ClusterVision Spins Off Cluster Management Software Company

Oct 07, 2009 | While most of the industry has gone through an enormous consolidation over the past year, Amsterdam-based ClusterVision is defying the trend by spinning off its ClusterVisionOS HPC management software into a separate company called Bright Computing. The new business launched itself this week, along with its flagship offering, Bright Cluster Manager.
Read more...

Bill Dally Sees Central Role for the GPU in Supercomputing

Oct 05, 2009 | Even before he joined NVIDIA as its chief scientist, Bill Dally has been at the forefront of parallel computing. In this interview, he talks about why he chose to make the move from academia to the commercial arena, the significance of the company's new Fermi architecture, and the future of GPU computing.
Read more...

The Week in Review

Oct 01, 2009 | SGI supercomputer used to analyze intelligence data; Sun HPC Consortium to be held in conjunction with SC09; and Western Massachusetts HPC Center moves forward. We recap those stories and more in our weekly wrapup.
Read more...

NVIDIA Takes GPU Computing to the Next Level

Sep 29, 2009 | GPU Computing 2.0 is upon us. Today at the NVIDIA GPU Technology Conference in San Jose, California, company CEO Jen-Hsun Huang unveiled a seriously revamped graphics processor architecture representing the biggest step forward for general-purpose GPU computing since the introduction of CUDA in 2006.
Read more...

Database Vendor Versant Eyes HPC Market

Sep 29, 2009 | A niche product for a niche market, Versant's core technology isn't needed everywhere, but it is indispensable where it is needed. And the company is hoping to demonstrate that at least some HPC users need it.
Read more...

Cray XT5m Midrange Supercomputer Builds Market Momentum

Sep 28, 2009 | In March 2009, Cray announced the Cray XT5m system, a compatible midrange extension of the high-end Cray XT5 product line that was first to break the sustained petaflop performance barrier on real-world applications. In this interview, HPCwire asked Barry Bolding, Cray's vice president of scalable systems, for an update on the midrange product.
Read more...

Lawrence Livermore Builds Stable of Workhorse Clusters

Sep 23, 2009 | Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has become synonymous with the world famous IBM Blue Gene supercomputers. But the lab's capacity clusters have quietly played a big supporting role for their elite brethren, and it looks like Dell is in line to provide some of these systems in the near future.
Read more...

SGI Makes Leap Into 'Personal Supercomputing'

Sep 21, 2009 | SGI has launched a deskside HPC cluster product aimed at users looking for supercomputers they can call their own. The new product line, called Octane III, also marks the re-entry of the company into the high performance workstation space.
Read more...

AMD Goes Native with New Server Chipsets

Sep 21, 2009 | AMD has launched its Fiorano server platform, consisting of chipsets that, for the first time, use only company-branded silicon. The three chipsets announced this week are aimed to serve a range of market segments.
Read more...

The Week in Review

Sep 17, 2009 | A review of the upcoming IBM Power7 processors includes the promise of multiple versions; and a recent Behind Blue Waters video explains how to get applications ready for sustained petascale performance. We recap those stories and more in our weekly wrapup.
Read more...

Option Engine: A Grid-Enabled Software Package to Evaluate Financial Options

Sep 17, 2009 | In today's complex financial markets and with the 2008 financial crisis ongoing, the market actors feel the need of high performance computing tools for a fast evaluation of financial products. Often in order to get quick evaluations of financial products, simplified models are used, which tend to produce inaccurate results. In order to efficiently evaluate financial products with state-of-the-art models, researchers have developed Option Engine.
Read more...

Confronting Cloud Computing Security Concerns

Sep 16, 2009 | Cloud computing offers a new, more efficient, and economically attractive model – it’s undoubtedly the next step in the evolution of the data center. Despite the cloud’s advantages, concerns about security are not going away. Are security concerns putting a damper on the enthusiastic acceptance of cloud computing?
Read more...

Flash Drive Startup Looks to Leapfrog Competition

Sep 15, 2009 | In an attempt to shake up the solid-state drive (SSD) business, startup Pliant Technology has launched the Enterprise Flash Drive (EFD) family of products. The company is touting its 2.5- and 3.5-inch "Lightning" EFDs as the fastest and most robust flash storage drives on the market.
Read more...

Arista Finds Niche in High Frequency Trading

Sep 14, 2009 | Newcomer Arista Networks has found a comfortable home for its high performance Ethernet switches on Wall Street. Company founder Andy Bechtolsheim explains why Arista's low latency switches are an especially good fit for the lucrative algorithmic trading business.
Read more...

With Power Comes Complexity

Sep 14, 2009 | When rPath CTO Erik Troan speaks during the opening session at this year's High Performance Computing on Wall Street conference, he'll be emphasizing something that old school HPC'ers are very familiar with: complexity. Even moderately-sized HPC clusters are a study in complexity.
Read more...

Solace Systems Sets the Pace in the Race to Zero Latency

Sep 14, 2009 | In the algorithmic trading business, speed is literally money. An extra microsecond of latency between the market feed and the trading application could be worth a million dollars to a large investment bank or hedge fund.
Read more...

Compilers and More: OpenCL Promises and Potential

Sep 10, 2009 | OpenCL was introduced with great fanfare and promise. Given all the hype, what can we expect from OpenCL? Is it really simple? Is it portable? Will it replace other parallel programming models? Michael Wolfe addresses these questions and more.
Read more...

The Week in Review

Sep 10, 2009 | Indiana University to establish an experimental supercomputing network; and a comparison of current processor architectures. We recap those stories and more in our weekly wrapup.
Read more...

Resource Management in Seconds: The New Era for Virtual Organizations

Sep 08, 2009 | Complex HPC infrastructures, grids and collaboratories need to manage a plethora of distributed assets: data repositories, machines, applications and services. To share in a coordinated way, the HPC community invented virtual organizations (VOs): groups that share resources because they trust each other. The more-than-a-decade-old concept is encountering a revival.
Read more...

Mellanox Rolls Out Next Iteration of ConnectX

Sep 03, 2009 | This week Mellanox announced a refinement of its ConnectX line with the ConnectX-2 architecture. This latest evolution enhances its combination InfiniBand/Ethernet network adapter cards with new features, such added support for IEEE DCB standards and enhanced RDMA access, while maintaining the advantages of the previous line for those needing to support multiple protocols with limited server real estate.
Read more...

The Week in Review

Sep 03, 2009 | OSC supercomputer gets much-needed expansion; Cray acquires PathScale compiler suite; and Dell and Brocade team on unified computing. John West recaps those stories and more in our weekly wrap-up.
Read more...

Reliable Memory: Coming to a GPU Near You

Sep 02, 2009 | GPUs are becoming more like CPUs. But in the critical area of error corrected memory, graphics hardware still lags. The lack of error correction is probably the single biggest factor that makes users of GPUs for high performance computing nervous. The good news is that graphics chip vendors are aware of the problem and it appears to be only a matter of time before GPUs get a memory makeover.
Read more...

Mission Possible -- Greening the HPC Data Center

Aug 31, 2009 | High density computing allows datacenter managers to meet the constantly increasing performance demands of their users without corresponding demands on the center’s electrical and thermal capabilities. Because GPU-based systems combine supercomputer-level performance with significantly lower power and cooling costs, the goal of greening the datacenter is now mission possible.
Read more...

PathScale Rises from SiCortex's Ashes

Aug 31, 2009 | SiCortex's loss will be PathScale's gain. With the help of Cray, the PathScale compiler technology will get another chance to make a go of it on its own.
Read more...

The Week in Review

Aug 27, 2009 | NOAA outsources computational work to ORNL; Platform Computing teams up with NVIDIA; and an introduction to clustered file systems. John West recaps those stories and more in our weekly wrap-up.
Read more...