The Week in Review

Oct 19, 2007 | Quad-core Opteron supply falling short of demand; IBM advances carbon nanotube technology; and the fastest supercomputer in Europe boots up. John West recaps those stories and more in the latest HPC news of the week.
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Summit Spotlights Biomedical High Performance Computing

Oct 19, 2007 | HPC and grid computing, and the promises and challenges for biomedical applications, were the focus of the first annual Biomedical High Performance Computing Leadership Summit on October 1-2, hosted by Harvard Medical School in the Medical School's Rotunda in Boston, Massachusetts.
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SiCortex Machine Gets Warm Reception at Argonne

Oct 19, 2007 | On Monday, Argonne National Laboratory became the proud owners of the first SiCortex SC5832 system deployed in the field. Introduced in November 2006, the SC5832, along with its smaller sibling, the SC648, represent a new approach to high performance computing.
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Compilers and More: Are Optimizing Compilers Important?

Oct 19, 2007 | Over the past several years, general-purpose CPUs have advanced considerably, delivering order-of-magnitude improvements in application performance.While the same can't be said for software technologies in general, new compiler capabilities have managed to boost performance of some codes rather significantly.
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The Week in Review

Oct 12, 2007 | IBM launches energy consumption metering program; ClusterMonkey explains MorphMPI; and IBM and Google push parallel programming. John West recaps those stories and more in the latest HPC news of the week.
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HPC User Forum Wrap-Up

Oct 12, 2007 | About 100 people participated in IDC's recent HPC User Forum in Santa Fe, N.M. on Sept. 26-27. The attendees represented government, industry and academia, as well as all the major HPC vendors. Each User Forum has a theme; this one focused on the use of HPC in the energy industry.
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XLoom Makes Its Play for the Optical Datacenter

Oct 12, 2007 | XLoom Communications is just one of a growing number of companies who want to bring optical connectivity inside the datacenter. On Monday, the company unveiled its new 20 Gbps optical transceiver device, the AVDAT 4X.
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Panasas Invents 'Tiered Parity'

Oct 12, 2007 | This week, cluster storage vendor Panasas said that they have implemented the most significant extension to disk array data reliability since the original RAID paradigm was developed in 1988. Their new architecture is called "tiered parity."
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Q&A: Dr. Valentina Salapura

Oct 12, 2007 | On October 18 at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, IBM researcher Valentina Salapura will be delivering a plenary speech titled Next Generation Supercomputers. We asked her about her upcoming talk and the significance of the conference to women in the field of computer science.
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ASC Labs Create Unified Strategy to Add HPC Capacity

Oct 05, 2007 | Starting next month, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratories will begin installing eight new Appro high performance computing clusters. The new systems are the result of a unique government procurement, which joined together the three Advanced Simulation and Computing DOE labs for the purpose of optimizing the purchase, deployment and operation of HPC capacity resources.
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The Week in Review

Oct 05, 2007 | Appro wins tri-lab contract; Intel engineer espouses single-core performance; SiCortex signs agreement with European distributor; NSF to advance "computational thinking"; and Fernbach and Cray awards announced. John West recaps those stories and more in the latest HPC news of the week.
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NASA Perfects Pyrotechnics for Space Flight

Oct 05, 2007 | Separating the space shuttle from the external fuel tanks takes just the right amount explosive force. In order to achieve the proper design of the components, determine the precise amount of combustion required, and predict the behavior of the debris field, NASA is using finite element analysis software from MSC.Software along with visualization software by CEI Inc.
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Talking the Green Talk, but Not Walking the Green Walk

Oct 05, 2007 | A new survey just released shows that while CEOs and CIOs may be championing green IT, the reality is that many companies are still in the 'talking' phase or still have no plans to green up their data centres. Tony Sceales, Celona Technologies CEO, looks at the key findings and examines what this means for business and wider communities.
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Avoiding Application Porting Pitfalls

Sep 28, 2007 | A lot of companies are interested in migrating legacy HPC applications from traditional servers to clusters. But for many, the cost of migration is too high. Commercial cluster-ready software libraries may offer some relief.
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The Week in Review

Sep 28, 2007 | PNNL to receive 18,000 cores from HP; Woven gets $20 million in financing; and ClearSpeed partners with Sun and moves into Asia. John West recaps those stories and more in the latest HPC news of the week.
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Programming Models for Scalable Multicore Programming

Sep 28, 2007 | Multicore devices are quickly evolving in both architecture and core count, motivating software developers to decouple their code from the hardware. The SPMD parallel programming model offers a powerful approach to help achieve the desired attributes of both portability and scalability.
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Language Design for an Uncertain Hardware Future

Sep 28, 2007 | Do you know where your algorithms will be running two years from now? Five? Ten? Are you investing in code today that you will need to throw away? Now more than ever, selecting the best language environment has become a critical element in increasing the lifespan of your code.
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FPGA Acceleration Gets a Boost from HP, Intel

Sep 21, 2007 | Reconfigurable supercomputing via FPGA technology is getting some help from two of the biggest players in IT -- Intel and HP. Along with AMD's coprocessor-friendly Torrenza strategy, FPGA technology companies are starting to see a more welcoming environment for their offerings.
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The Week in Review

Sep 21, 2007 | PNNL gets first Cray XMT supercomputer; Intel jumps on the FPGA bandwagon; AMD tries out tri-core; and Barcelona goes toe-to-toe with Clovertown. John West recaps those stories and more in the latest HPC news of the week.
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A Global Climate of Change

Sep 21, 2007 | About eighty meteorologists and HPC experts from large-scale computing centres in eleven countries attended the bi-annual Computing in Atmospheric Sciences workshop on the use of high performance computing in meteorology. This event, organized by the National Centre for Atmospheric Research, provided a tour de force in meteorological and computing techniques by active practitioners, striving to leverage the latest HPC technology to refine their climate prediction models.
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The Week in Review

Sep 14, 2007 | AMD sets Barcelona free; partners line up their support. Acquisition rumors rumble around Rambus. Sun adds Lustre to its portfolio. John West recaps those stories and more in the latest HPC news of the week.
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AMD Climbs Back in the Ring

Sep 14, 2007 | After talking up its quad-core processors for more than a year, AMD finally released them into the wild this week. The company is hoping the new Opterons will not only stop AMD's financial hemorrhaging, but will also start to reverse Intel's momentum in the x86 market.
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Credit Modeling with Supercomputing

Sep 14, 2007 | The creation and deployment of new numerical methods for economic and financial modeling is becoming a critical competitive weapon for banks, hedge funds and other investment firms. Consequently, computing requirements on Wall Street are growing exponentially as algorithms and models become more complex to support new investment opportunities, while incorporating ever larger data sets.
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ClearSpeed Technology Takes Flight

Sep 07, 2007 | Earlier this week, ClearSpeed Technologies signed an agreement with BAE Systems licensing the design of ClearSpeed's next-generation processor to be used in BAE's satellite systems. This agreement marks ClearSpeed's foray into the embedded space, and may signal a change of strategy for the company.
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Terra Soft Carries the Torch for Cell and Power Platforms

Sep 07, 2007 | Since launching Yellow Dog Linux for the PLAYSTATION3 last year, Terra Soft has been busy expanding its presence in the Cell processor ecosystem. To get an update about what the company has been doing, we contacted Terra Soft's CEO Kai Staats via email in Nakuru, Kenya, where he is working with the Pistis Orphanage & Academy.
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