Cray Unveils Personal Supercomputer

Sep 16, 2008 | With few exceptions in its 30-year history, Cray has focused exclusively on the high end of the HPC market. This week the company announced a product aimed at a new space: deskside HPC. Ian Miller, Cray's senior vice president of sales and marketing, talked with HPCwire about the company's new CX1 personal supercomputer.
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Gedae Promises Performance and Portability

Sep 11, 2008 | Gedae is a relatively old tool in the world of parallel programming built on a big idea that's still fresh: the implementation of an algorithm should be kept separate from its specification. Other programming approaches that have tried this approach haven't seen broad adoption. This was at least in part because, in the process of abstracting the implementation, they hid the knobs that control performance -- something that HPC developers, in particular, don't like.
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The Week in Review

Sep 11, 2008 | Obama responds to Science Debate questions; UK Met's new computer hinders energy reduction goals; and HPC resists economic downturn. John West recaps those stories and more in our weekly wrap-up.
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Compilers and More: GPU Architecture and Applications

Sep 10, 2008 | One of the most exciting developments in parallel programming over the past few years has been the availability and advancement of programmable graphics cards. A high end graphics card costs less than a high end CPU and provides tantalizing peak performance approaching, or exceeding, one teraflop. This potential is worth exploring.
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InfiniBand and the Enterprise Datacenter

Sep 09, 2008 | Can InfiniBand co-exist with emerging Fibre Channel over Ethernet? Dr. Casimer DeCusatis, distinguished engineer of the IBM System and Technology Group, and Todd Bundy, director with ADVA Optical Networking, talk about some of the issues that datacenter managers need to be aware of when evaluating these two technologies.
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TotalView Debugger Offers Instant Replay

Sep 08, 2008 | After years of development, TotalView Technologies has launched ReplayEngine, a debugger add-on that allows developers to record and replay their programs during execution. Being able to TiVo your application might not seem like a big deal, but it could end up being the most important advance in debugging technology since the breakpoint.
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The Week in Review

Sep 04, 2008 | PRACE to evaluate petaflops prototypes; Acadamic roundtable discusses the computing industry's talent pool; and WRF benchmark data are released. John West recaps those stories and more in our weekly wrap-up.
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'Coopetition' Helps the UK HPC Market Go 'Round

Sep 04, 2008 | The size and diversity of the HPC market in the United States supports a varied set of system providers and integrators. But in Europe, and the United Kingdom in particular, the market has a different shape.
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Semantic Supercomputing Reaps Competitive Advantage from Patent Data

Sep 03, 2008 | Since the first patent was issued for a Venetian statue in 1471, 60 million patents have been awarded around the world, with four million patents actively in force today worldwide. And 800,000 new inventions are registered every year. While the data is public, current search tools are inconvenient and inadequate to the needs of professionals. Semantic supercomputing techniques are helping researchers tackle this difficult challenge.
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Compilers and More: Parallel Programming Made Easy?

Sep 02, 2008 | There are scads of computer languages and research projects aimed at making parallel programming easy. Considering that we have yet to make sequential programming easy, is that a realistic goal? PGI's Michael Wolfe offers some insight.
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Cray Unveils New Cooling Technology For the Petascale Era

Aug 28, 2008 | Cray, known for its power and packaging prowess since 1976, when Seymour Cray bent the Cray-1 into a "C" shape, is unveiling a petascale-era cooling technology it says is more than 10 times as efficient as same-size water coils. Cray CTO Steve Scott discusses this innovation and the company that was green before green was cool.
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HPC Simulations Help Researchers Develop Artificial Sniffer Technology

Aug 27, 2008 | From law enforcement to cancer detection, the uncanny ability of dogs to sniff out the earliest signs of danger and disease is receiving ever-increasing attention by researchers. Despite tremendous advances in law enforcement technology, there is still no man-made tool that can detect the presence of explosives quite like a canine's sophisticated sniffing system.
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Will High-Speed Copper Interconnects Dim Optical's Prospects?

Aug 26, 2008 | The prospects for optical cable interconnects never looked so good. With single and double data rate InfiniBand firmly entrenched in HPC clusters and quad data rate deployments just around the corner, optical cable makers are looking to displace bulky copper cabling in the next generation of high performance systems.
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Managing the File Explosion

Aug 26, 2008 | The "digital universe" seems to be mirroring our own physical universe: it just keeps expanding at faster and faster rates. According to IDC, the total volume of digital information that is created and replicated globally reached 281 billion gigabytes of digital information in 2007. That's 45 gigabytes for every person on Earth.
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Intel Develops Toolset for Parallel Programming

Aug 21, 2008 | Intel has had a slew of announcements in recent months around investments in tools and technology to make it easier for programmers to include parallelism in their applications. On Wednesday, Intel announced Parallel Studio, a developer suite aimed at the millions of C and C++ programmers struggling to incorporate parallelism into their applications.
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The Week in Review

Aug 21, 2008 | Intel to the multicore rescue with Parallel Studio; Rackable wants out of the storage business; and Panasas beefs up its parallel storage platform. John West recaps those stories and more in our weekly wrap-up.
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Panasas Broadens Storage Portfolio

Aug 19, 2008 | Panasas made hardware, software, and business announcements across their storage technology offerings today. On the hardware side, the company has revved the capabilities at the high end of its products and added a new low-end product for price-conscious consumers looking for secondary storage. Panasas is also announcing version 3.2 of its ActiveScale storage software, a release that features the productization of the tiered parity technology announced last fall.
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HyperTransport Gets One Last Speed Bump Before QuickPath Deploys

Aug 18, 2008 | On Monday the seven-year old HyperTransport (HT) Consortium announced it was boosting the maximum bandwidth of its HT interconnect and associated HTX connector. The new specifications are aimed to keep pace with the next generation of high performance, low latency platforms based on HyperTransport links.
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The Week in Review

Aug 14, 2008 | The University of Missouri-St. Louis opens a high performance computing center dedicated to research and enterprise, and Dakota State creates a certification course for HPC professionals. John West recaps those stories and more in our weekly wrap-up.
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NAG Embarks on a New Business Venture

Aug 14, 2008 | After more than three decades of operations building and selling numerical software, Numerical Algorithms Group has started a new effort to teach the world how to program in parallel. Responding to changes in computing at both ends of the spectrum, the company is positioning itself as the place to go, not just for shrink-wrapped libraries, but also for education and expertise in how to program in parallel, and even for expert advice on how to buy, build and run your own supercomputer.
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Sony Unveils Cell-Based Image Processing Appliance

Aug 12, 2008 | Sony has unveiled the BCU-100, a digital content creation appliance based on Sony's PlayStation 3 technology. Terra Soft Solutions will provide the Linux OS platform and other software tools. The announcement was made today at SIGGRAPH 2008 in Los Angeles.
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The Week in Review

Aug 07, 2008 | CRA policy blog provides analysis of NITRD oversight hearings; IBM releases open-source software stack for Linux clusters; and Dell plans HPC pilot program. John West recaps those stories and more in our weekly wrap-up.
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CEI: Turning Data Into Insight

Aug 07, 2008 | CEI is a company on a mission to help you become intimately acquainted with your data. Its sole commercial offering, a visualization package called EnSight, is found in technical and computing organizations around the world. With a long history in the field, and a strong connection to the technical computing community, CEI is determined to keep doing what it feels it does best: that special alchemy that transforms raw data into insight.
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Intel Lifts the Curtain on Larrabee

Aug 04, 2008 | In a press briefing on Friday, Intel representatives revealed some of the architectural details of the company's much talked-about Larrabee processor. The new design is the chipmaker's first manycore x86 platform and represents what could be described as a general-purpose, x86 vector processor, combining features from both GPUs and CPUs. The architecture is the culmination of more than three years of R&D accomplished under Intel's terascale research program.
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The Week in Review

Jul 31, 2008 | SGI cuts over 100 jobs; animation company WETA increases HPC rendering capacity. John West recaps those stories and more in our weekly wrap-up.
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