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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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?

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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."

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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?"

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