October 11, 2011
The site of an abandoned textile mill in the middle of an industrial area in Holyoke, Massachusetts is set to receive some modern investments on the part of the state, five universities and two major technology vendors, among others.
Boston University, Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Northeastern University and the University of Massachusetts have joined forces to boost access to computational resources for nearby researchers via the Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Center.
All of the universities are putting forth $10 million with the state of Massachusetts chipping in $25 million. Additional support comes from EMC and Cisco, who are putting $2.5 million each into the project.
The Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Center is drawing attention for the same reasons it attracted newcomers a century ago as they sought an ideal location for their textile mill. Plenty of water from the Connecticut River meant cheap power for the site’s first industrial inhabitants—and will mean cooling and energy for the new supercomputing center. This, in addition to the fact that the use of waste heat for greenhouse and building heat systems, are part of the “green” approach to supercomputing facilities.
According to a CBS news report:
“Holyoke's hydropower generated by the falls over Connecticut River's 57-foot drop is a strong attraction, say Goodhue and others involved in planning the computing center, which has a generator on site that draws water power from a canal more than 100 years old. Holyoke's water power accounts for about two-thirds of locally generated electricity.
The relatively cheap electricity is particularly important for the computing center, which is expected to be able to use at any time up to 15 megawatts, the equivalent of powering as many as 15,000 homes.”
When the 9-acre site opens, it will provide resources to power a range of academic research projects, including research in protein structure, fluid dynamics, atmospheric studies, sociological phenomena, and galactic evolution.
Full story at CBS News
In quieter times, sounding the bell of funding big science with big systems tends to resonate further than when ears are already burning with sour economic and national security news. For exascale's future, however, the time could be ripe to instill some sense of urgency....
Read more...
In a recent solicitation, the NSF laid out needs for furthering its scientific and engineering infrastructure with new tools to go beyond top performance, Having already delivered systems like Stampede and Blue Waters, they're turning an eye to solving data-intensive challenges. We spoke with the agency's Irene Qualters and Barry Schneider about..
Read more...
Large-scale, worldwide scientific initiatives rely on some cloud-based system to both coordinate efforts and manage computational efforts at peak times that cannot be contained within the combined in-house HPC resources. Last week at Google I/O, Brookhaven National Lab’s Sergey Panitkin discussed the role of the Google Compute Engine in providing computational support to ATLAS, a detector of high-energy particles at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
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.
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.