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.
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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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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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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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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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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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.
In this demonstration of SGI DMF ZeroWatt disk solution, Dr. Eng Lim Goh, SGI CTO, discusses a function of SGI DMF software to reduce costs and power consumption in an exascale (Big Data) storage datacenter.
The Cray CS300-AC cluster supercomputer offers energy efficient, air-cooled design based on modular, industry-standard platforms featuring the latest processor and network technologies and a wide range of datacenter cooling requirements.