December 16, 2005
Microsoft Corp. greeted nearly 200 delegates at the Microsoft Government Leaders Forum (GLF) Asia in New Delhi, India last week. During the two-day forum, government, academia and industry leaders from around the Asia Pacific and other regions explored how they can use information and communication technology to help their industries and organizations remain competitive in an increasingly connected, technology-driven world.
"GLF Asia is an important forum to encourage dialog between leaders throughout Asia Pacific in an effort to address our most pressing challenges," said Mr. Dayanidhi Maran, India's Union Minister of Communications and Information Technology. "We are pleased that Microsoft is working with governments to build partnerships to address the tremendous social and economic challenges we all face."
During the forum, Microsoft continued to emphasize its new agenda for high-performance computing. As part of his keynote address to the delegates, Bill Gates made the following remarks:
"Historically, you probably thought of personal computers as having the best price performance because of the competitive framework where many companies make personal computers and they're completely compatible with each other, but you didn't think of the personal computer as where you would get the very highest performance. But in the last few years, that too has changed. In fact, just a few weeks ago I keynoted a convention called Supercomputing and talked about how computers based on Microsoft software and the chips that Windows run on were actually providing the highest performance capability in the world for business problems, for scientific problems, for every type of problem there is.
You might ask, if that's the case, why haven't we seen a rapid shift to these low cost computers, and the answer is that because of the software that's been written on traditional machines it will be more than a decade before that transition is largely complete, but year by year the move of applications from the mainframe, from the non-mainstream UNIX-type systems onto the PC server hardware and increasingly onto the software that we build, that will be a general trend.
The wonderful thing there is that as you move to new hardware, the cost of the hardware is often less than the maintenance cost of the hardware it replaces, and so the only thing that's difficult is making sure that you've got the new software system and you can make that transition. The software is also far better, far more flexible, easier to get the information, much better developed tools, but that has to be planned in an orderly way. And so the move towards a very uniform, very high-performance type of computer hardware is a huge benefit that will allow more ambitious applications to be built."
In quieter times, sounding the bell of funding big science with big systems tends to resonate further than when ears are already burning with sour economic and national security news. For exascale's future, however, the time could be ripe to instill some sense of urgency....
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In a recent solicitation, the NSF laid out needs for furthering its scientific and engineering infrastructure with new tools to go beyond top performance, Having already delivered systems like Stampede and Blue Waters, they're turning an eye to solving data-intensive challenges. We spoke with the agency's Irene Qualters and Barry Schneider about..
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Large-scale, worldwide scientific initiatives rely on some cloud-based system to both coordinate efforts and manage computational efforts at peak times that cannot be contained within the combined in-house HPC resources. Last week at Google I/O, Brookhaven National Lab’s Sergey Panitkin discussed the role of the Google Compute Engine in providing computational support to ATLAS, a detector of high-energy particles at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
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May 23, 2013 |
The study of climate change is one of those scientific problems where it is almost essential to model the entire Earth to attain accurate results and make worthwhile predictions. In an attempt to make climate science more accessible to smaller research facilities, NASA introduced what they call ‘Climate in a Box,’ a system they note acts as a desktop supercomputer.
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May 22, 2013 |
At some point in the not-too-distant future, building powerful, miniature computing systems will be considered a hobby for high schoolers, just as robotics or even Lego-building are today. That could be made possible through recent advancements made with the Raspberry Pi computers.
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May 16, 2013 |
When it comes to cloud, long distances mean unacceptably high latencies. Researchers from the University of Bonn in Germany examined those latency issues of doing CFD modeling in the cloud by utilizing a common CFD and its utilization in HPC instance types including both CPU and GPU cores of Amazon EC2.
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May 15, 2013 |
Supercomputers at the Department of Energy’s National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) have worked on important computational problems such as collapse of the atomic state, the optimization of chemical catalysts, and now modeling popping bubbles.
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05/10/2013 | Cleversafe, Cray, DDN, NetApp, & Panasas | From Wall Street to Hollywood, drug discovery to homeland security, companies and organizations of all sizes and stripes are coming face to face with the challenges – and opportunities – afforded by Big Data. Before anyone can utilize these extraordinary data repositories, however, they must first harness and manage their data stores, and do so utilizing technologies that underscore affordability, security, and scalability.
04/15/2013 | Bull | “50% of HPC users say their largest jobs scale to 120 cores or less.” How about yours? Are your codes ready to take advantage of today’s and tomorrow’s ultra-parallel HPC systems? Download this White Paper by Analysts Intersect360 Research to see what Bull and Intel’s Center for Excellence in Parallel Programming can do for your codes.
In this demonstration of SGI DMF ZeroWatt disk solution, Dr. Eng Lim Goh, SGI CTO, discusses a function of SGI DMF software to reduce costs and power consumption in an exascale (Big Data) storage datacenter.
The Cray CS300-AC cluster supercomputer offers energy efficient, air-cooled design based on modular, industry-standard platforms featuring the latest processor and network technologies and a wide range of datacenter cooling requirements.