Intel, AMD Gear Up for 2011 Server Chip Battle

Sep 16, 2010 | Although 2010 still has a few months left to go, the competition in the x86 server processor arena for 2011 is already setting up to be a knock-down, drag-out fight. Both AMD and Intel are introducing new high-end server chips with revamped microarchitectures next year, and, at the same time, upping the core counts over their previous generation products.
Read more...

Swift Before, Swifter Now: HPC Accelerates SMB's Business

Sep 13, 2010 | Council on Competitiveness studies have demonstrated that small and medium-size businesses (SMBs) face major hurdles moving to HPC. Auto/aero supplier Swift Engineering proves how worthwhile the journey can be. HPCwire talked with Swift chief scientist Mark Page about the transition and its benefits.
Read more...

Say Hello to the New ADIOS

Sep 12, 2010 | Last week marked the release of ADIOS 1.2, the latest incarnation of one of computational science’s most effective I/O tools. So far ADIOS has helped researchers make huge strides in fusion, astrophysics and combustion. The new version features some interesting improvements that will doubtless aid researchers in taking full advantage of leading supercomputing platforms.
Read more...

Dell Revs Up HPC Strategy with New Products and Market Focus

Sep 09, 2010 | In the HPC market, Dell has established itself as the number three system vendor, trailing only its larger competitors, HP and IBM. Known for offering no-frills performance servers at reasonable prices, Dell has garnered a particularly strong following in higher education and government labs, especially for small and mid-sized clusters. But a recent spate of purpose-built HPC products from the company point to a subtle shift in Dell's high performance computing strategy.
Read more...

The Week in Review

Sep 09, 2010 | IBM's World Community Grid donates computer time to clean water projects; China's Tianhe-1 supercomputer is installed and running at the National Supercomputing Center in Tianjin; and Myricom announces new leadership. We recap those stories and more in our weekly wrapup.
Read more...

SDSC Puts Data at Center Stage

Sep 07, 2010 | The naming of Michael Norman as director of the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) last week was long overdue. SDSC has been without an official director for more than 14 months, with Norman filling the spot as the interim head since last July. The appointment could mark something of a comeback for the center, which has not only gone director-less during this time, but has been operating without a high-end supercomputer as well.
Read more...

The Week in Review

Sep 02, 2010 | The National Science Foundation has awarded funding to four projects as part of the Future Internet Architecture program; and the 3PAR bidding war is won by HP. We recap those stories and more in our weekly wrapup.
Read more...

Intel Flexes Parallel Programming Muscles

Sep 02, 2010 | Intel Corp has released Parallel Studio 2011, a set of four tools designed to mainstream software development on multicore x86 architectures. The update folds in a number of parallel programming technologies that the company has acquired or developed independently over the past few years, including the Cilk Arts and RapidMind technologies, and Intel's own Ct data parallel language framework.
Read more...

Startup Makes Liquid Cooling an Immersive Experience

Aug 31, 2010 | There's nothing like a blazing hot summer to focus one's attention on the best ways to keep cool. That goes for datacenter operators as well, who are equally worried about keeping their servers properly chilled. While there is no shortage of innovative cooling solutions being proffered by various vendors, a new liquid immersion cooling solution from startup Green Revolution Cooling could end up being the best of them all.
Read more...

The Week in Review

Aug 26, 2010 | Researchers from TACC and MIT created lightweight supercomputing application for smart phone; and the tug of war over 3PAR continues, as Dell and HP both present counter-offers. We recap those stories and more in our weekly wrapup.
Read more...

AMD Blazes New Path with Bulldozer

Aug 24, 2010 | Advanced Micro Devices is hoping Bulldozer, the company's first x86 microarchitecture redesign in seven years, will bring back the glory days for the Opteron. AMD revealed additional details about the new architecture this week during the Hot Chips conference at Stanford University.
Read more...

High Frequency Trading in Japan on the Uptick

Aug 23, 2010 | High frequency trading (HFT), often called algorithmic or low latency trading, relies on fast computers and even faster networks to execute trades in sub-second and even sub-millisecond timeframes. It has generated massive profits for those firms skilled enough to handle the complexities of the software and hardware. As such, it has become the dominant method for equity trading in the US, but it's popularity is expanding worldwide, especially Asia. HPCwire got the opportunity to ask Chuck Chon, chief technology officer of SBI Japannext, about the HFT business in Japan.
Read more...

The Week in Review

Aug 19, 2010 | Purdue group invents energy management device that prevents need for costly datacenter shutdowns; and Dell announces its intention to purchase 3PAR for 1.15 billion. We recap those stories and more in our weekly wrapup.
Read more...

TeraGrid 2010 Conference Campus Champion Program

Aug 18, 2010 | Fifty-one Campus Champions attended TeraGrid's fifth annual conference in Pittsburgh, Pa., recently. Accounting for about 15 percent of attendees, the champions bring a wealth of experience to the program, including knowledge of TeraGrid systems and services, their local campus resources, and other cyberinfrastructures such as the Open Science Grid. This is our fifth and final in a series covering the TeraGrid conference.
Read more...

Startup Aims to Transform Computing with Probability Processing

Aug 16, 2010 | MIT spin-out Lyric Semiconductor Inc. has launched a new breed of integrated circuits that replaces the binary logic of traditional computing with probabilistic logic. The aim is to deliver a much more efficient architecture for applications based on probability computing. For these types of workloads, the company is promising orders-of-magnitude improvement in energy efficiency, performance and cost.
Read more...

TeraGrid 2010 Keynote: Attendees Peer into Blue Waters

Aug 16, 2010 | At this year's TeraGrid conference, Bob Wilhelmson, recently retired chief science officer of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) and former applications lead for the Blue Waters project, delivered a keynote address in which he discussed the Blue Waters architecture and shared several planned projects for the new supercomputer. This is our fourth in a series covering the TeraGrid conference.
Read more...

TeraGrid 2010 Keynote: The Essential Role Cyberinfrastructure Plays in the Geosciences

Aug 12, 2010 | Dr. Tim Killeen, representing the National Science Foundation, last week addressed the annual TeraGrid '10 conference in Pittsburgh, Pa. His keynote emphasized the urgent need for sustainable cyberinfrastructure in the geosciences and across all domains of science. This is our third in a series covering the TeraGrid conference.
Read more...

Students Get a Taste of Supercomputing at TeraGrid Conference

Aug 12, 2010 | It wasn't hard to spot the students who took part in the TeraGrid '10 conference in Pittsburgh, Pa., last week. All you had to do was look for the yellow shirts. More than 100 students took part in the event -- graduate students, undergrads, and high schoolers. This is our second in a series of articles covering the TeraGrid conference.
Read more...

The Week in Review

Aug 12, 2010 | COSMOS Consortium selects an SGI Altix UV supercomputer to support high-end workloads; and Verari rebrand announced. We recap those stories and more in our weekly wrapup.
Read more...

TeraGrid 2010 Keynote: The Physics of Black Holes with Cactus

Aug 11, 2010 | TeraGrid '10, the fourth annual conference of the TeraGrid, took place last week in Pittsburgh, Pa. HPCwire will be running a series of articles highlighting the conference. The first in the series covers Gabrielle Allen's keynote talk on Cactus, an open, collaborative software framework for numerical relativity.
Read more...

DARPA Sets Ubiquitous HPC Program in Motion

Aug 10, 2010 | The US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has selected four "performers" to develop prototype systems for its Ubiquitous High Performance Computing (UHPC) program. According to a press release issued on August 6, the organizations include Intel, NVIDIA, MIT, and Sandia National Lab. Georgia Tech was also tapped to head up an evaluation team for the systems under development.
Read more...

Scaling the New Bar for Latency in Financial Networks

Aug 09, 2010 | The bar for what qualifies as a fast connection or "low latency" networking has always been higher in finance than in other areas of corporate networking. It's never been quite this high, however.
Read more...

The Week in Review

Aug 05, 2010 | Cray's first XT6 customer revealed and Q2 earnings statement released; Grid-X comes out of hiding after several years of secrecy. We recap those stories and more in our weekly wrapup.
Read more...

Compilers and More: Knights Ferry Versus Fermi

Aug 05, 2010 | In May, Intel announced the Many Integrated Core (MIC) architecture, with a development kit codenamed Knights Ferry. NVIDIA has announced and started to deliver its next-generation architecture, Fermi. PGI's Michael Wolfe presents an in-depth comparison of the two designs.
Read more...

Revolution Analytics Lifts R Language into Terascale Computing

Aug 04, 2010 | R language booster Revolution Analytics is going after the predictive analytics crowd with its latest Revolution R Enterprise software platform. The company announced this week it will be introducing a package called RevoScaleR to bring the R language into the world of "Big Data," enabling analytics applications to turbo-charge their performance and scale terabyte-sized mountains of data.
Read more...