November 04, 2010
Here is a collection of highlights from this week's news stream as reported by HPCwire.
SDSC Part of DARPA Program to Deliver Extreme Scale Supercomputer
NASA to Demo 40/100-Gigabit Networking at SC10
Large Hadron Collider Pauses Protons, Looks Ahead to Lead
QLogic, Platform Computing Integrate Management Software
SGI Unveils Performance and Managment Software Suites
University of Texas at Austin Breaks Ground on Gates Computer Science Complex and Dell Hall
Altair Unveils PBS Professional 11.0
SCinet Research Sandbox to Demonstrate Unprecedented HPC Industry Collaboration
Supercomputer Models Yield Sneak Previews of NASA's Webb Space Telescope
EU Launches Project to Develop Technologies for Heterogeneous Platforms
'Big Data' Supercomputing Analytics Becomes Focus for New Company
Mechdyne CAVE To Be Featured on Discovery Science Channel
Swedish Bank Deploys Middleware from Platform Computing
HPC Advisory Council Reaches Publication of over 50 Best Practices and Guidelines
IBM Awards Powerful Computing System to University of Lugano
Johns Hopkins Builds Data Mining Super Machine
While most supercomputing designs nowadays are focused on achieving a maximum number of FLOPS (floating point operations per second), researchers at Johns Hopkins University are designing a scientific instrument that will enable a maximum number of IOPS (I/O operations per second). This novel architecture will be better suited to analyzing the enormous amounts of data that today's science generates.
Dubbed the Data-Scope, the machine is currently being developed by a group led by computer scientist and astrophysicist Alexander Szalay of Johns Hopkins' Institute for Data Intensive Engineering and Science. The National Science Foundation is providing funding in the form of a $2.1 million grant and Johns Hopkins is contributing nearly $1 million to the project.
According to Szalay:
"Computer science has drastically changed the way we do science and the science that we do, and the Data-Scope is a crucial step in this process. At this moment, the huge data sets are here, but we lack an integrated software and hardware infrastructure to analyze them. Data-Scope will bridge that gap."
Data-Scope's design will include a combination of hard disk drives, solid state disks, and GPU computing, enabling it to handle five petabytes of data, with a sequential I/O bandwidth close to 500 gigabytes per second, and a peak performance of 600 teraflops. The machine will be adept at data mining, able to discern relationships and patterns in data leading to discoveries that would otherwise not be possible.
There is already a backlog of data just waiting to be analyzed -- three petabytes worth from about 20 interested research groups within Johns Hopkins. Szalay explains that without Data-Scope, the researchers would have to wait years in order to analyze the data already in existence, never mind the data that will keep accumulating in the meantime.
Data-Scope is expected to being operation in May 2011 and will handle a range of subject matter, including genomics, ocean circulation, turbulence, astrophysics, environmental science, and public health.
Szalay underscores the importance of the project:
"There really is nothing like this at any university right now. Such systems usually take many years to build up, but we are doing it much more quickly. It's similar to what Google is doing -- of course on a thousand-times-larger scale than we are. This instrument will be the best in the academic world, bar none."
Appro Outfits LLNL with Visualization Cluster
This week Appro launched its Appro HyperPower Clusters, providing Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) Computing Center with a new visualization cluster called "Edge." The cluster is based on the Appro CPU/GPU GreenBlade System and is designed to support I/O bound applications, such as advanced data analysis and visualization tasks. It will also be used for LLNL's exascale software development computing projects.
The system's six racks house a total of 216 CPU nodes sporting Six-Core Intel Xeon processors and 208 NVIDIA Tesla GPUs nodes, delivering 29 teraflops of computing power. The system's 20 terabytes of memory provide the increased level of I/O bandwidth needed for data analysis and complex visualization projects. QDR InfiniBand fabric connects the compute and graphic nodes.
According to Trent D'Hooge, a cluster integration lead at LLNL, Edge is the first data analysis cluster that has GPUs with ECC support and increased double-precision floating point performance.
Becky Springmeyer, computational systems and software environment lead of the Advanced Simulation and Computing program at LLNL, explains that "post-processing tasks are heavily I/O bound, so specialized visualization servers that optimize I/O rather than CPU speed are better suited for this work, which will be now enabled through the 'Edge' cluster."
May 16, 2013 |
When it comes to cloud, long distances mean unacceptably high latencies. Researchers from the University of Bonn in Germany examined those latency issues of doing CFD modeling in the cloud by utilizing a common CFD and its utilization in HPC instance types including both CPU and GPU cores of Amazon EC2.
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May 15, 2013 |
Supercomputers at the Department of Energy’s National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) have worked on important computational problems such as collapse of the atomic state, the optimization of chemical catalysts, and now modeling popping bubbles.
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May 10, 2013 |
Program provides cash awards up to $10,000 for the best open-source end-user applications deployed on 100G network.
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May 09, 2013 |
The Japanese government has revealed its plans to best its previous K Computer efforts with what they hope will be the first exascale system...
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May 08, 2013 |
For engineers looking to leverage high-performance computing, the accessibility of a cloud-based approach is a powerful draw, but there are costs that may not be readily apparent.
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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.
In this demonstration of SGI DMF ZeroWatt disk solution, Dr. Eng Lim Goh, SGI CTO, discusses a function of SGI DMF software to reduce costs and power consumption in an exascale (Big Data) storage datacenter.
The Cray CS300-AC cluster supercomputer offers energy efficient, air-cooled design based on modular, industry-standard platforms featuring the latest processor and network technologies and a wide range of datacenter cooling requirements.