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Michael Feldman
Top 10 Hits and Misses for 2008
Post Date: December 18, 2008 @ 9:00 PM, Pacific Standard Time
Blog: From the Editor
Petaflops supercomputing dominated much of the HPC news in 2008, but the year also witnessed the rise of GPU-accelerated computing and the fall of Linux Networx.
Michael Feldman
Larrabee for HPC: Not So Fast
Post Date: December 16, 2008 @ 9:00 PM, Pacific Standard Time
Blog: From the Editor
For those of you who thought Intel was angling for an HPC play with its upcoming Larrabee processor family, think again.
Michael Feldman
A Moment of Truth for SGI
Post Date: December 14, 2008 @ 9:00 PM, Pacific Standard Time
Blog: From the Editor
Vendors in the HPC market might fare better in the recession than other IT sectors, but they're not immune to economic gravity.
Michael Feldman
Up Against the Memory Wall
Post Date: December 10, 2008 @ 9:00 PM, Pacific Standard Time
Blog: From the Editor
Nevermind the cores. Just hand over the cache.
Michael Feldman
OpenCL Makes It Official
Post Date: December 08, 2008 @ 9:00 PM, Pacific Standard Time
Blog: From the Editor
The GPGPU contingent of the high performance computing crowd got another big boost on Tuesday with the release of the first version of the OpenCL standard.
Isaac Lopez
Searching for the Personal Supercomputing Killer App
Post Date: December 03, 2008 @ 9:00 PM, Pacific Standard Time
Blog: HPC Matters
I have always been a lover of technology. I was the type of kid who would spend hours on the Tandy computer at the local municipal library, trying to get it to do my bidding. So why am I so skeptical when I read about the emerging "personal supercomputer?"
Michael Feldman
Decoupling HPC From the Datacenter
Post Date: December 03, 2008 @ 9:00 PM, Pacific Standard Time
Blog: From the Editor
The democratization of HPC is unlikely to happen if every company and institution is forced to build and maintain multi-million dollar datacenters to house supercomputers. But there are alternatives.
Michael Feldman
The Undervalued Tech Worker
Post Date: November 26, 2008 @ 9:00 PM, Pacific Standard Time
Blog: From the Editor
In our supposedly tech-driven economy, it's common to hear about computer professionals who have lost their jobs and are unable to find new work in their field. Is the IT industry really that much at odds with its own labor market? Surprisingly, yes.
Addison Snell
Feast or Famine: A Hungry Analyst's Review of SC08
Post Date: November 26, 2008 @ 9:00 PM, Pacific Standard Time
Blog: HPC Matters
It happens every year at the Supercomputing Conference and Expo, whether it's seafood in Seattle, pierogies in Pittsburgh, or anchos in Austin. Some days it's a feast, others a famine.
Michael Feldman
QLogic Completes Home-Grown InfiniBand Strategy
Post Date: November 24, 2008 @ 9:00 PM, Pacific Standard Time
Blog: From the Editor
QLogic Corp. has decided to follow its own path with Quad Data Rate (QDR) InfiniBand.
Michael Feldman
What Caught My Attention at SC08
Post Date: November 20, 2008 @ 9:00 PM, Pacific Standard Time
Blog:
A show the size of the Supercomputing Conference is difficult to swallow whole. With hundreds of exhibitors and conference activities, it's virtually impossible to get a balanced perspective. That said, here are a few areas that caught my attention at SC08.
Michael Feldman
In a Photo Finish, Roadrunner Beats Jaguar
Post Date: November 18, 2008 @ 9:00 PM, Pacific Standard Time
Blog:
Last week's announcement of the upgraded "Jaguar" system at Oak Ridge National Laboratory had a lot of people, including yours truly, thinking that the Cray super would take the TOP500 crown this time around. It was not to be.
Michael Feldman
Supercomputing Puts On a Happy Face
Post Date: November 17, 2008 @ 9:00 PM, Pacific Standard Time
Blog:
Amid the gloomiest economy in decades, the year's Supercomputing conference -- SC08 -- got underway in Austin, Texas. Despite the worldwide financial turmoil, the 2008 conference may turn out to be the largest SC event of them all, with over 330 exhibitors and more than 10,000 registered attendees.
Chris Willard
What Makes a Supercomputer Super?
Post Date: November 13, 2008 @ 9:00 PM, Pacific Standard Time
Blog: HPC Matters
The announcement of each new TOP500 list and especially those with systems that break the triple order of magnitude barrier in FLOPS tend to get me thinking about the meaning of the term "supercomputer."
Debbie Walsh
HPC Horizons Community Member SPOTLIGHT
Post Date: November 12, 2008 @ 9:00 PM, Pacific Standard Time
Blog: HPC Matters
In order get to know our HPC Horizons members a little better, we have started this new column. For the first edition of HPC Horizons Community Member SPOTLIGHT, we introduce Laurence Liew, the Open Source Grid Development Centre Director at Platform Computing in Singapore.
Michael Feldman
Packing for SC08
Post Date: November 12, 2008 @ 9:00 PM, Pacific Standard Time
Blog:
The 20th annual Supercomputing (SC) conference launches next week in Austin, Texas. As usual, HPCwire will be providing live coverage, but this year we decided to include some pre-conference guidance for the event.
Michael Feldman
AMD Pulls the Trigger on Its 45
Post Date: November 12, 2008 @ 9:00 PM, Pacific Standard Time
Blog: From the Editor
Barcelona, we hardly knew ye. Today AMD launched its 45nm "Shanghai" quad-core Opterons, sending the ill-fated 65nm Barcelona chips into the microprocessor history books.
Chris Willard
Traditional HPC and Edge HPC -- The Same Only Different
Post Date: November 11, 2008 @ 9:00 PM, Pacific Standard Time
Blog: HPC Matters
Tabor Research is in the midst of conducting in depth end user interviews with organizations running or considering Edge HPC applications. As we have completed the initial interviews several similarities and difference between the two branches of high productivity computing have become apparent.
Michael Feldman
ORNL's 'Jaguar' Leaps Past Petaflop
Post Date: November 10, 2008 @ 9:00 PM, Pacific Standard Time
Blog: From the Editor
The petascale era is in full swing. Yesterday, the DOE announced that the Cray XT 'Jaguar' supercomputer at Oak Ridge has been upgraded to 1.64 peak petaflops.
Michael Feldman
Increasing Clouds
Post Date: November 05, 2008 @ 9:00 PM, Pacific Standard Time
Blog: From the Editor
It seems hardly a week passes without some news of HPC being delivered as an on-demand service. That topic includes everything from in-house grids to commercial clouds, but it's the cloud element that's grabbing the attention of the supercomputing crowd.
Michael Feldman
In Memoriam: Suresh Shukla
Post Date: November 05, 2008 @ 9:00 PM, Pacific Standard Time
Blog: From the Editor
Suresh Shukla, a leader and advocate of high performance computing at Boeing, passed away on October 15.
Michael Feldman
OpenCL on the Fast Track
Post Date: November 03, 2008 @ 9:00 PM, Pacific Standard Time
Blog: From the Editor
As far as technology maturity goes, GPGPU is just a baby. But there's already an effort underway to produce an industry standard for this new programming model: OpenCL.
Michael Feldman
HPC Vendors Showing Mixed Success in Faultering Economy
Post Date: November 03, 2008 @ 9:00 PM, Pacific Standard Time
Blog: From the Editor
With the financial environment in turmoil, HPC vendors are holding their own... some more than others..
Michael Feldman
Darkstrand Gives NLR the Business
Post Date: October 27, 2008 @ 9:00 PM, Pacific Daylight Time
Blog: From the Editor
Access to National LambdaRail's high-speed optical fiber network will soon be available for commercial businesses (and just in time for the biggest recession in decades).
Diane Lieberman
Has the Joe Boat Sailed? Wanted: HPC Mascot
Post Date: October 22, 2008 @ 9:00 PM, Pacific Daylight Time
Blog: HPC Matters
The concept of the "democratization of HPC" is not a new one, but in recent months it appears to have taken on a life of its own. Our own editors and Tabor Research analysts have alluded to it many times, including twice within the last week.
Michael Feldman
Eric the CEO
Post Date: October 21, 2008 @ 9:00 PM, Pacific Daylight Time
Blog: From the Editor
Google CEO Eric Schmidt's recent endorsement of presidential hopeful Barack Obama has caused a minor stir in the tech community. While some wonder if execs at high profile companies should even get involved in national politics, the reality is that the tech community overwhelmingly supports Obama over McCain, from the executive suite to the corner cubicle.
Michael Feldman
Tabor Research Bullish on HPC Market
Post Date: October 15, 2008 @ 9:00 PM, Pacific Daylight Time
Blog: From the Editor
Things look grim for the economy right now. And while much of the IT market will proably suffer, HPC may turn out to be a bright spot.
Michael Feldman
Weird Science from National Review
Post Date: October 13, 2008 @ 9:00 PM, Pacific Daylight Time
Blog: From the Editor
Will Obama Kill Science? When I saw that headline in National Review Online, I thought it might be a good opportunity to read a fresh perspective of the Dems approach to science policy. Boy, was I wrong.
Michael Feldman
AMD Does the Splits
Post Date: October 13, 2008 @ 9:00 PM, Pacific Daylight Time
Blog: From the Editor
Today, in an announcement that came as a shock to no one in the industry, Applied Micro Devices revealed it would spin off its chip manufacturing business into a separate entity and focus its efforts on microprocessor design.
Debra Goldfarb
Riding the Storm
Post Date: October 08, 2008 @ 9:00 PM, Pacific Daylight Time
Blog: HPC Matters
We are all consumed, and rightly so, with the chaos rampaging the world economic system. And while I am not an economist, I don't believe it takes one to realize the systemic dynamics underway.
Michael Feldman
2008 HPCwire Readers' Choice Nominations Are Open
Post Date: October 08, 2008 @ 9:00 PM, Pacific Daylight Time
Blog: From the Editor
It's time to vote for the annual HPCwire Readers' Choice awards.
Michael Feldman
Making the Quantitative Models Work
Post Date: October 01, 2008 @ 9:00 PM, Pacific Daylight Time
Blog: From the Editor
The ongoing financial turmoil in the U.S. continues to flog the stock market and the credit market. Not surprisingly, economists are in disarray, predicting everything from a mild recession to the end of capitalism.
Michael Feldman
Stocking Up on HPC
Post Date: September 29, 2008 @ 9:00 PM, Pacific Daylight Time
Blog: From the Editor
The stock market's recent volatility is giving some publicly traded HPC companies an interesting ride. While tech stocks, in general, have been taking a beating, at least a couple of HPC companies are bucking the trend.
Michael Feldman
Microsoft HPC, Act II
Post Date: September 24, 2008 @ 9:00 PM, Pacific Daylight Time
Blog: From the Editor
With the release of Windows HPC Server 2008, Microsoft is attempting to make up for its late entry into the high performance computing market.
Michael Feldman
Intel: CPUs Will Prevail Over Accelerators in HPC
Post Date: September 23, 2008 @ 9:00 PM, Pacific Daylight Time
Blog: From the Editor
While hardware accelerators continue to show impressive performance results for supercomputing workloads, Intel is sticking to its CPU guns to deliver HPC to the broader market.
Michael Feldman
The Quantitative Models Tanked Too
Post Date: September 22, 2008 @ 9:00 PM, Pacific Daylight Time
Blog: From the Editor
The confluence of the U.S. financial meltdown and this week's High Performance on Wall Street conference in New York might be one of those coincidences that's trying to tell us something.
Diane Lieberman
Beep, Beep, Ka-Ching
Post Date: September 21, 2008 @ 9:00 PM, Pacific Daylight Time
Blog: HPC Matters
On the eve of the annual High Performance on Wall Street conference, it's ironic that the words "high performance" and "Wall Street" can be perceived as an oxymoron this week. Is it possible, though, that the very financial crisis we're in may bode well for increased investment in HPC?
Michael Feldman
Bad News on Wall Street Doesn't Diminish the Need for Speed
Post Date: September 21, 2008 @ 9:00 PM, Pacific Daylight Time
Blog:
Considering the ongoing crisis in the financial markets, you might expect the mood at a gathering of people who make their living in the financial services industry to be kind of glum. Or at least very, very anxious.
Michael Feldman
The Other Personal Supercomputer
Post Date: September 16, 2008 @ 9:00 PM, Pacific Daylight Time
Blog: From the Editor
Prior to yesterday's announcement of the Cray CX1, the SiCortex SC072 was really the only deskside HPC appliance out there. But the two companies have very different ideas of the role of personal supercomputing.
Michael Feldman
Dude, You're Getting a Cray
Post Date: September 15, 2008 @ 9:00 PM, Pacific Daylight Time
Blog: From the Editor
When Intel and Cray became sweethearts back in April, I never imagined the first offspring from that relationship would be a personal supercomputer. But that's what happened.
Michael Feldman
Collaborative Supercomputing
Post Date: September 10, 2008 @ 9:00 PM, Pacific Daylight Time
Blog: From the Editor
Over the last seven years, the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Office of Science has changed the direction of DOE research and has become a model for collaborative supercomputing.
Michael Feldman
IDC Sees Steady Growth for HPC in Q2
Post Date: September 08, 2008 @ 9:00 PM, Pacific Daylight Time
Blog: From the Editor
IDC offered some encouraging news for the HPC server market for the second quarter of 2008, while admitting it overestimated the numbers for 2007.
Michael Feldman
A Plea for Rational Branding
Post Date: September 03, 2008 @ 9:00 PM, Pacific Daylight Time
Blog: From the Editor
What are the top 5 mistakes the marketing department makes when choosing a brand name?
Michael Feldman
A Custom Home for Streaming Applications
Post Date: September 02, 2008 @ 9:00 PM, Pacific Daylight Time
Blog: From the Editor
Netezza marries data warehousing with streaming analytics, and it does it in sexy sort of way, geek-wise.
Isaac Lopez
What Is the Metaverse and Should HPC Care?
Post Date: August 27, 2008 @ 9:00 PM, Pacific Daylight Time
Blog: HPC Matters
What happens when the physical and virtual worlds meet and meld into something entirely new and different? You get the Metaverse, that's what.
Michael Feldman
Ecosystems Are Messy
Post Date: August 27, 2008 @ 9:00 PM, Pacific Daylight Time
Blog: From the Editor
How many times have your heard the word "ecosystem" in reference to the information technology market? Some people aren't comfortable with the terminology, but I think the analogy to the natural environment is near perfect.
Michael Feldman
Simulating a Better Mousetrap
Post Date: August 26, 2008 @ 9:00 PM, Pacific Daylight Time
Blog: From the Editor
Most product design engineers use HPC, in one form or another, as a fundamental tool for development and testing. But some are still on the desktop -- and that might not be a bad thing.
Debbie
Are You Ready for Spring Training?
Post Date: August 20, 2008 @ 9:00 PM, Pacific Daylight Time
Blog: HPC Matters
192 days and counting -- it's never too early to start planning for spring training! But, I'm not talking about baseball. The major leaguers I'm referring to are members of the HPC Horizons Community.
Michael Feldman
All Intel, All the Time
Post Date: August 20, 2008 @ 9:00 PM, Pacific Daylight Time
Blog: From the Editor
As expected, Intel dominated the IT news cycle this week with its semi-annual developer forum. The company's upcoming Nehalem processor family was the star of the show, but Intel talked about everything from parallel programming to the next-generation Internet.
Michael Feldman
Sun Adds Intel-Based HPC Server to Portfolio
Post Date: August 19, 2008 @ 9:00 PM, Pacific Daylight Time
Blog: From the Editor
Since welcoming Intel hardware into the company's product mix 18 months ago, Sun Microsystems has come out with six Xeon processor-based servers. This week the company added two more, including an HPC-only server.
Michael Feldman
IBM Super Marries Power6 With Nehalem
Post Date: August 13, 2008 @ 9:00 PM, Pacific Daylight Time
Blog: From the Editor
Tell me if you've heard this one before. IBM is planning to deliver one of the fastest supercomputers in the world, to help unravel the mysteries of the universe. Deja vu?
Debra Goldfarb
HPC: The Software Industry Gulag ... or More Pointedly, Where is SAP for the Rest of Us?
Post Date: August 13, 2008 @ 9:00 PM, Pacific Daylight Time
Blog: HPC Matters
If one were to categorize the enterprise software market as mature, robust, innovative -- and definitely 21st century -- as it races headstrong into the cloud -- how would one categorize the HPC software market? Not to throw stones, but you could easily put it in the circa 1980 timeframe and use terms like immature, cottage-like and definitely lacking investment. When you mention HPC to any of the venture guys, they run for the hills.
Michael Feldman
The Rising Star of Multi-Processing
Post Date: August 12, 2008 @ 9:00 PM, Pacific Daylight Time
Blog: From the Editor
It's not enough that GPUs are doubling their capability every year or so. Performance demand is such that GPU vendors are increasingly turning to multi-GPU configurations.
Michael Feldman
The Game Is Afoot
Post Date: August 06, 2008 @ 9:00 PM, Pacific Daylight Time
Blog: From the Editor
After a week of media buzz about Intel's upcoming manycore Larrabee processor, I thought I'd try to get a sense of how the competition -- namely AMD and NVIDIA -- is reacting to the news. If Intel is able to deliver the goods with Larrabee, both its rivals have a lot to lose.
Debra Goldfarb
The Politics of Scarcity
Post Date: August 06, 2008 @ 9:00 PM, Pacific Daylight Time
Blog: HPC Matters
I had a recent conversation with a colleague under the auspices of delving into the future of high-performance technology and breakthrough applications, and it somehow morphed into a discussion on the topic of scarcity. More precisely, we began to talk about scarcity of natural resources and how it will ultimately transform behavior, technology, politics and the global economy on a mass scale.
Michael Feldman
AMD Throws Its Lot in With GPGPU Standards
Post Date: August 05, 2008 @ 9:00 PM, Pacific Daylight Time
Blog: From the Editor
In the shadow of Intel's Larrabee unveiling, AMD announced today that it intends to support the new DirectX 11 standard in its stream computing software development kit.
Michael Feldman
The Other Microprocessor Revolution
Post Date: July 30, 2008 @ 9:00 PM, Pacific Daylight Time
Blog: From the Editor
These are interesting times for the microprocessor industry. At the same time the multicore revolution is happening, we're also seeing the rise of data parallel architectures. Yes, vector computing is back, but this time, it's not just for nerds.
Addison Snell
Field Research: Il Calcolo Tecnico-Scientifico in Italia
Post Date: July 30, 2008 @ 9:00 PM, Pacific Daylight Time
Blog: HPC Matters
When I saw the front-page article on HPCwire dealing with "cultural analytics" and a debate that originated in the Renaissance, I knew I had to learn more. Being a dedicated analyst, I flew immediately to Italy to check it out. Or maybe I was already in Italy on vacation and decided to check out the HPC scene while I was here.
Michael Feldman
BSC Maps Its Route to Petascale
Post Date: July 29, 2008 @ 9:00 PM, Pacific Daylight Time
Blog: From the Editor
The Spanish have hopped on the Cell processor bandwagon. The Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) is planning to build a hybrid multi-petaflop system based on Cell and Power technology.
Michael Feldman
A Cynic's View of Green Computing
Post Date: July 28, 2008 @ 9:00 PM, Pacific Daylight Time
Blog: From the Editor
The IT industry's focus on energy efficiency might seem like a "Mom and Apple Pie" type of pursuit, but there may a darker side to the trend.
Chris Willard
Is 'Partitioned HPC' an Oxymoron?
Post Date: July 24, 2008 @ 9:00 PM, Pacific Daylight Time
Blog: HPC Matters
Server partitioning -- one of the many implementations of IT virtualization -- has for the last half decade seen strong interest within commercial computing environments; meanwhile, HPC users have shown no great interest in the charms of partitioning. However, that may be changing; there are several trends causing HPC users to take another look at partitioning.
Michael Feldman
NVIDIA Keeps It Interesting
Post Date: July 23, 2008 @ 9:00 PM, Pacific Daylight Time
Blog: From the Editor
The summer months tend to be slow for HPC news, but NVIDIA is helping to liven things up a bit.
Michael Feldman
Can Big Blue Make Power7 Green?
Post Date: July 21, 2008 @ 9:00 PM, Pacific Daylight Time
Blog: From the Editor
IBM's upcoming Power7 chip is headed for multi-petaflop stardom. But energy efficiency might be a real challenge for this processor at the petascale level.
Michael Feldman
A Tale of Two Chip Vendors
Post Date: July 16, 2008 @ 9:00 PM, Pacific Daylight Time
Blog: From the Editor
Based on their latest financial reports, AMD and Intel are on very different trajectories. In the latest quarter, AMD lost almost as much money as Intel made. That's bad news for AMD investors, since Intel made a ton of money in the last 3 months. Oh, and along with AMD's dismal earnings report, the company also announced a new CEO.
Michael Feldman
Thinking Outside the Moore's Law Box
Post Date: July 15, 2008 @ 9:00 PM, Pacific Daylight Time
Blog: From the Editor
A lot of industry people in the know are predicting that Moore's Law will come to an end sometime in the next decade. Then what?
Isaac Lopez
It's the End of the World as We Know It?
Post Date: July 09, 2008 @ 9:00 PM, Pacific Daylight Time
Blog: HPC Matters
If you haven't heard yet, the world as we know it is about to end. Preparations are being made now. Don't bother getting your affairs in order -- that'll do you no good. To what can we attribute this impending doom? The good folks at CERN, who have engineered the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which is set to go online this August.
Michael Feldman
The Cell Processor Builds Its Mojo
Post Date: July 09, 2008 @ 9:00 PM, Pacific Daylight Time
Blog: From the Editor
Georgia Tech HPC director David Bader calls the Cell Broadband Engine "a processor ahead of its time." That usually means it needs more software.
Michael Feldman
Purpose-Built Supercomputing
Post Date: July 08, 2008 @ 9:00 PM, Pacific Daylight Time
Blog: From the Editor
In HPC, there has always been a tension between general-purpose and special-purpose architectures. That tension reflects two facets of the market: to apply HPC to more application domains and more users, and to increase performance for the most demanding applications. With a sort of schizophrenic behavior, HPC exploits Moore's Law's for all it's worth, and then, unsatisfied, tries to find a way to beat it.
Michael Feldman
DreamWorks Studio Hops On Intel's Roadmap
Post Date: July 07, 2008 @ 9:00 PM, Pacific Daylight Time
Blog: From the Editor
On Tuesday, Intel and DreamWorks announced an alliance to "revolutionize" 3-D animation technology. Although no financial terms of the deal with DreamWorks were disclosed, apparently Intel made them an offer they couldn't refuse.
Debbie Walsh
Don't be a Silent Observer
Post Date: July 02, 2008 @ 9:00 PM, Pacific Daylight Time
Blog: HPC Matters
Let's talk about what this blog is all about. It's about community. It's about getting to know you and giving you a way to communicate directly with us and, more importantly, with each other.
Michael Feldman
The World According to Pat
Post Date: July 02, 2008 @ 9:00 PM, Pacific Daylight Time
Blog: From the Editor
At a recent Q&A roundtable for journalists, Intel senior VP Pat Gelsinger laid out his vision of the future world of computing. Not surprisingly, Intel was at the center of that world.
Michael Feldman
Core Convictions
Post Date: July 01, 2008 @ 9:00 PM, Pacific Daylight Time
Blog: From the Editor
As Intel continues to flesh out its multicore processor roadmap, Anwar Ghuloum, principal engineer with the company's Microprocessor Technology Lab, is already encouraging software developers to begin designing applications for manycore processors -- architectures that contain tens, hundreds or thousands of cores.
Michael Feldman
Russia Revives Home-Grown Computers
Post Date: June 30, 2008 @ 9:00 PM, Pacific Daylight Time
Blog: From the Editor
On Monday, an article in CNews, a Russian IT publication, reported that 100 servers based on the home-grown Elbrus-3M microprocessor would be delivered to its "customers" later this year. The article stated that 0.6 teraflop systems will be built from the Elbrus-3M servers and characterized the new machines as "entry level supercomputers."
Michael Feldman
Better Chocolate Through Supercomputing
Post Date: June 25, 2008 @ 9:00 PM, Pacific Daylight Time
Blog: From the Editor
Forget curing cancer, solving global warming, or unraveling the origin of the universe. They've finally found the real killer app for supercomputing: advancing chocolate science.
Mike Bernhardt
HPC Marketing - A Sign of the Times?
Post Date: June 25, 2008 @ 9:00 PM, Pacific Daylight Time
Blog: HPC Matters
If any of us question what's changing about HPC, all we need to do is look around us. The technology is always changing -- it always has been -- but today, there is a very clear "sign of the times" being reflected throughout the HPC landscape.
Debra Goldfarb
The Big Ugly
Post Date: June 24, 2008 @ 9:00 PM, Pacific Daylight Time
Blog: HPC Matters
Back at the Newport HPCC conference in 2007, I broached the sensitive topic of whether the current ultra-scale procurement programs were good for the HPC industry by driving innovation into the market; or were these programs, in fact, draining resources, margin and long term opportunity out of the market?
Michael Feldman
China Ditches Home-Grown Chips in New Supercomputer
Post Date: June 24, 2008 @ 9:00 PM, Pacific Daylight Time
Blog: From the Editor
The largest supercomputer in China, a 160 teraflop Dawning 5000A supercomputer, will be installed at the Shanghai Supercomputer Center (SSC) in November, and will use quad-core Opteron processors.
Michael Feldman
Big Data Changes the Rules
Post Date: June 23, 2008 @ 9:00 PM, Pacific Daylight Time
Blog: From the Editor
Petabyte-sized data volumes are forcing researchers to rethink how to perform scientific inquiry. Is it, as Wired magazine says, "The End of Science"?
Michael Feldman
Intel CTO Pitches Manycore Vision
Post Date: June 18, 2008 @ 9:00 PM, Pacific Daylight Time
Blog:
In Justin Rattner's ISC keynote address on Thursday, the Intel CTO painted a picture in which future supercomputing technologies are merged into everyday computing.
Michael Feldman
The View From the Top
Post Date: June 17, 2008 @ 9:00 PM, Pacific Daylight Time
Blog:
There wasn't much suspense on which machine would nab the top spot on the June TOP500 list, which was released earlier today. Last week, IBM and LANL had already let everyone know that Roadrunner crossed the petaflop finish line first. Nonetheless, the new list portends some big changes ahead for supercomputing.
Michael Feldman
The InfiniBand-Wagon Starts Here
Post Date: June 16, 2008 @ 9:00 PM, Pacific Daylight Time
Blog:
A lot of exhibitor activity at ISC this year centers on InfiniBand. News and demos of the HPC fabric seem to be everywhere.
Chris Willard
What Makes a Supercomputer Super?
Post Date: June 15, 2008 @ 9:00 PM, Pacific Daylight Time
Blog: HPC Matters
The announcement of each new TOP500 list and especially those with systems that break the triple order of magnitude barrier in FLOPS tend to get me thinking about the meaning of the term "supercomputer."
Diane Lieberman
Who's the Dinosaur Here?
Post Date: June 11, 2008 @ 9:00 PM, Pacific Daylight Time
Blog: HPC Matters
I recently asked my son, a first year Ph.D. Neuroscience student at a leading New England university, what he knows about high performance computing or supercomputing. His first response was (somewhat kidding), "Do you mean like the old Cray computer that was used in Jurassic Park?"
Michael Feldman
Supercomputing's Spring Fling
Post Date: June 11, 2008 @ 9:00 PM, Pacific Daylight Time
Blog: From the Editor
I'll be heading out to Dresden, Germany in a couple of days to attend the annual International Supercomputing Conference (ISC) and immerse myself in all things petascale.
Michael Feldman
UltraSPARC T2 Finds a Home in HPC
Post Date: June 10, 2008 @ 9:00 PM, Pacific Daylight Time
Blog: From the Editor
In all the excitement about the Roadrunner petaflop announcement this week, a bunch of other HPC news got pushed aside. One item that caught my eye was the announcement by the Canadian High Performance Computing Virtual Laboratory (HPCVL) that it had purchased a cluster made up of 78 Sun SPARC Enterprise T5140 servers, which is not a product you hear much about in the HPC space.
Michael Feldman
Welcome to the Post-Petaflop Era
Post Date: June 09, 2008 @ 9:00 PM, Pacific Daylight Time
Blog: From the Editor
This week's achievement of the Linpack petaflop milestone by the IBM Roadrunner was widely predicted, but nonetheless, impressive. Last year at this time, the number one system was Lawrence Livemore's Blue Gene/L at 280 teraflops, and only two other systems -- the Cray XT4/XT3 supercomputer at Oak Ridge and the Cray Red Storm system at Sandia -- made it past 100 teraflops. In fact, the raw computation power of the Roadrunner exceeds the aggregate performance of the top 10 system in June 2007.
Addison Snell
Anticipating the Fall: Application Performance Has Chased Multicore's Speed Right Over a Cliff
Post Date: June 04, 2008 @ 9:00 PM, Pacific Daylight Time
Blog: HPC Matters
As systems transition to multicore processors, HPC application performance is heading off the cliff. So far, application performance hasn't dramatically suffered. Users are still satisfied with the performance they're getting. But the fall is coming.
Michael Feldman
Supercomputing with a Chance of Clouds
Post Date: June 04, 2008 @ 9:00 PM, Pacific Daylight Time
Blog: From the Editor
The cloud computing meme is permeating practically all areas of computing these days, including HPC. Will the cloud replace the grid as the new paradigm for delivering high performance computing?
Michael Feldman
Europe's Petascale Dreams
Post Date: June 03, 2008 @ 9:00 PM, Pacific Daylight Time
Blog: From the Editor
With a bigger GDP than the United States, the European Union certainly has the economic wherewithal to field a top tier high performance computing infrastructure. After taking a back seat to the U.S. and Japan in high end scientific computing for the past couple of decades, the Europeans now seem intent on playing in the deep end of the supercomputing pool. The renewed interested is exemplified by the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe, whose mission is to build a world-class pan-European high performance computing service.
Michael Feldman
Slow Road to Budapest
Post Date: June 02, 2008 @ 9:00 PM, Pacific Daylight Time
Blog: From the Editor
It was almost exactly one year ago when Cray announced it was lowering its 2007 revenue projections after it learned that AMD would not deliver its quad-core Opteron 'Budapest' processor on schedule. Little did anyone know at the time that the Budapest slip was just a prelude to the larger Opteron fiasco that would play out over the next six months.
Michael Feldman
HP Battles IBM For Ultra-Scale Mindshare
Post Date: June 02, 2008 @ 9:00 PM, Pacific Daylight Time
Blog: From the Editor
With HP's rollout of the new ProLiant BL2x220c G5 today, the company has an answer for IBM's recently announced iDataPlex server. Both are extra-dense server architectures designed for scaled out datacenters. That means these boxes are aimed at cloud computing, Web 2.0 and high performance computing, the current hot markets in IT.
Michael Feldman
Is There Really a Science and Engineering Gap?
Post Date: May 28, 2008 @ 9:00 PM, Pacific Daylight Time
Blog: From the Editor
While researching last week's blog on the H-1B topic, I came across an interesting 2007 report from the Urban Institute that challenges the conventional wisdom about the decline of science/engineering education. The report questions the assumption that the U.S technology workforce is inadequate.
Michael Feldman
Calling Doctor Cray
Post Date: May 26, 2008 @ 9:00 PM, Pacific Daylight Time
Blog: From the Editor
The Texas Advanced Computing Center has a great story this week about using supercomputers to perform prostate surgery. My prostate happens to be my third favorite organ and I'm not all that comfortable with a human being fiddling with it -- especially one with a knife in their hand. So this recent development is welcome news to me.
Michael Feldman
The H-1B Game
Post Date: May 21, 2008 @ 9:00 PM, Pacific Daylight Time
Blog: From the Editor
On Tuesday, I wrote about the difficulties that Japan and the UK are having in finding engineers for their local industries. For the flip side of that discussion, today I'm going to talk about how the H-1B visa program continues to agitate the tech community in the US.
Michael Feldman
DEISA 2.0
Post Date: May 20, 2008 @ 9:00 PM, Pacific Daylight Time
Blog: From the Editor
The second phase of the Distributed European Infrastructure for Supercomputing Applications (DEISA) initiative was announced earlier today. Like its US-based TeraGrid counterpart, DEISA links up regional supercomputing centers in order to create a common HPC resource for the research community.
Michael Feldman
Looking For a Few Good Engineers
Post Date: May 19, 2008 @ 9:00 PM, Pacific Daylight Time
Blog: From the Editor
If you thought the US had problems finding qualified engineers, look at what's happening in other countries. Even Japan and the UK are reporting that they can't produce enough engineers to fill local demand.
Michael Feldman
Microsoft Releases Windows HPC Server 2008 Beta 2
Post Date: May 18, 2008 @ 9:00 PM, Pacific Daylight Time
Blog: From the Editor
The release of the second beta for Windows HPC Server 2008 was announced on Microsoft's Windows Servers blog site over the weekend. Ryan Waite, Micrsoft's Group Program Manager for HPC says they signed off on the Beta 2 release last Friday.
Michael Feldman
On the Edge
Post Date: May 14, 2008 @ 9:00 PM, Pacific Daylight Time
Blog: From the Editor
If you read just one HPCwire article this week, be sure to catch John West's profile of the National Visualization and Analytics Center. The center is developing visual analytic tools for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. The work is particularly interesting because it fits into the category of "Edge HPC," Tabor Research's term for HPC that lies outside the traditional science and engineering realm.
Michael Feldman
IBM Unsheathes New Cell Blade
Post Date: May 13, 2008 @ 9:00 PM, Pacific Daylight Time
Blog: From the Editor
Earlier today IBM announced the new BladeCenter QS22, a new blade server that incorporates the latest Cell processor, the PowerXCell 8i. While the new name might not exactly roll off your tongue, IBM has managed to address one of the Cell's major technical shortcomings (at least for the HPC crowd), namely much better double precision floating point performance.
Michael Feldman
MATLAB Users Get a Parallel Boost
Post Date: May 13, 2008 @ 9:00 PM, Pacific Daylight Time
Blog: From the Editor
The Mathworks has integrated the company's Parallel Computing Toolbox with two MATLAB optimization tool sets: the Optimization Toolbox and the Genetic Algorithm and Direct Search Toolbox.
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Feature Articles
CERN, Google Drive Future of Global Science Initiatives
Large-scale, worldwide scientific initiatives rely on some cloud-based system to both coordinate efforts and manage computational efforts at peak times that cannot be contained within the combined in-house HPC resources. Last week at Google I/O, Brookhaven National Lab’s Sergey Panitkin discussed the role of the Google Compute Engine in providing computational support to ATLAS, a detector of high-energy particles at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
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Saddling Phi for TACC’s Stampede
The Xeon Phi coprocessor might be the new kid on the high performance block, but out of all first-rate kickers of the Intel tires, the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) got the first real jab with its new top ten Stampede system.We talk with the center's Karl Schultz about the challenges of programming for Phi--but more specifically, the optimization...
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"No Exascale for You!" An Interview with Berkeley Lab's Horst Simon
Although Horst Simon was named Deputy Director of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, he maintains his strong ties to the scientific computing community as an editor of the TOP500 list and as an invited speaker at conferences.
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Running Computational Fluid Dynamics in the Cloud
May 16, 2013 |
When it comes to cloud, long distances mean unacceptably high latencies. Researchers from the University of Bonn in Germany examined those latency issues of doing CFD modeling in the cloud by utilizing a common CFD and its utilization in HPC instance types including both CPU and GPU cores of Amazon EC2.
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Computing the Physics of Bubbles
May 15, 2013 |
Supercomputers at the Department of Energy’s National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) have worked on important computational problems such as collapse of the atomic state, the optimization of chemical catalysts, and now modeling popping bubbles.
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Internet2 Awards Program Seeks Innovative Applications
May 10, 2013 |
Program provides cash awards up to $10,000 for the best open-source end-user applications deployed on 100G network.
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Floating Funding to Exascale Island
May 09, 2013 |
The Japanese government has revealed its plans to best its previous K Computer efforts with what they hope will be the first exascale system...
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HPC and the True Cost of Cloud
May 08, 2013 |
For engineers looking to leverage high-performance computing, the accessibility of a cloud-based approach is a powerful draw, but there are costs that may not be readily apparent.
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