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.
Jun 19, 2013 |
Supercomputer architectures have evolved considerably over the last 20 years, particularly in the number of processors that are linked together. One aspect of HPC architecture that hasn't changed is the MPI programming model.
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Jun 18, 2013 |
The world's largest supercomputers, like Tianhe-2, are great at traditional, compute-intensive HPC workloads, such as simulating atomic decay or modeling tornados. But data-intensive applications--such as mining big data sets for connections--is a different sort of workload, and runs best on a different sort of computer.
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Jun 18, 2013 |
Researchers are finding innovative uses for Gordon, the 285 teraflop supercomputer housed at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) that has a unique Flash-based storage system. Since going online, researchers have put the incredibly fast I/O to use on a wide variety of workloads, ranging from chemistry to political science.
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Jun 17, 2013 |
The advent of low-power mobile processors and cloud delivery models is changing the economics of computing. But just as an economy car is good at different things than a full size truck, an HPC workload still has certain computing demands that neither the fastest smartphone nor the most elastic cloud cluster can fulfill.
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Jun 14, 2013 |
For all the progress we've made in IT over the last 50 years, there's one area of life that has steadfastly eluded the grasp of computers: understanding human language. Now, researchers at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) are utilizing a Hadoop cluster on its Longhorn supercomputer to move the state of the art of language processing a little bit further.
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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.
Join HPCwire Editor Nicole Hemsoth and Dr. David Bader from Georgia Tech as they take center stage on opening night at Atlanta's first Big Data Kick Off Week, filmed in front of a live audience. Nicole and David look at the evolution of HPC, today's big data challenges, discuss real world solutions, and reveal their predictions. Exactly what does the future holds for HPC?
Join our webinar to learn how IT managers can migrate to a more resilient, flexible and scalable solution that grows with the data center. Mellanox VMS is future-proof, efficient and brings significant CAPEX and OPEX savings. The VMS is available today.