October 30, 2008
Here's a collection of highlights, selected totally subjectively, from this week's HPC news stream as reported at insideHPC.com and HPCwire.
10 words and a link
Will cloud pricing answer the age-old question: is Windows more expensive?Barron's financial analysis on SGI: "circumstances dire"
It's interesting to me when broader communities peek into our little corner of the world. Today's morsel is a story from Barron's on SGI. It's titled "Don't Be Tempted by SGI," so you probably know where the article is headed (tip to HPCwire for the pointer)
The stock (ticker: SGIC) is down 59% this year, and its valuation -- it trades at less than one-third its trailing sales -- may tempt some investors. But the history of the business shows that sales of big, expensive supercomputers are rarely profitable.
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The circumstances now are dire for SGI. It had just $40 million in cash, as of its most recent quarter, and it must begin principal payments on $12.75 million of the Morgan Stanley loan next year. It has incurred an operating cash loss of $65 million over the past four quarters. And on its most recent conference call, its chief financial officer warned of further indebtedness.
Open Education Cup offers prize for best online HPC training
As the HPC industry has continued to grow and gain acceptance in mainstream commercial industry, more people are faced with the perils of efficiently architecting parallel applications. There will always be a series of flagship universities and national laboratories that have the knowledge and means by which to further educate their staff on the Zen of computational sciences. What about those without access to these resources? Enter the Open Education Cup.
"It used to be that the concepts of parallel processing -- of dividing a computing task and running it simultaneously across several processors -- were only important to supercomputing experts," said Jan Odegard, director of Rice University's Ken Kennedy Institute for Information Technology. "With the introduction of dual-core, quad-core, and soon, many-core chips, as well as the understanding that chips with hundreds of cores will be in your typical PCs within just a few years, parallel processing is suddenly something that everybody needs to be familiar with."
The Open Education Cup is a contest chartered with jump-starting "the creation of freely available, easily understood" classroom materials about parallel computing. Rice University is co-sponsoring the event with $500 cash prizes for the five best lessons submitted to the open-eduction site Connexions.
"Reports have said over and over again that we need more and better high-performance-computing education," said one of the contest's judges, Dan Reed, director of scalable and multicore computing strategy at Microsoft. "Projects like this are a way to build that education from the ground up," said Reed, who is also a member of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology ( PCAST ) and a co-author of PCAST's 2007 report on the challenges faced by America's information technology industry.
The contest will kick off during the week of the Supercomputing conference in Austin, Texas. I personally believe this is very exciting. So many of us have been musing thoughts on creating education material easily digested by those outside the HPC norms. I tip my hat to those affiliated with the Open Education Cup for taking the bull by the horns. I'm personally looking forward to viewing the course submissions.
For more info on this, read the full article or check out their Web site.
Newman on three technologies that will disrupt enterprise storage
Sun's HPC Watercooler points to the latest bit of analysis by Henry Newman pointing to his call for three storage technologies that will be "truly disruptive to the enterprise storage market." Highlights:
Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) is my number one pick for a technology that could change enterprise storage in dramatic ways.
...I have been writing about object-based storage for several years now (see Let's Bid Adieu to Block Devices and SCSI), and I am a big proponent of T10 OSD, given the problems I see regularly with fragmentation.
...I am a big proponent of [pNFS], and it has some broad implications (see The Future of NFS Arrives and NFS Enters a Parallel Universe).
Henry's original article is here.
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John West is part of the team that summarizes the headlines in HPC news every day at insideHPC.com. You can contact him at john@insidehpc.com.
May 23, 2013 |
The study of climate change is one of those scientific problems where it is almost essential to model the entire Earth to attain accurate results and make worthwhile predictions. In an attempt to make climate science more accessible to smaller research facilities, NASA introduced what they call ‘Climate in a Box,’ a system they note acts as a desktop supercomputer.
Read more...
May 22, 2013 |
At some point in the not-too-distant future, building powerful, miniature computing systems will be considered a hobby for high schoolers, just as robotics or even Lego-building are today. That could be made possible through recent advancements made with the Raspberry Pi computers.
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May 16, 2013 |
When it comes to cloud, long distances mean unacceptably high latencies. Researchers from the University of Bonn in Germany examined those latency issues of doing CFD modeling in the cloud by utilizing a common CFD and its utilization in HPC instance types including both CPU and GPU cores of Amazon EC2.
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May 15, 2013 |
Supercomputers at the Department of Energy’s National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) have worked on important computational problems such as collapse of the atomic state, the optimization of chemical catalysts, and now modeling popping bubbles.
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May 10, 2013 |
Program provides cash awards up to $10,000 for the best open-source end-user applications deployed on 100G network.
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05/10/2013 | Cleversafe, Cray, DDN, NetApp, & Panasas | From Wall Street to Hollywood, drug discovery to homeland security, companies and organizations of all sizes and stripes are coming face to face with the challenges – and opportunities – afforded by Big Data. Before anyone can utilize these extraordinary data repositories, however, they must first harness and manage their data stores, and do so utilizing technologies that underscore affordability, security, and scalability.
04/15/2013 | Bull | “50% of HPC users say their largest jobs scale to 120 cores or less.” How about yours? Are your codes ready to take advantage of today’s and tomorrow’s ultra-parallel HPC systems? Download this White Paper by Analysts Intersect360 Research to see what Bull and Intel’s Center for Excellence in Parallel Programming can do for your codes.
In this demonstration of SGI DMF ZeroWatt disk solution, Dr. Eng Lim Goh, SGI CTO, discusses a function of SGI DMF software to reduce costs and power consumption in an exascale (Big Data) storage datacenter.
The Cray CS300-AC cluster supercomputer offers energy efficient, air-cooled design based on modular, industry-standard platforms featuring the latest processor and network technologies and a wide range of datacenter cooling requirements.