December 17, 2009
Here is a collection of highlights from this week's news stream as reported by HPCwire.
Scientists Explore Energy Efficiency in Multi-Scale Computing Systems
Tata Sons' CRL Partners with Force India
Knowledge Computing Offers New Perspectives in Scientific Computing
Acumem Launches ThreadSpotter 2010
UK Science Agency Announces £2.4 Billion Investment Strategy
EDGeS Connects More Than 100,000 Computers to EGEE
Unilever Joins Forces with STFC for Product R&D
Clemson University Leads $6M Technology Initiative
NVIDIA, National Taiwan University Aim to Unlock Secrets of Universe
Queensland University of Technology Selects Mitrion Platform
3D Microchips for More Powerful and Environmentally-Friendly Computers
NLR Helps Enable SC09 Bandwidth Challenge Winners
Wide Area InfiniBand Used in the Winning Bandwidth Challenge Entry at SC09
Platform Computing Solution Helps CERN Manage Data
CERN, the European nuclear physics laboratory that runs the Large Hadron Collider, has selected cloud computing solutions from Platform Computing to improve on its current grid infrastructure and to manage the world's largest cloud environment for scientific collaboration. CERN researchers deal with massive amounts of data that must be accessible in near real-time. The infrastructure has to support the production and analysis of more than 15 petabytes of data per year, which is processed by more than 60,000 CPU cores. With a cloud system, scientists can manage workloads themselves as opposed to having to operate out of a centralized IT management department at CERN's laboratory near Geneva.
CERN was already using Platform's LSF grid and workload management solution, so it made sense to see what Platform could offer in the way of a virtualized cloud environment. To that end, CERN selected both private cloud management and HPC cloud-enabling software solutions, called Platform ISF and Platform ISF Adaptive Cluster.
According to Tony Cass, group leader of fabric infrastructure and operations at CERN:
"Platform's ISF and ISF Adaptive Cluster, combined with the Platform LSF grid workload management solution already in place, will provide our users the scalability and flexibility they need to manage their clusters and share datacenter resources while adhering to our requirements for open standards."
CERN believes the improved infrastructure will offer increased computing performance and services to its 10,000 researchers from 85 countries.
NCAR Picks Builder for Supercomputing Center
The National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) has selected a constructure firm for the NCAR-Wyoming Supercomputing Center (NWSC) project. And the winner is Denver-based Saunders Construction, Inc., which is set to provide pre-construction and possibly construction services for the 150,000-square-foot building in Cheyenne, Wyo. Once completed, the $66 million center will be home to one of the world's most powerful systems dedicated to improving climate predictions, including severe weather events, air quality and related topics.
From the press release:
"NCAR is very excited to be taking the next important step in this process," said Krista Laursen, NWSC project director at NCAR. "We are pleased to be on track to deliver a world-class facility for the atmospheric science and geoscience communities."
Onera Selects SGI Supercomputers
Onera, the French aerospace research center, has selected SGI Altix for its new supercomputer, which will be used to enhance the precision of simulations and modeling, acccelerate digital simulation, and to prepare its resources for massively parallel processing. The new solution will have 3,000 processing nodes, a sizable increase over the previous system's 512 nodes, with each offering twice the power, boosting speed significantly.
From the announcement:
The Altix cluster enables Onera's computation codes -- such as Elsa for aerodynamic simulation, or Cedre for the simulation of propulsion and the thermal budget for aerospace vehicles -- to simulate computation configurations involving more than one billion degrees of freedom.
Onera also selected a second system, SGI Altix ICE (ICE stands for Integrated Compute Environment), to power its new system, "Stelvio," which was named after the highest mountain pass in Italy. One of the top ten systems in France and one of the top 100 worldwide, Stelvio incorporates 384 SGI Altix ICE nodes, delivers 34 teraflops of processing power, has a total of 3,072 cores and 14 terabytes of memory.
The Altix ICE cluster will provide a large share of the computing power needed by all scientists at Onera, enhancing the agency's research capabilities across scientific branches and departments.
SGI won the contract after an intense year-long process. Stelvio replaces the previous system from Bull.
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?
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