December 10, 2009
Here is a collection of highlights from this week's news stream as reported by HPCwire.
HyperTransport Consortium Releases New Connector/Cable Specs
Dinosaurs Hop, Skip and Jump into 21st Century
Fusion-io Debuts Faster, Cooler Solid-State Technology
Intel and DFKI Cooperate on 3D Internet
Internet2 Announces CEO Search
Southampton Supercomputer to Crunch Complex Computations
UC San Diego Experts Calculate How Much Information Americans Consume
SGI to Support Federal 'JLENS' Defense Program
High Energy Physicists Set New Record for Network Data Transfer
NAG, Dawning Launch Strategic Partnership for HPC and Scientific Research
Sun Sets Records with New x64 Server
Panasas, Arista Partner to Optimize Ethernet Storage at LANL
Sporting Index Selects Platform Computing
ANSYS 12.1 Enhancements Support Fast Product Design and Validation
Scalable Informatics Introduces siCluster
Blue Waters Project Stirs Cost/Benefit Debate
From an article at Daily Illini, an independent student newspaper at the University of Illinois, we learn that there may be some trouble brewing over the shiny Blue Waters project. As always, it's about the money.
From news writer, Joseph Ward:
The computer itself will cost $208 million to build and will be funded through a grant from the National Science Foundation, or NSF. The cost of housing the supercomputer is $72 million; the University will pay $12 million and the state will pay $60 million, Barker said.
But with what administrators have called a "budget crisis" looming in the University's near future, some have brought to question the morality of the University spending this much on a computer.
There is doubt whether the universe can afford the computer in light of these budget woes. However, as with any of these high-profile mega-computing projects, the final benefits are not always apparent at first. A massive, cutting-edge system like this brings more than monetary value, it brings prestige, reputation and recognition, and with that, it creates both academic and business parternships, drawing talent and capital to the region. Of course, all of those factors will eventually lead to revenue-generating endeavors.
As Lisa-Joy Zgorski, spokeswoman for NSF, said, the true value of Blue Waters will be realized in the future:
We (the NSF) are in the business of funding things that sometimes, at first blush, the practical implications for which are not immediately recognized. It's (Blue Waters) building for the future and providing the computational resources to attack the really complex, daunting problems we are facing in society.
Which remindes me, the supercomputer will also do really good things like assist in solving humanities' most pressing concerns. From Trish Barker, spokeswoman for the National Center for Supercomputing Applications:
Blue Waters will be used to do scientific research that relies on supercomputers. It might be doing better weather prediction. It might be looking at how the universe evolved in the very early days, and it might be trying to find an answer to global warming. It will be, in 2011, the most powerful supercomputer in the world.
German Weather Super Officially Launched
Scientists from the German Climate Computing Center (DKRZ) inaugurated their new climate supercomputer today in a ceremony slated to coincide with the UN Climate Change Conference taking place in Cophenagen this week.
The new €35 million euro supercomputer, named "Blizzard," provides more accurate predictions of future climate change and enables more detailed climate calculations. Specifically, more complex processes and interactions can be included in models, and the spatial resolution of the climate models will be enhanced.
Blizzard -- an IBM p575 "Power6" cluster -- has a peak speed of 158 teraflops, making it 60 times more powerful than its predecessor, and with a storage capacity of more than 60 petabytes (equal to approximately 13 million DVDs), it will be able to store 10 times as much data.
"It's the biggest computer in the world to be dedicated solely to climate research," said German Science Minister Annette Schavan at the inauguration.
As for power draw, DKRZ reps say that Blizzard is carbon neutral, which it owes to the use of green electricity generated by wind and other renewable energy sources.
For more details, there is a press release at the DKRZ Web site, which is great if you're fluent in German, otherwise, check out a brief notice here.
May 23, 2013 |
The study of climate change is one of those scientific problems where it is almost essential to model the entire Earth to attain accurate results and make worthwhile predictions. In an attempt to make climate science more accessible to smaller research facilities, NASA introduced what they call ‘Climate in a Box,’ a system they note acts as a desktop supercomputer.
Read more...
May 22, 2013 |
At some point in the not-too-distant future, building powerful, miniature computing systems will be considered a hobby for high schoolers, just as robotics or even Lego-building are today. That could be made possible through recent advancements made with the Raspberry Pi computers.
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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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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.