The Week in Review

Nov 04, 2010 | Johns Hopkins University researchers are developing a specialized machine for uncovering hidden patterns in data; and Appro HyperPower Cluster will support data analysis at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. We recap those stories and more in our weekly wrapup.
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Compilers and More: Hardware/Software Codesign

Nov 02, 2010 | There is a growing feeling that merely taking the latest processor offerings from Intel, AMD or IBM will not get us to exascale in a reasonable time frame, cost budget, and power constraint. One avenue to explore is designing and building more specialized systems, aimed at the types of problems seen in HPC, or at least at the problems seen in some important subset of HPC. Of course, such a strategy loses the advantages we've enjoyed over the past two decades of commoditization in HPC; however, a more special purpose design may be wise, or necessary.
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Duke University anticipates $100,000 or more per year in energy savings, while increasing processing power.

Nov 01, 2010 | Dell | Crunching large quantities of data is a crucial component of modern academic life. On university campuses, everyone from chemists and engineers to researchers in sociology, economics and even literature needs access to high-performance computing (HPC). At Duke University, the Duke Shared Cluster Resource (DSCR) supports these needs for professors across the spectrum.
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HPC Movers and Shakers: Thomas Sterling

Oct 29, 2010 | As we head into SC10, taking place in New Orleans, HPCwire presents an interview with Thomas Sterling, Professor of Computer Science at Louisiana State University. This highly respected man, the "father of Beowulf clusters," has a sharp wit and irrepressible sense of humor.
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The Week in Review

Oct 28, 2010 | Chinese Tianhe-1A supercomputer exploits GPU power to deliver 2.5 petaflops; and Cray nabs a $60 million contract with the University of Stuttgart. We recap those stories and more in our weekly wrapup.
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T-Platforms Places Bet on Switchless Supercomputing Interconnect

Oct 27, 2010 | Russian supercomputer maker T-Platforms is continuing its push into the elite end of the HPC market. On Monday, the company announced a joint venture with a group at the University of Heidelberg to develop a new ultra-fast interconnect for high-end supercomputing. The goal is to bring the technology to market in the form of an ASIC, which can be incorporated into a network interface controller for HPC servers.
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SC10 Champions HPC Education and Workforce Development

Oct 26, 2010 | There is a great need for workforce development to attract students into science, math and computing worldwide, at the same time that research shows that the number of students pursuing studies in these domains is declining and student performance needs to improve. The supercomputing community is not immune to these shortages.
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The Race to Indy: How HPC is Changing the Way a Leading Engineering Firm Designs and Builds the Next-Generation Race Car

Oct 25, 2010 | Cray, Inc. | Swift Engineering, Inc., a California-based designer and manufacturer of open-wheel race cars, developed key motorsports partnerships with industry-leading companies to further its bid to design and build the next generation of race car chassis for the 2010 IZOD IndyCar Series®. To reach its objectives, Swift Engineering cemented a key alliance with Cray Inc. (The Supercomputer Company) to set new standards in innovative design, manufacturing and support.
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Lustre Gets Backing of Non-Profit Corporation

Oct 21, 2010 | Some of the most prominent organizations in the HPC community have joined together to bootstrap a non-profit corporation devoted to scalable file system technologies. On Tuesday, Cray, Data Direct Networks, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Oak Ridge National Laboratory announced the incorporation of Open Scalable File Systems, Inc. The newly-hatched group has cast itself as the focal point for development of Lustre and other open source file system technologies aimed at high performance computing.
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The Week in Review

Oct 21, 2010 | Carnegie Mellon University researchers develop a powerful algorithm for solving systems of linear equations faster than ever before; and the University of Queensland deploys SGI half-rack server to advance a wide variety of technical computing applications. We recap those stories and more in our weekly wrapup.
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Movers and Shakers in HPC: John Gustafson

Oct 20, 2010 | I had the pleasure of working with John Gustafson when he was Chief Technology Officer for ClearSpeed in 2007. Sure, I had heard about John, known for his work in HPC, describing the notion of weak scaling (Gustafson's Law), introducing the first commercial computer cluster, winning the first Gordon Bell Award and all that. What surprised me was that there was so much more to John than the public persona.
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Seven Days of Speed

Oct 18, 2010 | For a week in November, New Orleans will be home to one of the most advanced networks in the world. SCinet forms the data backbone of the annual SC conference: it takes months to build and connects to the world's most advanced data networks, but it is only active for seven days each year before it is torn down and planning starts for next year.
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The Week in Review

Oct 14, 2010 | BLADE Network Technologies unveils a single-chip 40 Gigabit Ethernet switch capable of one terabit of throughput to the datacenter; and UC Riverside physicists make breakthroughs using graphene as a spin computing substrate. We recap those stories and more in our weekly wrapup.
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The Second Coming of TSUBAME

Oct 14, 2010 | When the TSUBAME 2.0 supercomputer is formally inaugurated in December, it will officially be declared the fastest supercomputer in Japan. However, it’s not simply speed that separates this machine; boasting a raw performance of 2.4 petaflops, the new TSUBAME exceeds the total FLOPS capacity of all other government and academic supercomputers in Japan today. That kind of computational brawn will make it the platform of choice for some of the most powerful scientific applications on the planet.
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Appro Slings Overclocked Server for High Frequency Traders

Oct 12, 2010 | HPC cluster maker Appro has unveiled the HF1 server, a purpose-built box aimed at the high frequency trading business. The new server incorporates overclocked Intel Xeon "Westmere" CPUs and a self-contained liquid cooling system to deliver the best dual-socket performance this side of a tricked-out gaming machine. Although the risky design isn't geared for mainstream HPC users, for high frequency traders, it may be just the kind of gamble they are comfortable with.
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Maximizing Supercomputing Resources

Oct 08, 2010 | Put a unique partnership between academia, government and commercial research organizations together with the latest advances in computing power with the affordable Cray XT5m supercomputer and computational challenges fall faster – and at lower cost – than ever before. That’s exactly what’s happening at the University of Stuttgart’s High Performance Computing Center.
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The Week in Review

Oct 07, 2010 | Massachusetts high-performance computing center breaks ground; and GENCI orders a petascale supercomputer from Bull as part of the PRACE infrastructure. We recap those stories and more in our weekly wrapup.
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HP Adds New HPC Server with On-Board GPGPU

Oct 05, 2010 | Hewlett Packard has launched a new purpose-built HPC rack server with a formidable GPGPU capability. That product, the ProLiant SL390s G7, provides more raw FLOPS per square inch than any server HP has delivered to date, and is the basis for the 2.4 petaflop TSUBAME 2.0 supercomputer currently being deployed at the Tokyo Institute of Technology.
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Rogue Wave Adds Acumem to Its HPC Stable

Oct 04, 2010 | Rogue Wave Software has acquired HPC toolmaker Acumen AB, a Swedish company that makes performance optimization tools for multithreaded applications. Acumem brought its first products to market in 2008, based on technology developed by Erik Hagersten and his research team at Uppsala University. Acumem's product set and engineering group will be retained, along with the company's office in Uppsala, Sweden.
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The Week in Review

Sep 30, 2010 | Fujitsu begins shipping next-generation, multi-petaflop Japanese supercomputer; and a trio of prestigious awards recognize outstanding contributions to the high-performance computing realm. We recap those stories and more in our weekly wrapup.
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Company Offers a New Way to Parallelize Applications

Sep 30, 2010 | Startups always begin with big ambitions and Massively Parallel Technologies is no exception. This week, the company unveiled "Blue Cheetah," which is described as a "total application ecosystem" that aims to revolutionize the traditional software development and distribution model, especially for highly parallel codes.
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Microsoft Aims for Client-Cluster-Cloud Unification in Technical Computing

Sep 27, 2010 | Last week's High Performance Computing Financial Markets conference in New York gave Microsoft an opening to announce the official release of Windows HPC Server 2008 R2, the software giant's third generation HPC server platform. It also provided Microsoft a venue to spell out its technical computing strategy in more detail, a process the company began in May.
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The Week in Review

Sep 23, 2010 | Microsoft announces lastest release of Windows HPC Server; Intersect360 Research and the National Center for Manufacturing Sciences release survey on digital manufacturing in the US; and an IBM study shows that 10 Gigabit Ethernet outperforms InfiniBand and Gigabit Ethernet.
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GPGPU Finds Its Groove in HPC

Sep 21, 2010 | The NVIDIA GPU Technology Conference (GTC) kicked off on Tuesday amid a flurry of news that suggests the GPGPU HPC business is quickly moving into the mainstream. After just four years since the introduction of commercial-grade GPU computing, the technology has become firmly established and is poised to spill out across every application domain that has a need for data-parallel computing.
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MATLAB Adds GPGPU Support

Sep 20, 2010 | MATLAB users with a taste for GPU computing now have a perfect reason to move up to the latest version. Release R2010b adds native GPGPU support that allows user to harness NVIDIA graphics processors for engineering and scientific computing. The new capability is provided within the Parallel Computing Toolbox and Distributed Computing Server.
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