit_Floating-Point_Calculations.html 2008-05-15T02:35:53Z http://www.hpcwire.com/features/NASA_and_SGI_Join_Petascale_Fray.html SGI's entry into the multi-petaflops sweepstakes began last week with its announcement of the Space Act Agreement. The agreement outlines a multi-year partnership between SGI, Intel and NASA, with the goal of deploying petascale supercomputing capabilities for the NASA Advanced Supercomputing facility at the Ames Research Center. Wed, 14 May 2008 02:10:56 GMT http://www.hpcwire.com/features/NASA_and_SGI_Join_Petascale_Fray.html 2008-05-14T02:10:56Z http://www.hpcwire.com/features/High_Performance_Humanities.html The NEH and DOE have a vision to bring one million hours of high performance computing time to the humanities. The effort is being managed out of the NEH's new Office of Digital Humanities, created recently to recognize the increasing importance of computing in what has traditionally been a very old-fashioned area of research. Thu, 15 May 2008 01:39:26 GMT http://www.hpcwire.com/features/High_Performance_Humanities.html 2008-05-15T01:39:26Z http://www.hpcwire.com/features/The_Week_in_Review_20080509.html SGI and NASA plan for 10 petaflops with Pleiades; Sun and SGI join Cray in reporting quarterly losses. John West recaps those stories and more in our weekly wrap-up. Fri, 09 May 2008 01:30:55 GMT http://www.hpcwire.com/features/The_Week_in_Review_20080509.html 2008-05-09T01:30:55Z http://www.hpcwire.com/features/Compilers_and_More_Accelerating_High_Performance.html Accelerators have been receiving a lot of attention lately from high performance computing users. PGI's Michael Wolfe thinks they should be getting even more. According to him, accelerators represent a more natural platform for HPC parallelism than either the current crop of general-purpose multicore chips or the ones on the drawing board. The trick is how to program them. Thu, 08 May 2008 17:46:38 GMT http://www.hpcwire.com/features/Compilers_and_More_Accelerating_High_Performance.html 2008-05-08T17:46:38Z http://www.hpcwire.com/features/InfiniBand_Goes_Long.html Since InfiniBand came onto the scene, users have focused their efforts on using the high performance network fabric to connect compute and storage boxes within the datacenter. But a couple of enterprising companies, Network Equipment Technologies and Obsidian Research Corp., have developed InfiniBand connectivity for wide area networks. Tue, 06 May 2008 22:39:05 GMT http://www.hpcwire.com/features/InfiniBand_Goes_Long.html 2008-05-06T22:39:05Z http://www.hpcwire.com/features/The_Green_Grids_Datacenter_Metrics.html The Green Grid has proposed key metrics for end user organizations to monitor as it pursues its goal of helping its members create more efficient datacenters. But what do the quantities mean, and how should they be measured? HPCwire talked to Jim Smith, the vice president of engineering for global datacenter operator Digital Realty Trust for lessons from his experiences measuring the health of datacenters in a business that looks a lot like HPC, but where a kW/h saved is a dollar earned. Mon, 05 May 2008 18:14:29 GMT http://www.hpcwire.com/features/The_Green_Grids_Datacenter_Metrics.html 2008-05-05T18:14:29Z http://www.hpcwire.com/features/New_Dimensions_in_HPC.html Within the computing industry, the traditional High Productivity Computing (tHPC) market has and continues to act as a generative edge for new technologies and applications. This market area has traditionally been the point where users are pushing advances in system performance and architectures to address problems that range from standard engineering simulations to problems that have hitherto been intractable. Mon, 05 May 2008 18:14:28 GMT http://www.hpcwire.com/features/New_Dimensions_in_HPC.html 2008-05-05T18:14:28Z