The Week in Review

Oct 23, 2008 | Volunteer grids offer path of least resistance, Sun booth at SC to feature Rocks cluster running Solaris, WETA Digital heats up, Sun prepares stockholders for Q1 loss. John West recaps those stories and more in our weekly wrap-up.
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Arastra Starts with a Name Changer, Aims for a Game Changer

Oct 23, 2008 | Arastra, a startup that introduced its high-performance 10 Gigabit Ethernet switches in 2007, has changed its name to Arista Networks, and with it, a new focus on the emerging cloud computing market. The company has tapped former Cisco VP Jayshree Ullal as the president and CEO, and Arista co-founder Andreas (Andy) Bechtolsheim as the chief development officer and chairman.
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The MathWorks Gets Serious About Distributed Computing

Oct 21, 2008 | Scientific computing is quickly moving to parallel platforms and most software vendors are following suit. The MathWorks, which started parallelizing MATLAB and the company's other numerical and scientific computing products four years ago, is now setting its sights on cluster and grid computing -- and even computing in the cloud.
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The Week in Review

Oct 16, 2008 | Cray repays debt at a discount; datacenter temperatures inch upward; and Ferrari test drives Windows HPC Server. John West recaps those stories and more in our weekly wrap-up.
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Bob Graybill Starts National Clearinghouse Firm for HPC Services

Oct 16, 2008 | Bob Graybill, whose high-profile roles have included heading the DARPA High Productivity Computing Systems (HPCS) program and working with USC-ISI, the Council on Competitiveness and half a dozen big defense contractors, is now CEO and president of a start-up. Nimbis Services aims to expand HPC use in manufacturing by brokering cycles, storage and expertise.
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Complete Genomics Takes Off

Oct 15, 2008 | Last week, San-Francisco-based Complete Genomics came out of stealth mode to become the first provider of large-scale human genome sequencing services. HPCwire recently asked company representatives a few questions about their new offering.
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John's Audio Link Test

Oct 15, 2008 | Morbi gravida. Donec at quam. Morbi laoreet, diam non sagittis pellentesque, enim quam semper nulla, ut molestie orci nisi sit amet pede. Donec iaculis tellus eget eros placerat sagittis. Duis blandit congue purus. Morbi vulputate convallis dui. Aliquam posuere. Morbi ornare congue est. Quisque commodo adipiscing felis. Pellentesque elementum viverra lectus. Sed justo augue, semper at, interdum vel, pulvinar ac, augue. Integer eu purus. Ut at magna. Quisque quam. Ut lacinia ipsum eget tellus porttitor consequat. Morbi tincidunt leo. Cras ornare. Nam lacinia sodales sapien. Proin nec elit at enim pellentesque consectetuer.
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Intel Grabs NetEffect Assets, Becomes iWARP Player

Oct 15, 2008 | Intel has acquired the assets of NetEffect, an Austin-based company that makes iWARP-capable adapters. Intel will inherit NetEffect's product portfolio, which includes 1 and 10 GbE accelerated adapters, 10 GbE adapters for blade configurations as well as a 10 GbE ASIC.
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Woven Launches New 10 GbE Switch

Oct 14, 2008 | Woven Systems has added a new 10 Gigabit Ethernet top-of-rack switch to its product lineup. The TRX 200 is aimed at high performance datacenter environments requiring a scalable Ethernet fabric.
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Accelerators in the Data Center -- Green Is In

Oct 10, 2008 | In the data center, the quest for greater performance -- while keeping power, cooling and space concerns in check -- is providing significant challenges for companies. Faced with an array of increasing complex challenges, data center managers may do well to take a look at hardware accelerators as a means to achieve more application performance, in less space and with less power.
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Velocity Micro Makes an HPC Play

Oct 09, 2008 | The GPGPU phenomenon is continuing to attract lots of attention in the high performance computing community and is starting to bring some new players into the market. On Monday, Velocity Micro jumped into the HPC space with a new line of GPU-accelerated HPC workstations.
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The Week in Review

Oct 09, 2008 | Nimbis offers full menu of hosted HPC services; Bull acquires German HPC company; and AMD goes halvsies. John West recaps those stories and more in our weekly wrap-up.
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Compilers and More: Programming GPUs Today

Oct 08, 2008 | In the not-too-distant past, programs had to be written in or manually translated into binary machine code, but soon assembly languages and assemblers were developed to simplify the process. Then followed operating systems, multiprogramming, and the concept of an application binary interface (ABI). Now programming languages and compilers have progressed to where we use many higher level languages (C, Java, Fortran, others too many to enumerate) with a great increase in productivity.
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The Linux HPC Empire Strikes Back

Oct 06, 2008 | While the Microsoft juggernaut has been touting the joys of its new Windows HPC Server 2008, the Linux HPC contingent has been somewhat less vocal of late. But now Red Hat has come up with its version of an integrated cluster solution.
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The Week in Review

Oct 02, 2008 | Google datacenters most energy efficient; Cluster Resources to demo Moab Hybrid Cluster; Red Hat Linux releases HPC distro. John West recaps those stories and more in our weekly wrap-up.
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Nexsan Looks to Scare Up HPC Customers With Storage Beast

Oct 02, 2008 | Even though the cost of servers still dominates the datacenter budget, storage is actually on a steeper growth curve. HPC storage, in particular, is being singled out as high-growth opportunity. Vendors are scrambling to keep up.
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Saudi Arabia Buys Some Big Iron

Oct 01, 2008 | Last week, IBM and King Abdullah University of Science and Technology announced a collaboration to build "Shaheen," a 222 teraflop Blue Gene/P supercomputer. When deployed in 2009, it will represent the most powerful computer in the Middle East and one of the top systems in the world.
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The Week in Review

Sep 25, 2008 | IBM's On Demand offering lets users try out Windows new HPC platform; Microsoft datacenters go camping; and NVIDIA is making staff cuts. John West recaps those stories and more in our weekly wrap-up.
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Hardware Accelerators Are One Way to Help Wall Street, Companies Say

Sep 24, 2008 | Can hardware acceleration save Wall Street? Well, not as quickly as a multibillion-dollar bailout might, but there was plenty of discussion at this week's HPC on Wall Street conference about the advantages specialized hardware can bring to market analysts and traders. Sellers of these products were all over the place, their booths were busy, and several sessions on the subject were standing-room only.
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Banks and Outsourcing: Just Say 'Latency'

Sep 24, 2008 | A common critique of external cloud computing services is that big-time IT users, like major corporations and financial institutions, are nowhere near getting on board. That might be true for the new breed of "cloud" services, but for the financial services sector, at least, outsourcing is far from a dirty word.
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Microsoft Aims Newest HPC Offering at Wall Street

Sep 23, 2008 | When profits drop, businesses look to boost productivity and performance -- and nowhere is that demand more urgent right now than on Wall Street. Yesterday, about 60 blocks north of the scene of the recent financial meltdown, Microsoft announced it has released its latest product to provide that boost: Windows HPC Server 2008.
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Accelerating Financial Computations on Multicore and Manycore Processors

Sep 22, 2008 | Multicore processors promise improved computational efficiency, but achieving high efficiency execution on these processors is non-trivial. Moreover, in the financial industry, time is literally money, so high-productivity software development is just as important as efficient execution.
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GPUs Finding A New Role on Wall Street

Sep 22, 2008 | Despite the carnage from this year's financial crisis, the arms race in algorithmic trading is likely to continue. Behind that competition are a variety of high performance computing technologies, such as commodity clusters, FPGA accelerators and Blue Gene supercomputers. One of the new kids on Wall Street is GPU computing, a technology that is making inroads across nearly every type of HPC application.
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The Week in Review

Sep 18, 2008 | McCain takes turn responding to Science Debate questions; SiCortex boosts performance, energy-efficiency; and Appro partners with NEC. John West recaps those stories and more in our weekly wrap-up.
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Beyond Performance, Price and Power in HPC

Sep 18, 2008 | After a year in development, Tabor Research has launched its HPC Productivity Analyzer, a free online tool designed to help HPC lab directors and datacenter managers evaluate and improve their computing investments.
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