The Week in Review

Dec 16, 2010 | A European group forms to support Lustre as an open source file system; and IBM announces that its "Watson" supercomputer will be a contestant on the Jeopardy! quiz show. We recap those stories and more in our weekly wrapup.
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Europeans Build Up Stable of Elite Supercomputers

Dec 15, 2010 | This week, the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE) announced its third petascale supercomputer for the organization's Tier 0 research infrastructure. The upcoming machine, known as SuperMUC, will be built by IBM and is estimated to deliver 3 peak petaflops when it is deployed in 2012 at the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ) in Garching, Germany.
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Mathematica 8 Gets Performance Boost, Integration with Wolfram Alpha

Dec 14, 2010 | The eighth version of Mathematica was released last month, the latest in Wolfram Research's 22-year-old computational software platform. Although the tool is a relative newcomer to the high performance computing world, a raft of new capabilities have been added over the last several years that are aimed directly at the performance crowd. Mathematica 8 builds on those capabilities and adds some new ones that make it a serious contender for HPC applications.
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The Week in Review

Dec 09, 2010 | UK supercomputing agency seeks out US partners for collaboration on high-end software; and TACC selects Bright Cluster Manager for its FutureGrid cluster. We recap those stories and more in our weekly wrapup.
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Terascale Memory Challenges and Solutions

Dec 06, 2010 | In contrast to the previous decade, CPU clock rates are scaling slower over time due to the power constraints. However, the number of transistors per silicon area continue to increase roughly at the rate of Moore's Law. Therefore, CPUs are being designed and built with an increasing number of cores, with each core executing one or more threads of instructions. This puts a new kind of pressure on the memory subsystem.
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The Week in Review

Dec 02, 2010 | U.S. Department of Energy reveals 2010 INCITE award recipients; and IBM gets closer to exascale with latest advance in on-chip optical communications. We recap those stories and more in our weekly wrapup.
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Intel Charts Its Multicore and Manycore Future for HPC

Dec 01, 2010 | As the high performance computing community hurtles toward the exaflop milestone, it has become clear that the natural evolution of multicore x86 CPUs won't get the industry very far toward that goal. Manycore GPGPUs, on the other hand, do appear to be a viable path to exascale computing. So where does that leave GPU-less Intel?
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Mellanox to Buy Voltaire

Nov 29, 2010 | Voltaire shareholders got an early Christmas present this week. Mellanox Technologies has entered a definite agreement to acquire Voltaire Ltd. for a cash value of $8.75 per share, equivalent to approximately $218 million. The deal would represent the first major consolidation of InfiniBand vendors.
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The Week in Review

Nov 24, 2010 | Argonne Lab announces debut of Exascale Technology and Computing Institute; and NCSA selects IBM's GPFS file system for facility-wide deployment. We recap those stories and more in our weekly wrapup.
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HPC Movers and Shakers: Michael Jackson, Adaptive Computing

Nov 22, 2010 | After hearing about the recent funding success achieved by Adaptive Computing and Moab, contributing editor Caroline Connor talks with company president Michael A. Jackson. What resonated with Connor following their discussion was Jackson's belief in core values and in making contributions to the community -- which he defines as true success.
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The Expanding Floating-Point Performance Gap Between FPGAs and Microprocessors

Nov 22, 2010 | For the past several years, Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) have been getting large enough to compete with microprocessors in floating-point performance. Using the theoretical peak performance numbers, the FPGA's floating-point performance is growing faster than microprocessors. This article calculates the peak performance for several FPGA devices from Xilinx and compares them to a reference microprocessor for equivalent time periods and shows that this gap in performance is growing.
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Swiss Researchers Propose 'GreenIT' Methodology for HPC

Nov 19, 2010 | The latest Green500 list announced this week at SC10 is once again shining the spotlight on the energy efficiency of the world's top supercomputers. But the path to more efficient high performance computing goes beyond this simple benchmark-based approach. Ralf Gruber and Vincent Keller, both from École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), describe a holistic approach to more energy-efficient HPC operations in their book, HPC@GreenIT. HPCwire contributor Steve Conway interviewed the Swiss duo about their ideas, including a new benchmark.
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The Greening of HPC -- A Conversation with Professor Wu Feng

Nov 18, 2010 | The increased awareness in the HPC community of the need to maximize energy efficiency in compute-intensive environments has never been greater. With The Green500 results coming out this week, HPCwire's Caroline Connor turned to Professor Wu Feng from Virginia Tech, the man largely credited with the movement towards environmentally-sustainable supercomputing.
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Is 10 Gigabit Ethernet Ready for HPC?

Nov 18, 2010 | Despite the still-modest showing of 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE) technology in high performance computing deployments, vendors at SC10 were showcasing a wide array of performance-laden Ethernet products. IT Brand Pulse Labs analyst Tim Dales takes a look at the prospects for 10GbE in high performance computing, the migration pattern from GbE to 10GbE, and some application areas that seem especially suitable for the technology.
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Python Snakes Its Way Into HPC

Nov 17, 2010 | Interpreted programming languages usually don't find too many friends in high performance computing. Yet Python, one of the most popular general-purpose interpreted languages, has garnered a small community of enthusiastic followers. True believers got the opportunity to hear about the language in the HPC realm in a tutorial session on Monday and a BoF session on Wednesday. Argonne National Lab's William Scullin, who participated in both events, talked with HPCwire about the status of Python in this space and what developers might look forward to.
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A Call to Arms for Parallel Programming Standards

Nov 16, 2010 | Although the parallel programming landscape is relatively young, it's already easy to get lost in. Beside legacy frameworks like MPI and OpenMP, we now have NVIDIA's CUDA, OpenCL, Cilk, Intel Threading Building Blocks, Microsoft's parallel programming extensions for .NET, and a whole gamut of PGAS languages. And according to Intel's Tim Mattson, that's not necessarily a good thing.
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The Not-So-Unlikely Marriage of CUDA and x86

Nov 16, 2010 | NVIDIA's CUDA is easily the most popular programming language for general-purpose GPU computing. But one of the more interesting developments in the CUDA-verse doesn't really involve GPUs at all. In September, HPC compiler vendor PGI (The Portland Group Inc.) announced its intent to build a CUDA compiler for x86 platforms. The technology will be demonstrated for the first time in public at SC10 this week in New Orleans.
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Graph 500 Takes Aim at a New Kind of HPC

Nov 15, 2010 | Data-intensive applications are quickly emerging as a significant new class of HPC workloads. For this class of applications, a new kind of supercomputer, and a different way to assess them, will be required. That is the impetus behind the Graph 500, a set of benchmarks that aim to measure the suitability of systems for data-intensive analytics applications.
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SGI Gets Its Mojo Working for Supercomputing Conference

Nov 15, 2010 | SGI has made good on its promise to create a petaflop-in-a-cabinet supercomputer that can scale up to tens and even hundreds of cabinets. Developed under the code name "Project Mojo," the company has dubbed the new product Prism XL. SGI will be showcasing the system this week in their exhibit booth at the Supercomputing Conference in New Orleans.
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The Business of Disruptive Innovation

Nov 14, 2010 | Like every technology-based sector, high performance computing takes its biggest leaps by the force of disruptive innovation, a term coined by the man who will keynote this year's Supercomputing Conference (SC10) in New Orleans. Clayton M. Christensen doesn't know a whole lot about supercomputing, but he knows a great deal about the forces that drive it.
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The Week in Review

Nov 11, 2010 | European supercomputer Tera 100 gets to petaflop; Barcelona Supercomputing Center and IRB Barcelona announce the largest video database of proteins; and SGI, Cray and NVIDIA all release financials. We recap those stories and more in our weekly wrapup.
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Panasas Takes Parallel Storage to the Next Level

Nov 10, 2010 | In the midst of a management and business strategy revamp, Panasas is launching PAS 12, its newest parallel storage system. PAS, which stands for Panasas ActiveStor, is the company's flagship NAS storage line meant to serve HPC and similar performance-critical enterprise applications. PAS 12 is the fourth generation of the product, and is being touted as "the world's fastest parallel storage system."
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Convey Debuts Second-Generation Hybrid-Core Platform

Nov 09, 2010 | In an HPC market that seems determined to go down the CPU-GPU path, upstart Convey Computer may yet offer a few surprises. The company today unveiled the sequel to its HC-1 platform it introduced in 2008. Called the HC-1ex, the new system adds a lot more performance and capability, but retains the original x86-FPGA co-processor design.
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AMAX Unveils Its Densest GPU-Accelerated System

Nov 08, 2010 | There seems to be no end to the roll-out of GPGPU-accelerated server offerings this year. The latest comes from server maker AMAX, which has introduced what it says is the densest GPU computing system on the market. The ServMax AS-5160G is a 16-GPU, 4-CPU system that delivers more than 8 teraflops of high performance computing in a mere 5U of rack space.
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Should I Buy GPGPUs or Blue Gene?

Nov 04, 2010 | Given the recent ascent of the GPU-powered Tianhe-1A system to the top of the supercomputing heap, a current paper from Department of Computer Science at the University of Warwick should be of particular interest to those in the market for a petascale supercomputer. Essentially their study asks the question: As an organization, should I commit to a platform based on general-purpose GPUs or an IBM Blue Gene?
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