November 12, 2008
Computing at Scale
Thursday's examination of the large scale computations and technologies needed to support fusion science in Simulation at the Petascale and Beyond for Fusion Energy Science falls into both the Computing at Scale and Application Horizons themes and provides a view into one of the most pressing research areas of our time.
Big compute usually means big data, and data management is receiving increased focus as petabyte-sized data stores become commonplace. The BitDew environment is discussed in the Visualization and Data Management session after lunch, highlighting the features that make it an interesting solution for automatic and transparent data management on computational grids.
Finally, the panel Disruptive Technologies: Weapons of Mass Disruption looks at the potential accelerative effects of quantum computing, flash storage, cheap and low power optical communications, and 3D chip stacking with an eye toward the possible goal of reaching an exascale system by 2020.
Computational Infrastructure
Both the physical and software infrastructure needed to support supercomputing get a lot of attention on Thursday. Proactive Process-Level Live Migration in HPC Environments examines the use of health monitoring to anticipate node failures before they happen, and then transparently migrate processors away from those nodes before a computation is interrupted.
The Grid Virtualization and Overlays papers session early in the afternoon presents papers on the use of overlays for efficient wide-area data transfers, examines the cost of doing science in the cloud, and using server-storage virtualization for integration and load balancing in datacenters.
Thursday also looks at the physical side of computation support infrastructure. Zero-emission Datacenters: Concept and First Steps compares three approaches to cooling datacenters and provides evidence that a novel approach studied by the authors cuts energy use by almost a factor of two.
Moving from Data Center Efficiency to Data Center Productivity looks at the evolution of attitudes as we move from managing power and cooling for efficiency and learn to manage datacenters for productivity. Finally, the Masterworks session Save Energy Now in Computer Centers presents the practical steps and real world results that Lawrence Berkeley National Lab has experienced on its path to more responsible energy use in its datacenters.
Application Horizons
HPC and the Energy Challenge: Issues and Opportunities features Jeffrey Wadsworth and a discussion of how petascale computing will enable a revolution in the way we provide for the energy needs of a growing world population.
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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May 09, 2013 |
The Japanese government has revealed its plans to best its previous K Computer efforts with what they hope will be the first exascale system...
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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.