Utility Computing and HPC

Aug 11, 2006 | Utility computing is emerging as a new model that allows HPC organizations to rent the processing power they need -- whenever and wherever they need it. HPCwire sat down with Norman Lindsey, chief architect, HP Flexible Computing Business Unit, to get his perspective on utility computing in HPC and HP's latest offering in this market, HP Flexible Computing Services.
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A Grand Challenge DNS at BSC

Aug 04, 2006 | Researchers Sergio Hoyas and Javier Jiménez Sendín undertook this grand challenge application in order to better understand the physics of turbulent boundary layers at high Reynolds numbers. This simulation was performed on the Barcelona Supercomputing Center's MareNostrum supercomputer and is now the world's largest simulation in the field of wall turbulence.
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Software Carpentry for Scientists and Engineers

Aug 04, 2006 | HPCwire recently had the opportunity to talk with Greg Wilson, author of the book "Data Crunching." In this interview, he describes his "Software Carpentry" course, a primer for scientists and engineers who are not professional software developers. This audience often spends a lot of time developing, debugging and maintaining programs, but doesn't have the computer science background to do these tasks effectively or efficiently. Wilson's course teaches the basics of modern software engineering in order to increase quality and proficiency.
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Nanoelectronics Goes Vertical

Aug 04, 2006 | Engineers at Purdue University have developed a technique to grow individual carbon nanotubes vertically on top of a silicon wafer, a step toward making advanced electronics, wireless devices and sensors using nanotubes by stacking circuits and components in layers. The technique might help develop a method for creating "vertically oriented" nanoelectronic devices, the electronic equivalent of a skyscraper.
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Technology Leadership Begins With the Individual

Aug 04, 2006 | We expect technology professionals to have a firm grasp on the hard sciences, while leadership skills are often considered expendable. But John West, director of the Major Shared Resource Center at the U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center, argues that these skills are as fundamental as technical expertise for scientists and engineers. In this Q&A, West talks about the importance of leadership for all technologists.
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The Direction of Future EU Quantum Information Research

Aug 04, 2006 | Although currently a very young field, quantum information science and technology could well have a vital role to play in future information and communication technologies. Quantum computing and communication techniques have the potential to transform the way we think about computing power. Or so believes Daniele Binosi of the Institute of Quantum Optics and Quantum Information in Innsbruck, Austria, and the European Centre for Theoretical Studies in Nuclear Physics and Related Areas in Trento, Italy.
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Leibniz Computing Centre Begins New Era in German HPC

Jul 28, 2006 | Last week, German officials inaugurated a new building of the Leibniz Computing Centre (LRZ) in Garching near Munich. At the same time a new national supercomputing system started operation. The new system will not only strengthen LRZ's standing in the area of high performance computing, but will also ensure improved competitiveness of the Munich area as well as Bavaria on an international level with respect to scientific computing capability.
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Expanding the HPC Ecosystem

Jul 28, 2006 | Over the past three years, the Council on Competitiveness has sponsored pioneering studies and conferences on the relationship between HPC and business competitiveness, under the direction of Council Vice President Suzy Tichenor. In January 2006, Bob Graybill, former DARPA HPCS program manager and current division director of USC's Information Sciences Institute, became a senior advisor to the Council. In this exclusive HPCwire interview, Tichenor and Graybill discuss the importance of expanding the HPC ecosystem for businesses.
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Senate Subcommittee Hears Testimony on HPC

Jul 28, 2006 | Last week the Senate Subcommittee on Technology, Innovation, and Competitiveness listened to testimony from expert witnesses on the subject of high performance computing in the context of national competitiveness. The witnesses, from goverment and industry, shared their diverse experience to create a varied portrait of the current state of high performance computing. Their testimony has the potential to advance future HPC legislation.
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Computer Scientists Evolve Text Mining Model

Jul 28, 2006 | Performing what a team of dedicated librarians would need months to do, scientists at UC Irvine have used an emerging technology to perform a topic analysis of 330,000 newspaper stories in a few hours. The demonstration is significant because it shows that an efficient, yet complicated, technology called text mining is on the brink of becoming a tool useful to more than highly trained computer programmers and homeland security experts.
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NASA's Columbia Supercomputer Tackles Einstein's Equations

Jul 28, 2006 | For 90 years, physicists have tried to solve the equations that constitute Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity -- the concept that matter, space and time are intertwined. But some of Einstein's abstract equations have proven too complicated to reliably calculate using traditional computer software and hardware. Until now, that is.
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Researchers Image Magnetic Semiconductors

Jul 28, 2006 | In a first-of-its-kind achievement, scientists have directly imaged the magnetic interactions between two magnetic atoms less than one nanometer apart that were embedded in a semiconductor chip. The findings bring researchers one step closer toward realizing the goal of building a very advanced semiconductor computer chip that would be based upon a property of the electron called "spin" and the related technology of "spintronics."
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Seven Challenges of High Performance Computing

Jul 21, 2006 | During our coverage of the High Performance Computing and Communication conference in March, HPCwire conducted an interview with Douglass Post, chief scientist of the DoD High Performance Computing Modernization Program, where he talked about the major challenges currently facing high performance computing. As the HPC community awaits DARPA's selection of the winners of the High Productivity Computer Systems (HPCS) Phase 2 competition, it may useful to review these challenges in order to understand some of the context of the impending decision.
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MIT Scientists Create Fiber Webs That See

Jul 21, 2006 | In a radical departure from conventional lens-based optics, MIT scientists have developed a sophisticated optical system made of mesh-like webs of light-detecting fibers. The fiber constructs, which have a number of advantages over their lens-based predecessors, are currently capable of measuring the direction, intensity and phase of light (a property used to describe a light wave) without the lenses, filters or detector arrays that are the classic elements of optical systems such as eyes or cameras.
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Driving Nanoscale Microelectronics Production

Jul 21, 2006 | A European partnership is focusing on the development of the basic fabrication techniques required for integrated circuits to meet the demands for ever smaller electronic systems. The main objective of the partnership is to stimulate "system innovation on silicon" and provide the technology platform that will allow Europe, through its microelectronics and system industry, to move faster into the Information Age.
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The Next Generation of Climate Models

Jul 21, 2006 | Few areas of scientific research today are as important, or provoke as visceral a response as global warming. Climate scientists around the world agree that the average global temperature could rise by 1.4 to 5.8 degrees Celsius by the end of the century. And scientists -- as well as government leaders, economists, and increasingly, the public at large -- recognize that warming could bring about far-reaching and unpredictable environmental, social, and economic consequences.
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The New Frontier: HPC in Enterprise Applications

Jul 21, 2006 | To the once-rarified list of human activities to which HPC has been frequently applied -- predicting the weather, simulating chemical reactions, sequencing genomes and so on -- one can now add business applications. This is particularly true in industries like aerospace and finance, which are heavily dependent on science, math and engineering, but HPC is turning up in less-expected places, like retail and insurance.
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HPC Helps to Unravel the Mysteries of the Universe

Jul 14, 2006 | What if the tiniest components of matter were somehow different from the way they exist now? Would matter as we know it be the same? Would humans even exist? Scientists are starting to find answers to some profound questions such as these, thanks to a breakthrough in the calculations needed to understand the force that comes from the motion of nature's basic building blocks.
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Uses and Misuses of Linpack: A Q&A with Doug Miles

Jul 14, 2006 | With each release of the Top500 list, more attention is directed at the relevancy of the ranking and the associated Linpack benchmark. Recently, we got the opportunity to ask Doug Miles, director of Advanced Compilers and Tools at STMicroelectronics, to share his perspective on this topic. In this Q&A, Doug discusses the significance of the Linpack benchmark and what it actually measures in today's HPC systems.
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A Personal View of Cray's Message at ISC2006

Jul 14, 2006 | Fresh from his recent trip to the 2006 International Supercomputing Conference in Dresden, contributing editor Christopher Lazou writes about Cray's recent achievements and the company's vision for providing the industry's next-generation supercomputers.
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Sun's Supercomputer Rises in the East

Jul 14, 2006 | IDC's Earl Joseph recently completed an exclusive interview for HPCwire with Professor Satoshi Matsuoka, of the Global Scientific Information and Computing Center at the Tokyo Institute of Technology. Professor Matsuoka talks about the significance of the institute's new 38 teraflops TSUBAME supercomputer, and describes some of the cutting-edge applications that will be running on it.
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Variations on an Opteron Theme

Jul 14, 2006 | This week Sun Microsystems introduced three new AMD Opteron-based server products targeted to the high performance computing and enterprise space: the industry's first 4-16 way x64 (64-bit x86) server, a data server that can accommodate up the 24 terabytes of internal disk storage, and Sun's new blade platform. The three new products are part of Sun's x64 strategy to leverage the Opteron's scalability.
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First Warning

Jul 07, 2006 | With advanced computing models and new technologies, the Center for Space Research at The University of Texas at Austin is helping Gulf Coast residents prepare for major hurricanes. To run these models and create detailed visualizations of their results quickly, scientists are using the supercomputing resources at the Texas Advanced Computing Center.
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Petaflops and Power Consumption

Jul 07, 2006 | Cray recently won the world's first order for a petaflops computer, which is headed for ORNL in 2008. During the ISC2006 conference, we caught up with Steve Scott, Cray's chief technology officer, and asked for his perspective on the HPC industry's drive toward petascale computing and about how the challenges of energy consumption will shape the future of the industry.
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SCinet Satisfies the Need for Speed

Jul 07, 2006 | Summer has barely begun and some in the HPC community are already looking toward November's 2006 Supercomputing Conference (SC06), which takes place in Tampa, Florida this year. In fact, the effort to develop the conference network, SCinet, actually began at the end of 2005 and will continue throughout 2006, right up to the beginning of SC06.
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