Water, Water Everywhere

Dec 15, 2006 | Understanding and addressing the many issues connected to water is complex, but NCSA is developing a cyberenvironment to make tackling the problems easier for the nation's researchers.
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The MareNostrum Universe

Dec 15, 2006 | According to the Bible, the universe was created in about a week. Astrophysicists are currently building a virtual universe that will be completed in about four months, using 2048 processors of the MareNostrum supercomputer at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center. This unique facility is the perfect place to compute the formation and evolution of a virtual replica of our own universe.
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Physicists Set Record for Network Data Transfer

Dec 15, 2006 | An international team of physicists, computer scientists, and network engineers led by the California Institute of Technology, CERN, and the University of Michigan and partners at the University of Florida and Vanderbilt, as well as participants from Brazil and Korea joined forces to set new records for sustained data transfer between storage systems during the SC06 Bandwidth Challenge.
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SiCortex Marches to A Different Drummer

Dec 15, 2006 | Last month at SC06, SiCortex, Inc. introduced its family of ultra low power high performance Linux systems, based on MIPS processor technology. In this Q&A, the company's co-founders, John Mucci (CEO) and Jud Leonard (CTO), talk about the novel design of the SiCortex systems, how the design overcomes the limitations of conventional clusters, and how their offerings will fit into the HPC market.
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17th Machine Evaluation Workshop at Daresbury

Dec 15, 2006 | On December 4th through 6th, 2006, about 250 people attended the 17th machine evaluation workshop at CCLRC Daresbury Laboratories, UK. In its seventeenth year, this workshop is a leading UK national event dedicated to distributed, high performance scientific computing. Contributing author Christopher Lazou recaps some of the most important workshop presentations and offers his perspective on the multi-core benchmark comparisons.
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Horst Simon Steps Down As NERSC Director

Dec 15, 2006 | Horst Simon, who has been director of DOE's National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) since early 1996, announced last month that he was stepping down in order to focus his energy on the two other positions he holds at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. With the search for a new NERSC leader officially under way, Simon took some time to talk about his decision and how he sees his future.
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Battle of the Network Fabrics

Dec 08, 2006 | With the support of InfiniBand and iWARP by the OpenFabrics Alliance, software stacks now exist that have open interconnect and protocol standards for HPC clusters, data centers, and storage systems. But convergence still seems a long way off. InfiniBand and iWARP are based on fundamentally different architectures, representing two approaches to high performance connectivity.
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Molecular Simulation of DNA Shows Unexpected Flexibility

Dec 08, 2006 | There is about 12 feet of DNA in a human cell but it is packaged into nucleosomes -- lengths of 147 base pairs each wrapped around eight special proteins. Virginia Tech researchers used novel methodology and the university's System X supercomputer to carry out what is probably the first simulation that explores the full range of motions of a DNA strand corresponding to the length of one nucleosome.
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The Impact of Cluster Virtualization on HPC

Dec 08, 2006 | In part two of this interview, Don Becker, CTO of Penguin Computing and co-inventor of the Beowulf clustering model, and Pauline Nist, senior vice president of product development and management for Penguin Computing, describe how cluster virtualization changes the cost model of server resoures and how virtualization and clustering will evolve in the marketplace. They also discuss Penguin's role in this evolution.
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GPGPU Computing and the Heterogeneous Multi-Core Future

Dec 01, 2006 | The general-purpose GPU (GPGPU) computing phenomenon has been gaining momentum over the last three years, and has reached the point where it has gained acceptance as an application acceleration technique. More broadly, the GPGPU phenomenon belongs to a larger research and commercial area dubbed heterogeneous multi-core computing.
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European Cyberinfrastructure in the Making

Dec 01, 2006 | In Rome on last week, CASPUR (Consorzio per le Applicazioni del Supercalcolo Per Università e Ricerca) hosted a "Forward Look" workshop on quantum molecular sciences at the prestigious Accademia dei Lincei. This is part of the European Computational Science Forum: The Lincei Initiative: from computers to scientific excellence. The aim of the workshop was to develop a vision on how computational sciences will evolve in the coming 10 to 20 years and create an infrastructure of support.
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The Impact of Cluster Virtualization on HPC

Dec 01, 2006 | Is virtualization the next "big thing" to impact high performance computing or is much of the buzz just hype? In part one of a two-part interview, HPC luminary Don Becker, CTO of Penguin Computing and co-inventor of the Beowulf clustering model, and Pauline Nist, senior vice president of product development and management for Penguin Computing, discuss how cluster virtualization can enable large pools of servers to appear and act as a single, unified system.
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IDC Meeting at SC06 Includes Five-Year Forecast

Nov 24, 2006 | During its analyst update breakfast meeting at SC06 last week, IDC unveiled a five-year revenue forecast for the HPC industry, projecting compounded annual growth of about 9 percent to $14.3 billion in 2010, from the 2005 total of $9.2 billion. IDC's five-year projection predicts slight growth for the capability segment and continued strong growth for all capacity segments, especially the departmental and workgroup markets.
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Ray Kurzweil Dazzles Crowd at SC06

Nov 24, 2006 | Addressing SC06 as the keynote speaker, Ray Kurzweil explained to a packed auditorium where he believes technology will lead us in the next several decades. The celebrated inventor and visionary described a future in which exponential progress in IT and biotechnology will have created a world that will be barely recognizable to the people of 2006.
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DARPA Selects Cray and IBM for Final Phase of HPCS

Nov 24, 2006 | This week, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency selected Cray and IBM as the two Phase III developers for the High Productivity Computing Systems (HPCS) program. Initiated in 2002, the program is designed to produce a new generation of cost-effective, highly productive petascale systems for national security, scientific research and industrial users. The third and final phase of the program will culminate in a prototype system by each of the two vendors in 2010.
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Researcher Explores Phosphorus-And-Silicon Quantum Computer

Nov 24, 2006 | A University of Utah physicist took a step toward developing a superfast computer based on the weird reality of quantum physics by showing it is feasible to read data stored in the form of the magnetic "spins" of phosphorus atoms in a phosphorus-and-silicon quantum computer. In such a computer, silicon would be "doped" with phosphorus atoms, and data would be encoded in the spins of those atoms' nuclei.
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Understanding the Different Acceleration Technologies

Nov 14, 2006 | Mark Twain once said, "History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme." Two decades after their heyday in the early 1980s, coprocessors are back with a vengeance. This time, the reasons are different: computing is increasingly limited by power consumption, cooling, space, and weight. If you know how your workload is different from the general one, you can exploit that difference to get far more computing done within those limits, by applying the right accelerator technology.
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The Software Challenges of Petascale Computing

Nov 10, 2006 | In this HPCwire interview, Kathy Yelick, one of the world's leading performance evaluation experts, discusses software challenges related to petascale and other large-scale computing systems. Yelick is a professor of computer science at UC Berkeley, with a joint appointment in Lawrence Berkeley Lab's Computational Research Division, where she leads the Future Technologies Group and the Berkeley Institute for Performance Studies.
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SDSC Boosts Storage Capacity to 25 Petabytes

Nov 10, 2006 | The San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) has upgraded it tape storage capacity to a phenomenal 25 petabytes. The new tape drives and media (IBM System Storage TS1120 tape drives and the 700-gigabyte tape media) will give SDSC and its host institution, the University of California San Diego, more storage capacity than any other educational institution in the world.
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ECMWF Workshop Explores the State of HPC in Meteorology

Nov 10, 2006 | Two weeks ago at the ECMWF (European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts) Workshop in Reading, over 120 meteorology experts, computer practitioners and vendor representatives spent four days exchanging experiences about the latest results in meteorology and the computer infrastructure which goes along with it. Contributing author Christopher Lazou highlights some of the more interesting workshop presentations.
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New NSF Center Targets Reconfigurable Computing

Nov 03, 2006 | The NSF's Center for High-Performance Reconfigurable Computing (CHREC, pronounced "shreck"), which is scheduled to become operational in January of 2007, is a new national center and consortium for fundamental research in reconfigurable computing. Recently we got the opportunity to ask Dr. Alan George, the CHREC director, to explain the significance of the new center and help us understand the type of work that will be performed there.
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The Yin and Yang of Understanding Data

Nov 03, 2006 | When the DOE's Office of Science announced the latest round of awards in the SciDAC program in September, the funded projects included the Visualization and Analytics Center for Enabling Technologies (VACET), which will focus on meeting the visualization and analytics needs of scientists. Wes Bethel, head of the Visualization Group at LBNL, and co-lead on VACET, talks about the field of analytics, how it contributes to computational science and where the fields of analytics and visualization are headed.
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IDC's HPC User Forum Meets In Manchester

Nov 03, 2006 | The 22nd meeting of the IDC HPC User Forum, held in Manchester, UK last week, brought together more than 80 UK, European and U.S. participants to discuss leading-edge research, market dynamics and vendor strategies in the high performance computing community. The local host for the meeting was the University of Manchester.
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Bioinformatics Lab Pursues Personalized Drug Treatments

Nov 03, 2006 | As bioinformatics becomes an indispensable tool for performing research into the origins and treatment of disease, more labs are investing in high performance computing platforms to help speed drug discovery. The Computational Bioinformatics and Bioimaging Laboratory (CBIL) at Virginia Tech is one such organization. Research at CBIL focuses on data modeling and molecular analysis of diseases such as cancer, muscular dystrophy and cardiovascular diseases.
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Cray Supercomputers Get a Workout at Oak Ridge

Oct 27, 2006 | With 54 teraflops of computing power, Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Cray XT3 is helping solve scientific grand challenges, while the Lab's 18.5 teraflop Cray X1E is being used to attack nanoscience problems. But scheduling the many research projects and keeping the supercomputers operating at peak capacity are challenges of their own.
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