Baby, It's Cold Outside...Let's Calculate Something

Dec 18, 2008 | Argonne National Labs is part of the Department of Energy, so it's not exactly surprising to learn that they are actively looking for ways to reduce energy use. But using Chicago's cold winters to save $25,000 a month on cooling costs for the supers in their Leadership Computing Facility is, well, cool.
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The Week in Review

Dec 18, 2008 | NCSA coloring book teaches kids about supercomputing; NVIDIA supports distributed computing projects; and the University of Cincinnati and Proctor & Gamble partner on computer modeling center. John West recaps those stories and more in our weekly wrap-up.
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Santa's HPC Woes

Dec 18, 2008 | You thought you had it hard. What if all of your business, with a worldwide customer base, occurred in the midnight hours of a single day towards the end of December?
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Aggregating Clusters Through Virtualization; Virtual SMP Benefits

Dec 16, 2008 | Virtual SMP systems provide a powerful platform for large-memory workloads, while granting other tangible benefits as well, such as reduced management costs. Low-latency commodity interconnects like InfiniBand, coupled with software virtualization techniques, are a good starting point.
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The Week in Review

Dec 11, 2008 | SGI gets cut, makes cuts; Cray gets another debt discount; and Univa UD's UniCloud gets into Amazon's cloud. John West recaps those stories and more in our weekly wrap-up.
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OpenCL: To GPGPU and Beyond

Dec 11, 2008 | This week at SIGGRAPH Asia in Singapore, The Khronos Group ratified version 1.0 of the OpenCL specification. In the short term OpenCL is expected to encourage the development of applications that can take advantage of those GPGPUs. But in the long term the implications for HPC may be much more far-reaching.
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Heterogeneous Compilers Ready for Takeoff

Dec 09, 2008 | The second wave of GPGPU software development tools is upon us. New tools from The Portland Group Inc. (PGI) and French-based CAPS Enterprise enable everyday C and Fortran programmers to tap into GPU acceleration within an integrated heterogeneous computing environment.
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Compilers and More: A GPU and Accelerator Programming Model

Dec 09, 2008 | If you are familiar with current approaches to programming accelerators, you are either discomforted by the complexities, or excited at the levels of control you can get. Can we come up with a different model of GPU and accelerator programming -- a model that allows HPC programmers to focus on domain science instead of on computer science?
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HPC@Intel: Is the Free Lunch Over?

Dec 04, 2008 | The need to write scalable applications has been important for programmers in the HPC community for years. Now, the proliferation of multi-core processors is making scalability a top priority for millions of programmers. Previously, HPC programs that scaled very well were called "embarrassingly parallel," but it is inevitable that we will increasingly settle for "good enough" parallelism.
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Spectra Logic Finds Niche in High-End Tape Storage

Dec 04, 2008 | You may have only just started hearing about tape storage vendor Spectra Logic -- recent installations and its partnership announcement with SGI have gotten the company a lot of attention. But Spectra Logic isn't new; the company has been around for 30 years.
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The Week in Review

Dec 04, 2008 | Pro-science video released in conjunction with the Army Science conference; Computerworld runs article highlighting efforts to make supercomputing more available to industry; Nick Carr explains Mathematica's Cloud Service. John West recaps those stories and more in our weekly wrap-up.
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Reconfigurable Computing Prospects on the Rise

Dec 03, 2008 | With all the recent hoopla about GPU-accelerated HPC, reconfigurable computing with Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) has been getting proportionally less attention. While NVIDIA has led the GPU push in HPC, there is no single vendor in the reconfigurable computing space that has jumped into the driver's seat. That hasn't kept a variety of smaller players from trying.
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The Benefits of Passive Cooling

Dec 03, 2008 | From Seymour Cray's early heroic implementation of dissipating heat to today's state-of-the-art technology, fans, heat sinks, exotic vapor cooling and even simple water cooling have come full circle, but we still have the same challenges: heat dissipation and designing useable cost-effective solutions, not to mention that some of these solutions draw additional energy, and energy equals expense.
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Computed Tomography Software Taps Into NVIDIA GPUs

Nov 26, 2008 | Minnesota-based North Star Imaging, a firm that specializes in industrial X-rays for nondestructive testing and analysis, is employing NVIDIA GPUs to accelerate 3D renderings in its CT (computed tomography) software. Julien Noel, the company's CT product manager, says the exceptional computational power afforded by CUDA and Tesla hardware is increasing customer productivity and transforming their workflow.
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The Next Big Thing in Humanities, Arts and Social Science Computing: 18thConnect

Nov 24, 2008 | For the humanities scholar who may have only recently mastered library and archival finding aids beyond the archaic card catalog, the possibility of retrieving source materials at the flash of a keystroke (well maybe a few...) is very heady stuff.
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HPC Clouds -- Alto Cirrus or Cumulonimbus

Nov 21, 2008 | The "cloud" model of exporting user workload and services to remote, distributed and virtual environments is emerging as a powerful computing paradigm. Yet, one domain that challenges this model in its characteristics and needs is high performance computing.
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OpenCL Update

Nov 21, 2008 | OpenCL (the Open Computing Language) is under development by the Khronos Group as an open, royalty-free standard for parallel programming of CPUs, GPUs, the Cell and other parallel processors. An update of the effort was presented at SC08 on Nov. 17.
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Live From the Show Floor: A Conversation with SiCortex Chief Engineer Matt Reilly

Nov 20, 2008 | John West had a great conversation with Matt Reilly, chief engineer for SiCortex. Matt talked about what's going on with the SiCortex's low power, high density compute platform, and then he discussed the need for the computer science curriculum to include parallelism.
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Incoming: 10 Gigabit Ethernet for HPC

Nov 20, 2008 | InfiniBand has been a comfort zone for those tightly-coupled HPC applications that can't live without their addiction to low latency and high speed. If your application is a science experiment with good funding and no firm schedule, that's OK. If your application involves business, deadlines, and ROI, it's time to break out of that comfort zone and acquaint yourself with 10 Gigabit Ethernet.
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Live From the Show Floor: Wednesday

Nov 19, 2008 | John West talks with John Lee, vice president of advanced technology solutions for Appro; Steve Cumings, director of infrastructure for HP's Scalable Computing and Infrastructure Group; Morgan Littlewood, vice president of Violin Memory; Jim Falgout, chief technologist for Pervasive's DataRush; and Dave Ellis, director of HPC architecture for LSI, on the SC08 show floor. We also present our second Two-Option Audio Quiz.
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The Greening of Renault's Formula One CFD Program

Nov 19, 2008 | At SC08 this week, Appro announced it had completed the final deployment of 38 teraflop Xtreme-X supercomputer for the ING Renault F1 Team. The new system lives in a brand new CFD facility, built for environmentally-friendly computing.
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Oak Ridge Dives Into Science at the Petascale

Nov 19, 2008 | Oak Ridge National Laboratory recently unveiled the first petascale system dedicated to scientific research, a Cray XT machine with a theoretical peak performance of 1.64 petaflops. We talked with Doug Kothe, director of science at ORNL's National Center for Computational Sciences, about the challenges of and potential breakthroughs in science now possible with this built-for-science petascale system.
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Latest Benchmark Results on NEC Super Highlights SX-9 Performance

Nov 19, 2008 | Researchers at Tohoku University in Sendai, north-eastern Japan, announced on Wednesday that they had broken a batch of performance records on their NEC SX-9 supercomputer, as measured on the HPC Challenge Benchmark test. Hiroaki Kobayashi, director the university's Cyberscience Center, said the SX-9 had achieved the highest marks ever in 19 of 28 areas the test evaluates in computer processing, memory bandwidth and networking bandwidth.
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The Search for Stable Storage

Nov 19, 2008 | A team led by Thomas Schulthess of Oak Ridge National Laboratory has broken the petaflop barrier with a supercomputing application likely to accelerate the revolution in magnetic storage. Using ORNL's upgraded Cray XT Jaguar supercomputer, the team was able to achieve a sustained performance of 1.05 petaflops for an application that simulates the behavior of electron systems.
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Closing the Parallelism Gap with the Chapel Language

Nov 19, 2008 | Chapel is a high-level parallel programming language being developed by Cray for DARPA's High Productivity Computing Systems (HPCS) program. We asked Brad Chamberlain, the technical lead for the Chapel language project, to give us an overview of the language, the rational behind its design, and an update on the current state of the Chapel effort.
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