Isaac Lopez HPCwire Market Watch Stocks Rebounding After Tough March Downward
Post Date: May 07, 2009 @ 4:28 PM, Pacific Daylight Time
Blog: HPC Matters

A year ago, when HPCwire was launching our fabulous new design and site infrastructure, we added a feature that was new to the site: The HPCwire Market Watch.

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Michael Feldman French Bank Takes On GPU Computing
Post Date: May 06, 2009 @ 12:23 PM, Pacific Daylight Time
Blog: From the Editor

The quants at Paris-based bank BNP Paribas march to a different drummer.

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Michael Feldman Podcast: QLogic-IBM Deal; HPC on Jeopardy; Rackable-SGI Deal Gets Go-Ahead; Al Gore at SCO9
Post Date: May 01, 2009 @ 12:40 PM, Pacific Daylight Time
Blog: HPCwire Soundbite

Week two of the HPCwire Soundbite Podcast. Download it and take it with you!

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Michael Feldman Obama Pushes Science Agenda
Post Date: April 30, 2009 @ 5:25 PM, Pacific Daylight Time
Blog: From the Editor

After eight years in the wilderness, the R&D community finally has an advocate in the White House.

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Deb Walsh HPC in the Life Sciences
Post Date: April 30, 2009 @ 4:03 PM, Pacific Daylight Time
Blog: HPC Matters

Sometimes there are great stories to be told about how HPC can change our lives, and this just might be one of them.

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Addison Snell Court Approves SGI Sale to Rackable
Post Date: April 30, 2009 @ 1:58 PM, Pacific Daylight Time
Blog: HPC Matters

A source within the U.S. Bankruptcy Court, Southern District of New York, confirmed that Judge Martin Glenn ruled today to approve the sale of assets of Silicon Graphics, Inc. to Rackable.

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Michael Feldman Alex, I'll Take Supercomputing for $1000
Post Date: April 29, 2009 @ 8:14 AM, Pacific Daylight Time
Blog: From the Editor

An IBM supercomputer is getting ready to beat trivia masters at their own game.

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Michael Feldman Podcast: Oracle Buys Sun; Flash Memory in HPC; AMD's New Roadmap
Post Date: April 29, 2009 @ 7:01 AM, Pacific Daylight Time
Blog: HPCwire Soundbite

New from HPCwire! A weekly podcast hosted by Michael Feldman, Editor of HPCwire, and Addison Snell, General Manager of Tabor Research. Michael and Addison break down the week's most compelling news and offer their own unique perspectives on how these stories affect the HPC industry.

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Chris Willard Oracle in HPC? Why – Why Not
Post Date: April 27, 2009 @ 7:33 PM, Pacific Daylight Time
Blog:

With Oracle's acquisition of Sun, the company is acquiring, among other assets, an estimated 8.4 percent stake in the traditional HPC server market. Is this an asset that Oracle will keep/nurture as it moves to integrate Sun into its ongoing product and operations strategy?

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Michael Feldman Oracle Grabs Sun on the Rebound
Post Date: April 21, 2009 @ 4:41 PM, Pacific Daylight Time
Blog: From the Editor

Jilted by IBM, Sun Microsystems has found a new suitor and this one doesn't seem to have commitment issues. But what does this relationship mean for Sun's HPC presence?

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Michael Feldman In a 24/7 World, There's No Stopping the Data
Post Date: April 16, 2009 @ 4:20 PM, Pacific Daylight Time
Blog: From the Editor

Complex event processing may be a technology whose time has come.

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Addison Snell How It All Went Wrong for SGI in HPC
Post Date: April 10, 2009 @ 9:54 AM, Pacific Daylight Time
Blog: HPC Matters

It’s been a long ride down for SGI, but it’s finally over.

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Michael Feldman Green Cred
Post Date: April 09, 2009 @ 5:47 PM, Pacific Daylight Time
Blog: From the Editor

For most IT firms, energy efficient computing is just one more piece of the marketing pitch, but for SiCortex, it's a religion.

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Michael Feldman Rackable Makes Bid to Swallow Up Silicon Graphics
Post Date: April 02, 2009 @ 5:57 PM, Pacific Daylight Time
Blog: From the Editor

The SGI deathwatch is over.

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Michael Feldman Still on the InfiniBandwagon
Post Date: March 26, 2009 @ 6:35 PM, Pacific Daylight Time
Blog: From the Editor

While 10 Gigabit Ethernet is getting all the press, InfiniBand keeps chugging along.

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Michael Feldman NVIDIA's Lock on GPU Computing Can Be Picked
Post Date: March 25, 2009 @ 5:38 PM, Pacific Daylight Time
Blog: From the Editor

NVIDIA rules the GPU computing landscape today, but the lack of a home-grown CPU companion could eventually spell trouble.

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Michael Feldman Money Talks
Post Date: March 20, 2009 @ 11:27 AM, Pacific Daylight Time
Blog: From the Editor

A couple of random items this week connected only by the inscrutable nature of research funding.

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Michael Feldman Silicon Valley Churn
Post Date: March 19, 2009 @ 5:07 PM, Pacific Daylight Time
Blog: From the Editor

In a week when Cisco, IBM, Sun Microsystems, Intel and AMD were all featured prominently in the news cycle, I got the feeling that the whole industry might be on the cusp of a realignment.

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Michael Feldman Another Company Takes Up Reconfigurable Computing
Post Date: March 12, 2009 @ 6:32 PM, Pacific Daylight Time
Blog: From the Editor

In the history of HPC, commercial FPGA-based systems have been few and far between. Kuberre Systems offers up its contribution.

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Michael Feldman Gird Your Loins Google, Here Comes Wolfram Alpha
Post Date: March 11, 2009 @ 1:25 PM, Pacific Daylight Time
Blog: From the Editor

Last week, Mathematica inventor Stephen Wolfram announced that he would be launching a new kind of Internet search engine in May, with the not-so-modest name of Wolfram Alpha.

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Michael Feldman Yes Indeed, NVIDIA Has x86 Ambitions
Post Date: March 05, 2009 @ 4:38 PM, Pacific Standard Time
Blog: From the Editor

Although rumors of NVIDIA developing its own x86 products have been circulating for years, a comment this week by Michael Hara, the company's senior VP of investor relations, all but confirmed the GPU maker's intention to bring x86 silicon to market.

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Michael Feldman As the Paradigm Shifts
Post Date: March 03, 2009 @ 5:34 PM, Pacific Standard Time
Blog: From the Editor

The industry's headlong rush into cloud computing is shaking up the old order, sometimes in ways even the biggest IT firms can't anticipate.

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Isaac Lopez Energy Revolution Brewing or Vaporware in the (un)Making?
Post Date: February 27, 2009 @ 9:30 AM, Pacific Standard Time
Blog: HPC Matters

It seems like since 1993, when the Internet got such a foothold on the imagination of the world, that there's always been the rumor of the next great disruptive technology lurking right around the corner.

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Michael Feldman Quants Gone Wild
Post Date: February 26, 2009 @ 4:55 PM, Pacific Standard Time
Blog: From the Editor

It's fascinating to read the post-mortem analysis of the economic meltdown, especially as it relates to the role quantitative analysts and their high-tech financial models played in pushing the industry off a cliff.

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Michael Feldman Folding@home Tops 5 Petaflops
Post Date: February 24, 2009 @ 6:00 PM, Pacific Standard Time
Blog: From the Editor

Last week, the Folding@home team reported that they achieved five petaflops of processing power for their popular protein folding research project.

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Michael Feldman Revisiting the Memory Wall
Post Date: February 19, 2009 @ 5:43 PM, Pacific Standard Time
Blog: From the Editor

The new Nehalem processors will push the memory wall back a bit...at least for a while.

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Chris Willard A Stimulus Package for HPC
Post Date: February 19, 2009 @ 10:52 AM, Pacific Standard Time
Blog: HPC Matters

A long-standing concern in HPC is the graying of the industry. That is, new people are not coming in at the skilled positions as older ones retire.

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Michael Feldman Programming in the Cloud
Post Date: February 17, 2009 @ 4:47 PM, Pacific Standard Time
Blog: From the Editor

Editing source code in the cloud may be an idea whose time has come.

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Debbie Walsh HPC Horizons Community Member Spotlight: Don Paul
Post Date: February 12, 2009 @ 3:47 PM, Pacific Standard Time
Blog: HPC Matters

Congratulations are in order for a new member of the HPC Horizons Online Community! Donald L. Paul. PhD, former CTO of Chevron, has been named Executive Director of the University of Southern California Energy Institute (EI).

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Michael Feldman Intel Buys American
Post Date: February 10, 2009 @ 5:16 PM, Pacific Standard Time
Blog: From the Editor

In what looks like a one-company stimulus package, Intel announced that it is going to invest $7 billion in US-based chip manufacturing plants.

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Michael Feldman High-Tech Anxiety
Post Date: February 05, 2009 @ 7:16 PM, Pacific Standard Time
Blog: From the Editor

In case you hadn't noticed, the global economic collapse is causing more churning in the tech workforce than we've seen since the dot-com bust.

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Michael Feldman Recession Takes a Bite Out of Supercomputing
Post Date: January 29, 2009 @ 4:51 PM, Pacific Standard Time
Blog: From the Editor

According to new reports released this month from analyst firms IDC and Tabor Research, HPC server revenue contracted in 2008, and 2009 doesn't look any better.

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Michael Feldman AMD Flexes Its Quads
Post Date: January 27, 2009 @ 3:46 PM, Pacific Standard Time
Blog: From the Editor

As promised, AMD has added a raft of new 45nm quad-core "Shanghai" Opterons to its product line. The new chips include five energy-sipping HE processors, with speeds ranging from 2.1 to 2.3 GHz, and which draw just 55 watts.

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Michael Feldman Economy Batters Tech Companies
Post Date: January 22, 2009 @ 5:24 PM, Pacific Standard Time
Blog: From the Editor

While much of the U.S. was experiencing presidential inauguration euphoria this week, most of the economic news was dismal. In particular, a lot of the big tech companies were announcing bleak quarterly financial results amid plans to scale back their operations.

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Addison Snell No Really, It's Good Kool-Aid
Post Date: January 15, 2009 @ 6:19 PM, Pacific Standard Time
Blog: HPC Matters

I loved Kool-Aid when I was a kid. Not only were the commercials fantastic -- admit it, if you were a kid in the 1970s, at some point you crashed through a homemade barrier singing "Oh yeah!"

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Michael Feldman Changing the Game
Post Date: January 15, 2009 @ 5:24 PM, Pacific Standard Time
Blog: From the Editor

If AMD's new "Fusion Render Cloud" supercomputer is going to be doing all the heavy lifting for games and HD rendering in the server, why do you need GPUs in the client?

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Michael Feldman AMD Expands Fusion Strategy with Petaflop Supercomputer
Post Date: January 13, 2009 @ 4:38 PM, Pacific Standard Time
Blog: From the Editor

Back in June 2008, I suggested Sun Microsystems could accelerate its Network.com compute grid with GPU-based nodes. Sun never did, but it looks like AMD is going to give this idea a whirl.

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Michael Feldman Will Multicore Kill the x86?
Post Date: January 08, 2009 @ 4:49 PM, Pacific Standard Time
Blog: From the Editor

The hardware and software challenges of multicore/manycore CPUs have been flogged in this publication for a number of years. The assumption was that geek ingenuity would eventually power through the roadblocks. But what if that doesn't happen?

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Michael Feldman New Year's Foreboding
Post Date: January 07, 2009 @ 11:22 AM, Pacific Standard Time
Blog: From the Editor

As is usual for the supercomputing world in early January, news is hard to come by. With so many academics in the community, a lot of HPC practitioners are still on their extended winter breaks. As for commercial HPC companies, they may not be so eager to return to work to confront the new economic realities they'll be facing in 2009.

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