European Meterological Institute Launches NEC Supercomputer

Jul 19, 2007 | The Central Institute for Meteorology and Geodynamics in Vienna has officially deployed a new NEC supercomputer. The system is 28 times faster than its predecessor, and is designed to generate weather forecasts more quickly and with greater precision.
Read more...

Standards-based Reconfigurable Computing for HPC

Jul 13, 2007 | Users and developers have long recognized the enormous performance gains that reconfigurable hardware can provide for certain types of computationally intensive problems. However, despite well-known advantages, the technology has historically struggled to gain a strong foothold in the high-performance computing marketplace. Now, that's beginning to change.
Read more...

ORNL Closes In On Petascale Computing

Jul 13, 2007 | As a Department of Energy leadership computing facility, Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) employs some of some of the most powerful supercomputers on the planet. Buddy Bland, project director of ORNL's Leadership Computing Facility, discusses the challenges of computing at very large scale.
Read more...

The Week in Review

Jul 13, 2007 | Dan Reed blogs on DOE's SOS11 workshop; SDSC shakes up science with supercomputing on-demand; and chipmaker branding shows little bang for the buck. John West recaps those stories and more in the latest HPC news of the week.
Read more...

DataDirect Networks Finds Room at the Top

Jul 06, 2007 | Last year, DataDirect Networks, an HPC storage solution provider, booked $86 million in revenue. This year they expect that figure to reach $100 million.After 19 consecutive quarters of profitability, the company sees only opportunities ahead. Why is DataDirect on roll, while other HPC vendors are struggling?
Read more...

A European's Take On ISC2007

Jul 06, 2007 | Last week's International Supercomputer Conference in Dresden enabled Europeans to appraise new technology from Japanese and U.S. vendors and to get a sense about where large-scale scientific technical computing is headed. The presentations at the conference were broad-based and some described the cutting edge of the industry.
Read more...

Swiss HPC Strategy 2008-2011

Jul 06, 2007 | In response to last week's HPCwire article on some of the perceived problems of Swiss HPC governance, the co-director of the Swiss Supercomputing Centre (CSCS), Marco Baggiolini, offers his views on the controversy and how CSCS is preparing for a national HPC strategy.
Read more...

The Week in Review

Jul 06, 2007 | Intel, AMD in quad-core race to the finish; and Sun's Schwartz comments on the company's HPC strategy. John West recaps those stories and more in the latest HPC news of the week.
Read more...

Swiss HPC Users and Investments 2008-2011

Jun 29, 2007 | Shall Swiss HPC users be able to benefit from an additional 150 million Swiss Francs for the purchase of a high-end national HPC system for the 2008-2011 period? This is the key question these days in Bern, Switzerland, where members of the Federal Parliament are intensively discussing the Swiss HPC future.
Read more...

Getting Data Centers to Chill

Jun 29, 2007 | The latest dense rack systems are hot -- and in more ways than one. High-density racks are growing popular because organizations need more compute performance to run today's HPC applications. But the "server sprawl" that resulted from years of cluster scale-outs can't continue for much longer.
Read more...

IBM Enters Petascale Era with Blue Gene/P

Jun 29, 2007 | This week at the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC) in Dresden, Germany, IBM unveiled its next-generation Blue Gene architecture -- Blue Gene/P. The new model is intended for users looking for petaflop-level computing and beyond.
Read more...

The Week in Review

Jun 29, 2007 | Sun, IBM, SGI tout their wares at ISC; Microsoft delivers three-part HPC announcement; TotalView Debugger 8.2 released. John West recaps those stories and more in the latest HPC news of the week.
Read more...

The Week in Review

Jun 22, 2007 | Bull launches PR blitz; NVIDIA get serious about HPC; and SRC jumps on the Torrenza bandwagon. John West recaps those stories and more in the latest HPC news of the week.
Read more...

CSC Flagship -- The Cray XT4 Comes On Stream

Jun 22, 2007 | At the beginning of April, phase one of the Cray XT4, purchased by the Centre for Scientific Computing (CSC) in Finland, became operational. While the first phase provides 10.6 teraflops, the final Cray XT4 configuration, planned for 2008, is to deliver over 70 teraflops of compute power to CSC's HPC users.
Read more...

Next-Generation 10GbE Switching

Jun 22, 2007 | While a number of specialized interconnect technologies, such as InfiniBand and Fibre Channel, are available for building high performance data center networks, Gigabit Ethernet remains the dominant networking technology in HPC environments. But the transition to 10 Gigabit Ethernet presents a number of obstacles that have to be overcome in order to fulfill the promise of broad-based deployment in high-end data centers.
Read more...

NVIDIA Takes Direct Aim at High Performance Computing

Jun 22, 2007 | For the past year and half, NVIDIA has been putting together the product strategy for the company's high performance computing platform. On Wednesday, NVIDIA announced Tesla, a GPU product line targeted squarely for the HPC customer.
Read more...

IBM Unveils Enterprise Stream Processing System

Jun 22, 2007 | On Tuesday at the Security Industry and Financial Market Association Technology Management Conference in New York, IBM announced System S, a software framework that uses a stream processing model to support a new class of applications. The result of a $5 million initiative at IBM Research, System S is designed to perform real-time analytics using high-throughput data streams.
Read more...

Mitrionics CEO Details Company Vision

Jun 15, 2007 | Sometimes our focus on how the big HPC players are shaping the industry causes us to ignore the smaller companies and their contributions to product innovation. Contributing author Christopher Lazou highlights one such organization in a conversation with Anders Dellson, CEO of Mitrionics Inc., a Swedish company that has developed a C language platform for FPGA supercomputing.
Read more...

Reading Tea Leaves Was Yesterday

Jun 15, 2007 | The French weather service Météo-France has announced that a new high performance computer was installed at the French national center for weather forecasts in Toulouse. Five times more powerful than its predecessor, it will allow Météo-France to use a new forecast model and to conduct new research on climate change in 2008.
Read more...

The Week in Review

Jun 15, 2007 | Evergrid launches new job management tools, partners with Platform; IBM's new BladeCenter targets smaller businesses; and Japan revs up for pole petaflops position. John West recaps those stories and more in the latest HPC news of the week.
Read more...

The Week in Review

Jun 08, 2007 | AMD's delay could hurt Cray; Sun announces new blades; and Google acquires Peakstream. John West recaps those stories and more in the latest HPC news of the week.
Read more...

High Frequency Traders Get Boost From FPGA Acceleration

Jun 08, 2007 | Greed may or may not be good, but it is certainly latency-sensitive. In today's capital markets, whoever can collect and process real-time market data the quickest has a tremendous advantage. Being able to execute financial transactions before your competition is an extremely powerful incentive to acquire systems with the lowest possible latency.
Read more...

HPC Databases: The Data Ingest Challenge

Jun 01, 2007 | While much attention, technology and consulting fees are dedicated to getting data out of database management systems rapidly, with faster queries, much less interest is paid to optimizing the process of putting the data in. But for HPC, optimizing the process of filling up a database takes on greater importance.
Read more...

HPC Joins the Green Party

Jun 01, 2007 | In HPC there is a growing awareness and a strong economic argument for energy efficiency. And while everyone acknowledges that 'Green Computing' has become a serious topic at all levels of the computing infrastructure, a number of small and mid-size companies don't want to be associated with the topic, saying that it takes away from their real message of performance leadership.
Read more...

The Week in Review

Jun 01, 2007 | Linux Networx announces their second generation high-end visualization system; Rackable Systems cleans house, acquisition rumors don't pan out. John West recaps those stories and more in the latest HPC news of the week.
Read more...