October 06, 2010
Research project launches stack to simplify parallel programming
BARCELONA, Oct. 5 -- It seems that these days everyone wants a "supercomputer" in their pocket. Consumers are demanding more performance and power from smaller and sleeker devices. However, even the latest gadgets have physical size limitations that will soon impede their ability to support consumer requirements, which could translate into a future rife with slower and clunkier devices. The performance wall represents a serious issue that vendors are addressing via the multicore processors that are now showing up in everyday devices from game consoles to cell phones. But, they haven't addressed the problem entirely. Writing software for these multicore processors, also known as parallel programming is difficult and requires specialized training and experience. Transactional Memory is a new technology that greatly simplifies parallel programming.
Since its launch in January 2008, the VELOX Project has focused on delivering the first integrated Transactional Memory Stack to serve as both proof-of-concept and a test-bed for this new technology.
Coordinated by the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, the VELOX Consortium gathers eight different partners that include top research organizations, University of Neuchâtel, the Technische Universität Dresden, Ecole Politechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Tel Aviv University, and Chalmers University of Technology as well as leading system integrators from the IT industry, AMD and RedHat. The VELOX Project Team consists of internationally recognized TM experts that have been working to solve the well-known TM research problems and to implement their solutions into a fully integrated VELOX Stack. The first release of this stack is now available for download at www.velox-project.eu/releases. The release offers the first complete Transactional Memory Stack complete with hardware simulators, OS, runtime, compilers (including the production gcc-tm), libraries and applications. While the current release focuses on C and Java compatibility, future releases will add C++ compatibility.
"This release provides a complete open source Transactional Memory Stack from applications through compiler and runtime to hardware for TM experts and regular programmers alike," says Osman Unsal of the Barcelona Supercomputing Center.
For further information, contact:
The Coordinator, Barcelona Supercomputing Center – Centro Nacional de Supercomputación: Osman Unsal and Gina Alioto at velox-coordinator@bsc.es.
-----
Source: Barcelona Supercomputing Center
Contributing commentator, Andrew Jones, offers a break in the news cycle with an assessment of what the national "size matters" contest means for the U.S. and other nations...
Read more...
Today at the International Supercomputing Conference in Leipzing, Germany, Jack Dongarra presented on a proposed benchmark that could carry a bit more weight than its older Linpack companion. The high performance conjugate gradient (HPCG) concept takes into account new architectures for new applications, while shedding the floating point....
Read more...
Not content to let the Tianhe-2 announcement ride alone, Intel rolled out a series of announcements around its Knights Corner and Xeon Phi products--all of which are aimed at adding some options and variety for a wider base of potential users across the HPC spectrum. Today at the International Supercomputing Conference, the company's Raj....
Read more...
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?
Join our webinar to learn how IT managers can migrate to a more resilient, flexible and scalable solution that grows with the data center. Mellanox VMS is future-proof, efficient and brings significant CAPEX and OPEX savings. The VMS is available today.