December 16, 2005
SilverStorm Technologies, a provider of high performance interconnect solutions for clustered computing, has announced that the Institut Francais du Petrole (IFP) has deployed its 9240 InfiniBand switch gateway platform as the interconnect backbone for its newest high performance cluster computing network. The new cluster enables IFP to utilize a common pool of computing resources to run multiple oil and gas industry applications over a single interconnect infrastructure. The new network improves oil and gas research application performance while reducing data center operational costs. IFP is the world's second largest process licensor in refining and petrochemicals (via its subsidiary Axens).
"This announcement is a reflection of SilverStorm's continued leadership in providing the oil and gas marketplace a high performance computing interconnect solution to drive competitive advantage," said Douglas Besselman, EMEA Sales Director, SilverStorm Technologies. "Companies such as IFP are turning to SilverStorm's InfiniBand solutions to improve application performance while reducing operating and infrastructure costs."
Powered by nearly 430 processors (2 teralops) interconnected through a single 288-port 9240 SilverStorm InfiniBand switch, the high performance cluster computing network is designed to improve the performance of applications that are used to develop the knowledge and technologies of the three fundamental oil and gas chain fields: exploration-production, refining-petrochemicals and engines-fuels.
"We are very happy to achieve the first milestone of our HPC vision: to access all our needs on a single Linux cluster, less than three years after replacing our previous vector platforms," said Stephane Requena, HPC architect, IFP. "This cluster is made up of heterogeneous nodes (based on single and dual core AMD Opteron, Intel Xeon and Itanium or IBM Power5 nodes) running different flavours of Linux, but controlled by a single large SilverStorm InfiniBand switch, accessing an IBM GPFS parallel file system, and orchestrated by Platform Computing LSF HPC solution."
"Thanks to the solutions provided by SilverStorm in our high performance computing facilities, we are now able to address new challenges in the oil and gas industry, such as improving oil recovery, implementing new design of catalysts, reducing car engine pollution, developing new fuels using biomass or hydrogen, or achieving carbon dioxide sequestration," said Jacqueline Lecourtier, Scientific Director, IFP.
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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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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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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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.
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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.