HPC Keys Gulf of Mexico Discovery for Chevron

Sep 15, 2006 | Chevron and two of its partners recently discovered a new field in Gulf of Mexico deepwater that could yield 3-15 billion barrels of oil, boosting U.S. reserves by up to half. At the Council on Competitiveness' HPC Users Conference on September 7, Chevron CTO, Dr. Donald Paul, gave an impromptu talk about the discovery and the crucial role HPC played.
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HPC and Supply Chain Management

Sep 15, 2006 | Is supply chain management poised to become an important new application for HPC? At the Council on Competitiveness' annual HPC Users Conference on September 7, panelists from commercial powerhouses Wal-Mart, Procter & Gamble, Pratt & Whitney and Clopay Plastic Products described their experiences.
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Rackable Eases Power Struggle in the Data Center

Sep 08, 2006 | Rackable Systems has been one of the fastest growing x86 server makers over the last four years. Its customers, including Yahoo, Amazon and Microsoft, represent some of the largest scale-out deployments of capacity cluster infrastructure in the industry. The secret to its success? The company provides a couple of unique features that differentiate its offerings from run-of-the-mill server vendors.
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Changing Times for Linux Networx

Sep 08, 2006 | Some changes are afoot at Linux Networx. In the past few weeks HPCwire learned that the company had started to do some internal realignment. There were rumors that as many as 60 workers had been laid off. At the same time, they were looking to expand other parts of the workforce. Subsequently we learned that a rather large amount of venture capital money was heading its way. In an exclusive interview, Linux Networx CEO Robert "Bo" Ewald tells HPCwire what prompted these changes and what it means for the future of the company.
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Cluster Virtualization

Sep 08, 2006 | As cluster use in enterprises grows, the need for high performance computing that scales on-demand to adapt to ever-changing workload requirements and provide optimal system utilization is also growing. These needs in turn have driven many useful innovations. However, there has remained a fundamental assumption that a cluster or grid configuration is provisioned as a static, disk-based, full operating system installation on every single server. In this article, Bob Monkman, Director of Product Management for Scyld Software, Penguin Computing, discusses an alternative approach -- Cluster Virtualization.
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Supercomputers Used to Model Gulf Storm Surges

Sep 01, 2006 | In 2006, the Department of Energy's Office of Science made two separate allocations of 400,000 processor hours of supercomputing time at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for studying ways to improve hurricane defenses along the Gulf Coast. The research is being done in cooperation with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). As hurricanes move from the ocean toward land, the force of the storm causes the seawater to rise as it surges inland. The Corps of Engineers used its DOE supercomputer allocations to create revised models for predicting the effects of 100-year storm-surges -- the worst case scenario based on 100 years of hurricane data -- along the Gulf Coast.
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The Rain in Spain

Sep 01, 2006 | Located on the Iberian peninsula, Spain's climate is influenced by the Atlantic Ocean, the Mediterranean Sea, and numerous mountain ranges. Such topography contributes to very high rainfall and gale force winds each Autumn. These types of extreme weather events are one of the main concerns of Dr. Garcia-Moya, a meteorologist who heads the Numerical Weather Prediction Group of Spain's Instituto Nacional de Meteorología (National Meteorological Institute), or INM. The INM provides weather products to a variety of customers and also teams with other agencies on climate research. In a recent interview, Dr. Garcia-Moya talks with HPCwire about the history, current challenges and future goals of meteorology in Spain.
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Star Maker Machinery

Sep 01, 2006 | How are stars made? -- no, not pop stars and movie stars, the other kind, the ones that bring light to cosmic darkness. Like people, the brilliant light points in space have a birth-to-death cycle, and their birth is a tempestuous, uncertain process. A star comes into being when a region of cold gas in a galaxy collapses -- like a basketball contracting to the size of a dot -- until the core gets so dense that the atoms begin to fuse. Astrophysicists mark the onset of nuclear fusion -- when the thermonuclear furnace at a star's core starts to heat up -- as the moment of star birth.
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UA Physicists Invent Single Molecule Transistors

Sep 01, 2006 | University of Arizona physicists have discovered how to turn single molecules into working transistors. It's a breakthrough needed to make the next-generation of remarkably tiny, powerful computers that nanotechnologists dream of. A transistor is a device that switches electrical current on and off, just like a valve turns water on and off in a garden hose. Industry now uses transistors as small as 65 nanometers. The UA physicists propose making transistors as small as a single nanometer, or one billionth of a meter.
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Intel Threads Its Way to Parallel Programming

Sep 01, 2006 | As computer systems with multiple CPUs become spread across the IT landscape, programmers will need a new set of development tools to take advantage of this new hardware model. This week, Intel announced a new high-level threading library aimed at software developers who are looking to exploit the parallelism of multi-core and multi-processor SMP systems. The new product, called Threading Building Blocks (TBB), extends C++ to provide thread-level parallelism for shared memory platforms based on x86 and Itanium processors.
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The Future of User-Directed SMP Parallel Programming

Sep 01, 2006 | OpenMP is an open standard for C, C++, and Fortran pragmas and directives to support portable shared-memory parallel programming. The current standard is OpenMP 2.5, which was defined by a language committee comprising users and vendors, and is available on many current high performance platforms. The OpenMP language committee is now discussing many issues regarding features to include in the next version of the standard, OpenMP 3.0. This article summarizes the proposed extensions likely to be incorporated in 3.0, more extensive issues we are working to define for inclusion in 3.0, and other issues that for one reason or another are not being discussed or were explicitly deferred until some future revision of the OpenMP standard.
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DOE Shares INCITE with Industry

Aug 25, 2006 | In mid-2005, the Department of Energy adopted the Council on Competitiveness' recommendation to expand the INCITE (Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment) program to include industry, along with government and university research. In this exclusive HPCwire interview, we first talk about the expanded INCITE program with Doug Kothe, director of science for Oak Ridge National Laboratory's National Center for Computational Sciences. We then turn to Jeff Candy, principal scientist in the Energy Group of General Atomics, one of the initial companies participating in the expanded INCITE program.
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Open Interface Enables Parallel Applications Debugging

Aug 25, 2006 | The Message Passing Interface (MPI) is used on most distributed memory architectures, such as clusters, to support parallel computing. Debuggers, such as Etnus' TotalView, also rely on the interface to examine and control parallel applications during execution. HPCwire recently caught up with Chris Gottbrath, Product Manager for the Etnus TotalView debugger, to discuss Etnus' efforts in helping to develop open interfaces for MPI. In this article, Gottbrath highlights Etnus' collaboration with the MPICH and Open MPI developers to extend these interfaces for the next generation of MPI.
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'Ballistic' Transistor Aims for Terahertz Chips

Aug 25, 2006 | According to Quentin Diduck, a graduate student at the University of Rochester, everyone has been trying to make better transistors by modifying current designs, but what is really required is a new paradigm. Electronics has gone from the relay, to the tube, to semiconductor physics. Now, researchers at the University are taking the next step on the evolutionary track: the "Ballistic Deflection Transistor." And it's as far from conventional transistors as tubes.
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Linux Clusters Target Oil & Gas Applications

Aug 25, 2006 | The oil & gas industry operates in an increasingly challenging environment. The new challenges include more than high risk and high capital commitments, or declining fields and complex operations. One also wants to be smart. The good news is that smart is a lot cheaper than it used to be. Specifically, high performance computers are a lot less expensive than they used to be, and a lot more powerful. This article discusses how cutting-edge Linux clusters are tackling tough exploration, drilling and production problems for oil and gas companies.
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HPCS Languages Move Forward: A Q&A with Rusty Lusk

Aug 25, 2006 | In July, Oak Ridge National Laboratory hosted an HPCS (High-Productivity Computing System) Language Workshop to discuss the status of the next-generation HPC languages -- Chapel, X10 and Fortress -- being developed by the three DARPA HPCS Phase II vendors. HPCwire got the opportunity to ask Rusty Lusk, one of the workshop's principle organizers, about the current state of the HPCS language effort and about some of the challenges that lie ahead as the program enters Phase III.
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Appearing on a Screen Near You:

Aug 18, 2006 | Over the last 10 years, a remarkable transformation has occurred in high-end visualization. Capabilities that once were available only to a select few now are accessible to almost anyone on any platform for any simulation application. Thanks to a combination of greater computing power at lower costs, major software advances, compatibility with major CAE solvers and ability to run on a variety of computing platforms, the technology is revolutionizing the way engineers and scientists see, analyze, communicate and interact with their computational results.
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Deborah Wince-Smith Previews HPC Users Conference

Aug 18, 2006 | The Council on Competitiveness' annual HPC Users Conference promises to be a watershed event this year (September 7, 2006), as the Council leverages three years of in-depth research on the HPC requirements of businesses and lays out its vision for addressing these requirements. HPCwire caught up with Council President Deborah Wince-Smith and asked her about the role of HPC within the Council.
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A Critique of RDMA

Aug 18, 2006 | Do you remember VIA, the Virtual Interface Architecture? In 1998, according to its promoters -- Intel, Compaq, and Microsoft -- VIA was supposed to change the face of high-performance networking. VIA was eventually reborn into the RDMA programming model. The pundits have returned, VCs are spending their money, and RDMA is touted as an ideal solution for the efficiency of high-performance networks.
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Cray Returns to NERSC: A Q&A with Bill Kramer

Aug 18, 2006 | The DOE's National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) recently announced that Cray won the bid to deliver a 100-teraflop, $52 million supercomputer that can be significantly expanded over time. Bill Kramer, general manager of the NERSC center, talked with HPCwire about the evaluation criteria and how Cray came out ahead in performance and price/performance.
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High Performance Wireless Network Aids Astronomers

Aug 18, 2006 | Combining computer and communications skills, experts at the University of California San Diego are helping colleagues at the California Institute of Technology share the massive amounts of data produced by astronomers' investigations of the cosmos. For the past three years, astronomers at the California Institute of Technology's Palomar Observatory in Southern California have been using the High Performance Wireless Research and Education Network as the data transfer cyberinfrastructure to further our understanding of the universe.
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Developing Data Solutions at NCSA

Aug 11, 2006 | NCSA is collaborating with the National Optical Astronomy Observatory to develop solutions for managing the tens to hundreds of gigabytes of data generated each night by its observatories. The ultimate goal is to meet the needs of the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST); when LSST begins operation in 2013 it will generate an estimated 15 terabytes of raw data and more than 100 terabytes of processed data every night, 365 days a year.
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NCAR, SDSC To Replicate Critical Data

Aug 11, 2006 | In June 2006, the National Center for Atmospheric Research and the San Diego Supercomputer Center signed a Memorandum of Understanding that provides a mechanism by which the two sites can back up each other's critical data. They will also jointly sponsor and participate in a workshop on data integrity and security. SDSC and NCAR will also work together to mount a coordinated storage infrastructure and exchange expertise.
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An Attractive 'Spin' on a Dark Subject

Aug 11, 2006 | Researchers at The University of Texas at Austin's Center for Relativity (CfR) are using computers from the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) to provide a better understanding of the interactions between spinning black holes. The CfR research team, investigated the strength of the gravitational attraction between two black holes as the direction of each hole's spin changed, as a way of better understanding the dynamics of what are thought to be the strongest sources of gravitational waves detectable on earth.
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Fabric7 Weaves an Interesting Tale

Aug 11, 2006 | Until Sun Microsystems unveiled its Sun Fire X4600 server last month, Silicon Valley start-up, Fabric7 Systems, was the only vendor with an eight-socket Opteron machine. Though not specifically targeted at the high performance computing market, the Fabric7 offerings have some interesting capabilities that may intrigue supercomputer users.
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