The Microsoft of FPGAs

Oct 27, 2006 | HPC and modern computing in general has a seemingly insatiable demand for more performance, better efficiency and scalability. Now with the expansion of computing to practically every commercial and non-commercial endeavor, an additional requirement is to apply these attributes to a much wider range of applications. At Celoxica, they believe that the FPGA is the solution that can meet both sets of challenges.
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SC06 Conference Volunteers Building Huge Network

Oct 27, 2006 | While many people attending conferences say they go for the networking opportunities, when the gathering is the world's largest conference on high performance computing and networking, connectivity is taken to an entirely different level. Every year, a team of volunteers works for more than a year to design, build and manage the supercomputing conference network known as SCinet.
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The Interconnect Driven Vendor

Oct 27, 2006 | Next week, Liquid Computing Corporation will announce the general availability of their new scalable computing system, LiquidIQ. With its Interconnect Driven Server architecture, LiquidIQ was developed to address the communication bottleneck that afflicts today's scale-out clusters as well as offer SMP virtualization. We recently got the opportunity to talk with Brian Hurley, CEO and co-founder of Liquid Computing, about the significance of their new offering and how he sees it fitting into the high performance and enterprise computing landscapes.
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3D Visualization for Oil and Gas Evolves

Oct 20, 2006 | 3D visualization has been the key to increased success and efficiency in many areas of exploration and production (E&P). In this industry visualization plays a critical role in gaining insight from data. But often when we discuss visualization, we are talking only about the actual rendering of images on the screen. In fact, the visualization challenge for E&P is characterized by computationally expensive algorithms, a very large number of diverse data sets, and a need for greater interactivity and collaboration. To meet this challenge, we must make data management, computation and rendering work together smoothly and efficiently.
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High Performance Woman

Oct 20, 2006 | Maria Eleftheriou is a researcher at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center. As the only woman on her research team at IBM, we were intrigued about how Eleftheriou faced the challenges of establishing herself in a male-dominated field. HPCwire asked Eleftheriou about the work she does at IBM Research, her thoughts on the role of women in supercomputing, and any advice she might have for other aspiring female technologists.
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Thanks for the Memory

Oct 20, 2006 | Technology has made steady advances in the ability to write and store vast quantities of information in smaller, more manageable forms, but current technologies are approaching their limit. With powerful quantum methods and the TeraGrid's Cray XT3 at Pittsburgh, an Oak Ridge-PSC team did very large-scale simulations that open a door to next-generation magnetic storage.
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New HPC Platform Aims For Balance

Oct 20, 2006 | This week, Silicon Valley startup PANTA Systems unveiled its new server platform called PANTAmatrix. It is an x86-based platform that represents one of the new breed of servers that focuses on I/O performance and SMP configurability. It allows users to dynamically allocate I/O and computational resources across the cluster. A single PANTAmatrix system can support up to 9,000 processors as well as petabytes of storage.
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Finnish IT Science Center Invests in HPC

Oct 13, 2006 | CSC Finland, the Finnish IT center for science, will acquire a Cray supercomputer delivering over 70 teraflops of compute power to CSC's high performance computing users. The new Cray system, code-named Hood, will be installed in stages beginning later this year and continuing through 2008. It will replace a four-year-old cluster system that can no longer keep pace with the performance needs of the Finnish research community, which is currently doubling its computer usage every 16 months. CSC will also be upgrading its cluster infrastructure with an HP ProLiant system.
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National LambdaRail President Explains Research Focus

Oct 13, 2006 | Why is National LamdbaRail focusing so much on facilitating network research and "big" science applications as its core mission? Is it not as important to give equal or greater attention to the networking needs of the broader research and education community? Tom West, president of National LamdbaRail, answers these questions by explaining the central role of research in the evolution of network infrastructure. He also describes the key drivers that are currently propelling the next leap forward in networking.
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Handle with Care

Oct 13, 2006 | Thanks to modern tools such as radiography or NMR, looking inside a patient is no longer a problem. The deciphering of the human genome and the associated research of the human proteome has enhanced our understanding of processes on the molecular and cellular level. This huge body of information however is of little use when dynamic or bio-mechanic effects are involved. However, a new class of simulation tools is starting to appear that makes such an approach feasible for the doctors by providing a realistic 3-D patient-specific numerical model of the body.
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The Real Deal

Oct 13, 2006 | Despite many irrational human behaviors, economists have the task of making reliable predictions about the economy, which involves trying to find underlying logic in the processes by which people make decisions in consumer spending, housing, employment, savings, healthcare and many other economic-related realms of activity. With innovative algorithms and TeraGrid resources at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, economist John Rust is solving the most realistically specified versions yet attempted of the life-cycle model, a central paradigm of economics modeling.
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Why Compromise?

Oct 06, 2006 | In this article, Gilad Shainer of Mellanox Technologies, discusses RDMA versus Send/Receive and outlines the difference between interconnect and application semantics. He asks if we must choose one semantic over the other or are both essential to provide the application the desired performance, flexibility and scalability now and in the future?
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SGI Expanding the Reach of Linux

Oct 06, 2006 | Steve Neuner, the director for Linux engineering at SGI, has been pushing Linux up the scalability ladder for the better part of the 21st century. Today, a single image of Linux can run on 1024 Itanium processors. How was this feat accomplished? This week at the Gelato Itanium Conference and Expo (ICE) in Singapore, Neuner presented a session that described the Linux kernel modification that helped to make this possible. HPCwire caught up with him before the conference to ask him about the Linux improvements and where the future of single system image scalability is headed.
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Why Pretend?

Oct 06, 2006 | Christopher Aycock from Oxford University counters the pro-RDMA article from IBM's Renato Recio recently published in HPCwire. As an end-user, Aycock has come to the conclusion that RDMA is unsuitable for most customers and the most utilitarian solution is still Socket I/O. He believes that network vendors should forget about RDMA and concentrate solely on the programmed I/O model.
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Itanium Enthusiasm

Oct 06, 2006 | This week, Linux-on-Itanium fans convened at the Gelato Itanium Conference and Expo (ICE) in Singapore to talk about platform issues and spotlight success stories. Cameron McNairy, Itanium Processor Architect and Principal Engineer, gave the opening keynote as well as presented a couple of other technical sessions on the microprocessor architecture. HPCwire asked McNairy about Itanium's role in high performance computing, the current maturity of Itanium-based systems, and what we can expect to see in the future.
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Leapfrogging the Petaflop Race

Oct 06, 2006 | An undeclared race towards petaflop computing is in progress between the United States and Japan -- a race which is being closely watched by the global HPC community. Right now the scales lean towards the U.S., which leads with its latest IBM Blue Gene/L computer, a 280 teraflops (sustained) system. The IBM machine took the number one spot from Japan's Earth Simulator in 2004, which had dominated the supercomputing charts since 2002.
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The Role of HPC in AIDS Vaccine Designs

Sep 29, 2006 | Since human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) -- the virus that causes AIDS -- was first isolated in 1981, 25 million people have died of the disease. Worldwide it is estimated that there are currently more than 65 million adults and children infected with the virus. Nearly a quarter of a century on from identifying the virus we now have effective treatments. But they're expensive and, if doses are missed, the effects can be catastrophic. High performance computing is playing a key role in coming up with an HIV vaccine.
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TACC Receives $59 Million NSF Award For Sun Supercomputer

Sep 29, 2006 | The University of Texas, Arizona State University, Cornell University and Sun Microsystems to will deploy the world's most powerful general-purpose computing system on the TeraGrid, a 400-teraflop (peak) supercomputer that will provide unprecedented computational power to the nation's research scientists and engineers. The National Science Foundation has made a five-year, $59 million award to the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at The University of Texas at Austin to acquire, operate and support the system, schedule for full deployment in 2007.
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European HPC Industry in Need of Revitalization

Sep 29, 2006 | The UK's Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE), hosted an HPC Europe Workshop at St Catherine's college in Oxford. This interactive workshop, which took place on September 25-26, discussed issues of concern to Europeans working in the HPC area. It brought together top experts in HPC to share intelligence and develop common strategies, hoping to collectively leverage future directions of European HPC. Contributing editor Christopher Lazou recaps the workshop for us.
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ClearSpeed Looks for Traction With Cooler FLOPS

Sep 29, 2006 | While much recent attention has focused on employing GPUs or the Cell processor for HPC floating point acceleration, ClearSpeed is offering specialized coprocessor boards to boost system FP performance. According to Stephen McKinnon, ClearSpeed's new COO, the company is uniquely focused on floating point acceleration for the HPC marketplace and believes it has the roadmap to keep it ahead of potential rivals for the foreseeable future.
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Does Your Cluster Scale?

Sep 22, 2006 | This article will discuss both the hidden and painfully obvious scaling inefficiencies inherent in current technology commodity cluster and Grid computing with respect to data movement. It will also discuss the latest advances in parallel file serving technology and how these techniques can be utilized with current network topologies, file servers and unmodified applications to deliver throughput performance speed-ups of order 2X to 9X on certain workloads.
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New Search Engine Can be Used for Creative Discovery

Sep 22, 2006 | When you ask a supercomputer to tell a story, you might not expect a creative outcome -- or any. But a group of Virginia Tech researchers are using System X, the university's supercomputer, to test a new search program that can tell the stories of life -- the connections between gene sets, for instance, or the connections between discoveries reported in biomedical articles on the U.S. National Library of Medicine PubMed database.
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Computational Biology: Challenges and Opportunities

Sep 22, 2006 | The current issue of the quarterly publication, CTWatch, focuses on the issues and challenges facing the field of computational biology today and in the future. A recurring theme throughout all of the articles is that the field of biology is becoming increasingly data driven and is producing data faster than computers can process it. The authors address the limitations of our current cyberinfrastructure and suggest strategies to overcome these challenges.
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IBM Unlocks the Cell

Sep 15, 2006 | Last week, the DOE's National Nuclear Security Administration selected IBM to design and build the world's first supercomputer that will use both Cell Broadband Engine processors and conventional AMD Opteron processors. HPCwire got the opportunity to talk with David Turek, vice president of Deep Computing at IBM, about the new system. In this extended interview, Turek reveals IBM's strategy behind its new platform and how it fits into the company's supercomputing plans. He also discusses IBM's overall approach to hardware accelerators and heterogeneous computing.
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A Tutorial of the RDMA Model

Sep 15, 2006 | In this article, Renato Recio, Chief Engineer, IBM eSystem Networks, provides a rebuttal to a recent HPCwire piece, "A Critique of RDMA," written by Myricom's Patrick Geoffray. This article begins with an overview of the RDMA Model and then describes the attributes of a well performing RDMA chip architecture.
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