Sun Reinvents HPC Offerings for SC08

Nov 18, 2008 | This week Sun is announcing new Constellation wins at Sandia and Aachen University, which come on the heels of large announcements at Forschungszentrum Jülich slated for installation in 2009, the Korean Institute of Science and Technology Information system, and a system in Canada at the Ontario Cancer Biomarker Network.
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Michael Dell Talks HPC

Nov 18, 2008 | Dell founder and CEO Michael Dell delivered the keynote address at the Supercomputing conference this morning in Austin, Texas, offering his perspective on where high performance computing is headed. We caught up with Dell shortly before the conference to get a preview of the keynote and to ask him about some of the hot-button issues that are driving the HPC industry today.
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Live From the Show Floor: Monday

Nov 18, 2008 | John West talks with Cray CEO Peter Ungaro, Sun Microsystems EVP John Fowler, and SGI SVP Dave Parry on the SC08 show floor. John also corners some randomly chosen exhibitors and attendees and gives them our Two-Option Audio Quiz.
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The GPGPU Chronicles: NVIDIA Goes Personal; AMD Keeps Streaming

Nov 18, 2008 | New GPGPU computing platforms are in the works at NVIDIA and AMD. NVIDIA has partnered with a number of OEMs and system integrators to offer Tesla-equipped personal supercomputers, while AMD has released its most powerful GPU computing board, the AMD FireStream 9270, and has also partnered with Silicon Valley startup Aprius to offer a 9.6 teraflop GPU expansion chassis.
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Straight Shooter: A Conversation with 2008 Seymour Cray Award Winner Steve Wallach

Nov 17, 2008 | Supercomputing legend Steve Wallach will be honored at SC08 with IEEE's Seymour Cray Award. HPCwire recently talked to Wallach about everything from the future of HPC to his philosophy on building a successful HPC business.
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Startup Provides a New Twist on Reconfigurable Supercomputing

Nov 17, 2008 | The HPC community has been dabbling with Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) for several years now, but the technology has never reached escape velocity. But at SC08 this week, startup Convey Computer Corp. launched a new server and software stack that aims to tame FPGAs and deliver reconfigurable computing to everyday HPC users.
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Supercomputing Conference Turns 20

Nov 16, 2008 | After more than a year of planning, the 20th annual Supercomputing conference (SC08) kicks off on Monday in Austin, Texas. SC08's general chair, Patricia J. Teller, tells us what we can look forward to this week.
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The Week in Review

Nov 13, 2008 | AMD's new quad-core Opterons ship early; ORNL announces Jaguar's petaflop performance; and Convey Computer prepares to launch SC-style. John West recaps those stories and more in our weekly wrap-up.
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Intel Revs Compiler Suite

Nov 12, 2008 | On Tuesday Intel announced that it has updated its compiler and cluster suites ahead of the introduction of the Core i7 (Nehalem) processors. HPCwire spoke with James Reinders, chief product evangelist and director of marketing for Intel's Developer Products Division, to find out what's new this time around.
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Executive Guide to SC08: Friday

Nov 12, 2008 | Although the final day of the conference is always a half-day, it's often a half-day not to be missed, and this year is no exception.
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Perspectives on HPC and the SC Series of Conferences

Nov 12, 2008 | Once a year, the leading experts from the world of high performance computing gather at SC to assess the current state of HPC and to look ahead to what the future holds. As the conference prepares to celebrate its 20th anniversary, several industry thought leaders and long-time attendees reflect on what is most important to them.
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Executive Guide to SC08: Thursday

Nov 12, 2008 | 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.
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Executive Guide to SC08: Wednesday

Nov 11, 2008 | Wednesday morning starts off looking at one of the most talked about visions of the HPC future to come on the scene in the recent past: Parallel Computing Landscape: A View from Berkeley. David Patterson, one of the report's principal authors, discusses A View in this invited talk.
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Executive Guide to SC08: Sunday and Monday

Nov 10, 2008 | Sunday and Monday during the conference feature a wide range of informative tutorials and thought provoking workshops. These days before the conference begins in earnest can be a good time to settle in and make the transition from everyday work into a frame of mind where you can do something that is increasingly a rare activity: thinking strategically about how supercomputing and HPC fit into your business.
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Executive Guide to SC08: Making the Most of the Conference

Nov 10, 2008 | The annual Supercomputing (SC) conference is the most important gathering of high performance computing professionals in the United States. You'd like to make sure that your time there is well spent, but SC can easily overwhelm attendees. It is all too easy to end up wandering the show floor for three days with the vague sense that you're missing something.
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Executive Guide to SC08: Tuesday

Nov 10, 2008 | Tuesday marks the first full day of the conference technical program. This year’s conference keynote will be given by Michael Dell, chairman and CEO of Dell, Inc. Dell’s selection reflects both the changing face of the industry, and the conference’s location – Dell is headquartered about 20 miles north of Austin in Round Rock, Texas.
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The Future of Climate Research: A Q&A with ORNL's James Hack

Nov 07, 2008 | As leader of ORNL's Climate Change Initiative, James Hack is in charge of pulling together scientists and engineers from across ORNL to advance the state of the science. We asked him about the future of climate science and the climate initiative at ORNL.
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Appro CEO Shares HPC Vision

Nov 06, 2008 | In this interview, Appro CEO Daniel Kim describes how Appro has been addressing the needs of high-performance computing customers worldwide to do more with less. He also provides a glimpse into Appro's vision and opportunities for its supercomputer and high-performance cluster solutions.
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The Week in Review

Nov 06, 2008 | Australian Bureau of Meterology considers Sun; former IBM employee goes to Apple in violation of 'no-compete' agreement; SC celebrates 20 years, honors long-time friends. John West recaps those stories and more in our weekly wrap-up.
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Mine is Greener Than Yours

Nov 06, 2008 | Supercomputing vendor SiCortex has long trumpeted the power-, cooling-, and space-friendliness of its HPC gear. This week the company is introducing a new metric, the Green Computing Performance Index, that assesses the performance of individual supercomputers based on the ratio of their performance on the HPC Challenge benchmark to power consumption.
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The Week in Review

Oct 30, 2008 | Barron's writes up SGI, Open Education Cup holds HPC coursework contest; and a blog about disruptive storage technologies. John West recaps those stories and more in our weekly wrap-up.
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HPC@Intel: Moving HPC Forward

Oct 30, 2008 | How do we move high-performance computing forward? Intel is producing technologies that enable major breakthroughs in science, engineering, medicine, and an array of other fields. At the same time, it is helping to make it simpler and more affordable for organizations to get involved with high-performance computing.
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SGI Returns to Visual Roots

Oct 30, 2008 | This week SGI has announced a new product portfolio that signifies the company's return to their computer graphics roots. The VUE family of applications is a new lineup of software and services that the company says will change the way you create, distribute and use visual information.
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Compilers and More: Optimizing GPU Kernels

Oct 30, 2008 | Michael Wolfe's latest column focuses on programming the GPU, taking a look at a simple single-precision matrix multiplication, equivalent to the BLAS SGEMM routine.
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National LambdaRail Opens for Business

Oct 28, 2008 | The commercialization of the largest optical network used by the U.S. research community is at hand. Darkstrand Inc. has announced that half the capacity of the National LambdaRail high-speed network will be available for commercial use at the beginning of 2009.
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