November 05, 2009
Here is a collection of highlights from this week's news stream as reported by HPCwire.
Green500 Expands Coverage of Energy-Efficient Supercomputers
BLADE Switches Support Dutch National University Research Consortium
Liquid Computing, Intel to Showcase Unified Computing System
ScaleMP Enhances Its Virtualization Offering
Platform Computing Advances Cloud Computing for HPC
Purdue Kicks Off National Center to Visualize Homeland Security Data
3Leaf Systems Announces Dynamic Data Center Server
ANSYS Releases Ansoft Academic Product Bundle
Altair Achieves Breakthrough Time Savings in Crash Simulations
$32.7 Million IU Data Center To Be Unveiled
Supermicro Launches 2U Twin Servers
RIKEN Cluster System Sets Record
Fortinet Announces New Switching Portfolio for HPC Market
NERSC to Develop Codes for Many-core Era
Supercomputer, Supernodes, Superhero? Meet Flash "Gordon"
SDSC announced this week it had received a $20 million grant from the NSF to create a supercomputer dedicated to solving the pressing scientific and societal problems of our time. Gordon -- as the system is called -- will employ flash memory to help it achieve its goal of solving data-intensive applications 10x faster.
According to SDSC Interim Director Michael Norman, who is also the project's principal investigator:
"This HPC system will allow researchers to tackle a growing list of critical 'data-intensive' problems. These include the analysis of individual genomes to tailor drugs to specific patients, the development of more accurate models to predict the impact of earthquakes on buildings and other structures, and simulations that offer greater insights into what's happening to the planet's climate."
Gordon will be built on Appro's Xtreme-X next-generation architecture with a mid-2011 timeframe, and will be made available to the research community through a network of high performance computers. The supercomputer will contain 32 "supernodes" based on the latest Intel processors and virtual shared-memory software from ScaleMP, connected by an InfiniBand network. All told, Gordon will possess 245 teraflops of total compute power, 64 terabytes of DRAM, 256 TB of flash memory, and four petabytes of disk storage -- placing it among the top 30 supercomputers in the world.
NCSA Presents GPU Primer
GPUs are showing up everywhere lately, but how much do we know about them? Test your knowledge by checking out this explanatory piece, put together by IACAT and NCSA staff. It starts out:
Graphics processing units (GPUs) aren't just for graphics anymore. These high-performance "many-core" processors are increasingly being used to accelerate a wide range of science and engineering applications, in many cases offering dramatically increased performance compared to CPUs.
Significant biomolecular, computational chemistry, astrophysical, condensed matter physics, weather modeling and seismic stack migration applications already have benefited substantially from or show substantial promise for using GPUs.
The Q&A runs the gamut from the most basic of questions: "How is a GPU different from a CPU?" to more advanced material, such as, "How do I adapt my application to use GPUs?"
The authors explain that even with the current GPU popularity, CPUs are still needed for certain tasks, such as accessing data from the disk and exchanging data between compute nodes in a multi-node cluster. Also CPUs are general purpose and GPUs are not, meaning GPUs don't have much support for I/O devices, interrupts, and complex assembly instructions.
This is an excellent primer for anyone wishing to learn the basics of GPU computing, for those looking to refresh their GPU knowledge, or for industry veterans looking for a simple way to explain this material to less technical folks.
Jun 18, 2013 |
The world's largest supercomputers, like Tianhe-2, are great at traditional, compute-intensive HPC workloads, such as simulating atomic decay or modeling tornados. But data-intensive applications--such as mining big data sets for connections--is a different sort of workload, and runs best on a different sort of computer.
Read more...
Jun 18, 2013 |
Researchers are finding innovative uses for Gordon, the 285 teraflop supercomputer housed at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) that has a unique Flash-based storage system. Since going online, researchers have put the incredibly fast I/O to use on a wide variety of workloads, ranging from chemistry to political science.
Read more...
Jun 17, 2013 |
The advent of low-power mobile processors and cloud delivery models is changing the economics of computing. But just as an economy car is good at different things than a full size truck, an HPC workload still has certain computing demands that neither the fastest smartphone nor the most elastic cloud cluster can fulfill.
Read more...
Jun 14, 2013 |
For all the progress we've made in IT over the last 50 years, there's one area of life that has steadfastly eluded the grasp of computers: understanding human language. Now, researchers at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) are utilizing a Hadoop cluster on its Longhorn supercomputer to move the state of the art of language processing a little bit further.
Read more...
Jun 13, 2013 |
Titan, the Cray XK7 at the Oak Ridge National Lab that debuted last fall as the fastest supercomputer in the world with 17.59 petaflops of sustained computing power, will rely on its previous LINPACK test for the upcoming edition of the Top 500 list.
Read more...
05/10/2013 | Cleversafe, Cray, DDN, NetApp, & Panasas | From Wall Street to Hollywood, drug discovery to homeland security, companies and organizations of all sizes and stripes are coming face to face with the challenges – and opportunities – afforded by Big Data. Before anyone can utilize these extraordinary data repositories, however, they must first harness and manage their data stores, and do so utilizing technologies that underscore affordability, security, and scalability.
04/15/2013 | Bull | “50% of HPC users say their largest jobs scale to 120 cores or less.” How about yours? Are your codes ready to take advantage of today’s and tomorrow’s ultra-parallel HPC systems? Download this White Paper by Analysts Intersect360 Research to see what Bull and Intel’s Center for Excellence in Parallel Programming can do for your codes.
Join HPCwire Editor Nicole Hemsoth and Dr. David Bader from Georgia Tech as they take center stage on opening night at Atlanta's first Big Data Kick Off Week, filmed in front of a live audience. Nicole and David look at the evolution of HPC, today's big data challenges, discuss real world solutions, and reveal their predictions. Exactly what does the future holds for HPC?
Join our webinar to learn how IT managers can migrate to a more resilient, flexible and scalable solution that grows with the data center. Mellanox VMS is future-proof, efficient and brings significant CAPEX and OPEX savings. The VMS is available today.