Here is a collection of highlights from this week's news stream as reported by HPCwire.

SGI Sets Records, Outperforms Competitors

Chi-Tech Selects IBM's High Speed Messaging Technology

ANSYS Releases HFSS 12.0

New Cray Super Cuts Job Times at UT Dallas

NextComputing Presents NextStream

ScaleMP Supports Xeon 5500-based Platforms

ORAU Seeking Proposals for HPC Grants

Wolfram Releases webMathematica 3

Dataram Launches Financial Services Group

Intel Announces Organizational Changes

LSU Launches High Speed Cluster

Solace's Messaging Platform Breaks the Microsecond Barrier

Pliant Technology Unveils Enterprise Flash Drive Family

Researchers Find Cheaper Parallel Processing Using Xbox

HPC-Flavored Power7 Chips

There's was a good wrap-up of the upcoming IBM Power7 processors over at IT Jungle, penned by the prolific Timothy Prickett Morgan. Some of the article is a rehash of the news that came out of the Hot Chips conference last month, but with additional details about chip speeds and configurations. In particular, it looks like IBM is planning to offer multiple flavors of Power7 depending on its target application, varying not only the core count and clock speed, but also the number of memory channels and the width of the SMP buses.

One version will be of special interest to HPC'ers. Says Morgan:

There is another variant of the Power7 chip that will not appear in standard machines and which seems to be destined for the "Blue Waters" massively parallel supercomputer being built by IBM for the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois. This is a multichip module (MCM) that will be a standalone SMP node that has four entire Power7 chips, with all eight of their memory controllers activated, plunked into a single ceramic package. These chips will all sport three 16-byte local links that glue the chips together. And there is every reason to believe these chips, which were developed under the code-name "Q7," will end up running at higher clock speeds than the MCM packaging should allow.

The use of processor variants to match up silicon with applications appears to be proliferating. Both Intel and AMD are using this approach with their latest server chip architectures, and now IBM is following suit. That bodes well for high performance computing, since it allows chipmakers to better target the HPC niche without having to invest in a completely customized design.

And Speaking of Blue Waters...

For the past couple years, NCSA has been releasing details on the Blue Waters project, which, when it comes online in June of 2011, is expected to be the most powerful supercomputer in the world for open scientific research. It will be the first system of its kind to deliver sustained performance of more than one petaflop on a range of real-world science and engineering applications.

For those of us who are interested in following the project's progress, there was a video posted as part of NCSA's Video on Demand series, featuring Bob Fiedler, Technical Program Manager for Science and Engineering Applications with the Blue Waters Project. In this, the fifth episode of the Behind Blue Waters series, Bob discusses how developers can prepare their applications for sustained petascale performance on the Blue Waters system, which is considerably larger than the machines most users and developers are familiar with.

Specifically, Bob discusses two kinds of simulators for testing applications' ability to run at large scale. One from IBM simulates a single execution on a single chip and the other, called BigSim, simulates the parallel execution of an application. Combining these tools enables a full system prediction of how fast the code will run and allows developers to make modifications that are needed to enable the applications to use the full capability that Blue Waters will provide.

To view the video, go to http://www.ncsa.illinois.edu/News/Video/2009/bbw_fiedler.html and for a related article by NCSA Director Thom Dunning that explains more about getting applications ready for the large-scale system, visit http://www.ncsa.illinois.edu/News/Stories/DunningPRAC/.

For previous editions of Behind Blue Waters, see Volume 1, Volume 2, Volume 3, and Volume 4.