Computing for a Better World

Dec 17, 2009 | Hamburg, Germany, is known worldwide for its harbor, its red-light district, the Reeperbahn, and the fresh sea breeze. On December 10, Hamburg added another feature of worldwide interest when an IBM supercomputer devoted to climate research was inaugurated, just in time for the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen.
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HPC in 2009: Mergers, Acquisitions and Worse

Dec 17, 2009 | The dominant storyline in high performance computing this year was not about technology, but the economy. Eleven companies in the HPC space were either acquired or went out of business in 2009. We recap their stories here.
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The Week in Review

Dec 17, 2009 | Platform Computing helps CERN with cloud management; NCAR selects a construction company for new supercomputer center; and French aerospace research center Onera chooses SGI Altix systems. We recap those stories and more in our weekly wrapup.
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Workshop Focuses on Use of Manycore and Accelerator-based Computing for Advancing Science

Dec 16, 2009 | Online, at conferences and in theory, manycore processors and the use of accelerators such as GPUs and FPGAs are being viewed as the next big revolution in high performance computing. If they can live up to the potential, these accelerators could someday transform how computational science is performed, providing much more computing power and energy efficiency.
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FTC Charges Intel with Anticompetitive Tactics

Dec 16, 2009 | Intel is back in hot water with government regulators. On Wednesday, the US Federal Trade Commission filed a lawsuit against Intel, bringing new allegations of anticompetitive behavior against the chipmaker.
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2009-2019: A Look Back on a Decade of Supercomputing

Dec 15, 2009 | As we turn the decade into the 2020s, we take a nostalgic look back at the last ten years of supercomputing. It's amazing to think how much has changed in that time. Many of our older readers will recall how things were before the official Planetary Supercomputing Facilities at Shanghai, Oak Ridge and Saclay were established. Strange as it may seem now, each country -- in fact, each university or company -- had its own supercomputer!
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The Week in Review

Dec 10, 2009 | Blue Waters' expense has some calling for project's justification; and new German weather system has official launch party. We recap those stories and more in our weekly wrapup.
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IBM Ponders the Exascale

Dec 09, 2009 | Over the next ten years of HPC history, the mainstream teraflop systems of today will evolve into the petaflop systems of tomorrow, while the leading-edge petaflop supercomputers will be replaced by exaflop machines. As the most diverse player in the HPC server business, IBM has some unique advantages as it charts a path toward the exascale milestone.
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Intel Cancels 2010 Larrabee Debut

Dec 07, 2009 | While Intel prides itself on maintaining a breakneck speed for processor development, the company's Larrabee GPU effort just couldn't keep pace with graphics technology development at NVIDIA and AMD. Intel revealed late last Friday that the company would not be delivering a Larrabee-based discrete graphics product next year, and has instead decided to use the work as the basis for a software development platform.
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The Week in Review

Dec 03, 2009 | NVIDIA's RealityServer 3.0 is now shipping; Fujitsu announces early success for its supercomputing project despite funding woes; and Microsoft previews a new visualization programming language. We recap those stories and more in our weekly wrapup.
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Intel Unveils 48-Core Research Chip

Dec 02, 2009 | On Wednesday Intel shifted its Tera-scale Computing Research Program into second gear by demonstrating a 48-core x86 processor. The company is intending to use the new chip as a research platform for the purpose of lighting a fire under manycore computing.
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AMD Server Roadmap: Cores, Lots of Them

Dec 01, 2009 | Despite the rise of GPUs, CPUs are the foundation high performance computing, with Intel clearly owning the majority of the HPC server market. AMD's server roadmap over the next couple of years may be able to blunt some of its rival's momentum, but there are no magic bullets in the company's arsenal.
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SC09 Roundup

Nov 25, 2009 | Before SC09 recedes too far in the rear-view mirror, it's probably worth recapping some of the news connected to the big trends that emerged at the conference.
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Ubiquitous Parallelism and the Classroom

Nov 20, 2009 | The oft-contended best simple statement is that we need ubiquitous parallelism in the classroom. In the near future, most electronic devices will have multiple cores which would benefit greatly from parallel programming. The low hanging fruit is, of course, the student's laptop, and aiding the student to make full use of that laptop.
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Exascale Expectations

Nov 20, 2009 | Supercomputer performance has grown at a fairly constant rate of a 1,000-fold increase per decade. Will the sprint to exascale be able to hold that pace?
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Reconfigurable Computing Research Pushes Forward

Nov 20, 2009 | Despite all the all the recent hoopla about GPGPUs and eight-core CPUs, proponents of reconfigurable computing continue to sing the praises of FPGA-based HPC. We got the opportunity to ask Dr. Alan George, who runs the NSF Center for High-Performance Reconfigurable Computing, about the work going on there and what he thinks the technology can offer to high performance computing users.
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Jaguar Scales TOP500

Nov 19, 2009 | AMD's John Fruehe and ORNL's Buddy Bland talk about the significance of Jaguar capturing the top spot in the supercomputing world and what that means for the most demanding science applications.
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Parallel NFS Is the Future Standard to Manage Petabyte Level Growth

Nov 19, 2009 | IT professionals are constantly being challenged to manage exponential growth that has reached petabyte levels. As pressures increase on IT to deliver even-higher levels of productivity and efficiency, a new generation file system standard will be required to maximize utilization of powerful server and cluster resources while minimizing management overhead.
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Mitrionics Looks Beyond FPGAs

Nov 18, 2009 | Mitrionics has begun work on an experimental compiler that aims to make parallel programming architecture-agnostic. We asked Stefan Möhl, Mitrionics' chief science officer and co-founder, what's behind the new technology and what prompted the decision to expand beyond their FPGA roots.
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Intel CTO Tells HPC Crowd to Get a Second Life

Nov 17, 2009 | The opening address of the Supercomputing Conference had a surreal quality to it in more ways than one. Between talking avatars, physics-simulated sound, and a Larrabee demo running HPC-type codes, it was hard to separate reality from fantasy.
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SGI Colors New Shared Memory Machines Ultraviolet

Nov 16, 2009 | After what may be the longest development cycle ever for a supercomputer, SGI has unveiled the first commercial implementation of its Ultraviolet architecture. The company first announced "Project Ultraviolet" at SC03. Now six years later, it has launched Altix UV, the company's first scale-up HPC system based on x86 technology.
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Déjà Vu All Over Again

Nov 16, 2009 | Never short on opinions, especially when it comes to high performance computing, Convey Computer Co-Founder Steve Wallach talked to HPCwire about the future of HPC and how lessons from the past can point the way for the future.
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DataDirect Networks Builds on Storage Fusion Architecture

Nov 16, 2009 | HPC storage vendor DataDirect Networks will soon offer integrated clustered file system support in its Storage Fusion Architecture product line. The idea is to drastically reduce the amount of storage switches and file system servers, and thus the cost and complexity of supercomputer-sized file storage.
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OpenFabrics Alliance Weaves Its Story at SC09

Nov 15, 2009 | We have developed something of a tradition at HPCwire in the weeks leading up to each year's SC conference; we interview the chairman of the OpenFabrics Alliance (OFA). Jim Ryan of Intel has been the OFA's chair all these years, and our annual interview with Jim was as interesting as ever.
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NVIDIA Unleashes Fermi GPU for HPC

Nov 15, 2009 | NVIDIA has announced the first Fermi GPU products here at the Supercomputing Conference (SC09) in Portland, Oregon, where thousands of attendees will get a chance to see the company's next-generation chip in action. The GPUs will first touch down in NVIDIA's new Tesla 20-series products aimed at HPC workstations and servers.
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