Airbus Buys Into HPC-as-a-Service

Oct 18, 2011 | High performance computing is getting cheaper every year. But that doesn't remove the burden of buying these systems on a regular basis when your organization demands ever-increasing computing power to stay competitive. That's the dilemma a lot of commercial HPC users find themselves in as they wonder how often they should upgrade their HPC machinery. At least one company, Airbus, determined buying HPC systems wasn't such a great deal after all.
Read more...

Appro Corrals Another Win at Los Alamos with Mustang Super

Oct 12, 2011 | Appro is doing a brisk business over at the Department of Energy. After winning the DOE's second Tri-Lab Linux Capacity Cluster contact back in June, Appro has been tapped once again to provide Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) with yet another high performance computing cluster. The new Mustang supercomputer, installed there last month, will give the lab another 353 teraflops of number crunching capacity.
Read more...

IBM Makes Bet on Distributed Computing with Platform Buy

Oct 12, 2011 | Platform Computing will soon be under new management. IBM announced on Tuesday that it intends to buy the Toronto-based company and fold it into its Systems and Technology Group. If all goes according to plan, the deal will close in Q4, ending Platform's 19-year reign as an independent, privately held company.
Read more...

GPUs Will Morph ORNL's Jaguar Into 20-Petaflop Titan

Oct 11, 2011 | Jaguar's days as a CPU-only supercomputer are numbered. Over the next year, the 2.3 petaflop machine at the Oak Ridge National Lab will be upgraded by Cray with the new NVIDIA "Kepler" GPUs, producing a system with about 10 times Jaguar's peak performance. The transformed supercomputer will be renamed Titan and should deliver in the neighborhood of 20 peak petaflops sometime in late 2012.
Read more...

Convey Bends to Inflection Point

Oct 07, 2011 | Convey recently noted that HPC is “no longer just numerically intensive, it’s now data-intensive—with more and different demands on HPC system architectures.” They claim that the “whole new HPC” that is gathered under the banner of data-intensive computing possesses a number of unique characteristics and see unique opportunities for all the of the data, and new memory and co-processor architectures.
Read more...

IEEE Conference Keynoters Lay Out Path to Exascale Computing

Oct 05, 2011 | The challenges of exascale computing were the main focus of the three keynote addresses at the IEEE Cluster 2011 conference hosted in Austin, Texas last month. The speakers, renowned leaders in cluster computing, described the obstacles and opportunities involved in building systems one thousand times more powerful than today’s petascale supercomputers.
Read more...

Adapteva Builds Manycore Processor That Will Deliver 70 Gigaflops/Watt

Oct 03, 2011 | In May, chip startup Adapteva debuted Epiphany, a manycore architecture designed to maximize floating point horsepower with the lowest possible energy footprint. The initial silicon was a 16-core processor, implemented on the 65nm process node. This week, the company announced it has taped out a 64-core version of the design on the 28nm process node, delivering 100 gigaflops of performance at under 2 watts of power.
Read more...

NetApp Gets First Petascale Supercomputer Win

Sep 28, 2011 | NetApp flexed its newly acquired supercomputing muscles this week when it announced it would be supplying one of the largest Lustre storage system in the world for the Sequoia supercomputer to be installed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory next year. NetApp's E-Series storage, which they inherited when the company purchased LSI's Engenio business, will be used to provide 55 petabytes of disk arrays for the 20-petaflop Sequoia machine.
Read more...

Violin Memory Zeros In On Primary Storage Tier with New Flash Offerings

Sep 27, 2011 | The assault on hard disk storage seems to be building with each new flash memory offering. This week, Violin Memory launched a new solid state memory line aimed to replace primary storage in the datacenter. The Violin 6000 Series flash Memory Arrays is designed as an all-silicon storage solution for data-intensive enterprise applications, and is intended to compete against disk-based solutions in cost, both upfront and operationally.
Read more...

On Wall Street, The Race to Zero Continues

Sep 27, 2011 | To address today's need for speedier transaction processing and to handle the associated surge in message traffic, financial services firms are examining every aspect of their infrastructures to squeeze any delays out of their end-to-end computational workflows. This quest to lower latencies in each step of processing trades, and to perform other chores, was a common theme at the High Performance Computing Financial Markets Conference held in New York, last week.
Read more...

Q&A: Jack Wells, Director of Science for the National Center for Computational Sciences

Sep 26, 2011 | On July 1 Jack Wells became the director of science for the National Center for Computational Sciences (NCCS) at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). In this interview he describes his vision for NCCS, some of the cutting-edge applications the center will support, and how the facility will gear up to deliver Titan, a hybrid supercomputer expected to have a peak performance of 10 to 20 petaflops, by early 2013.
Read more...

Dell to Build 10-Petaflop Supercomputer For Science

Sep 22, 2011 | The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) has revealed plans to deploy a cutting-edge petascale supercomputer courtesy of a $27.5 million dollar NSF award. Built by Dell, the system will consist of 2 petaflops of Sandy Bridge-EP processors accelerated by an additional 8 petaflops of Intel's Many Integrated Core (MIC) coprocessors. The machine is scheduled to boot up in late 2012 and be ready for production in January 2013.
Read more...

DDN Revs Up Storage Fusion Offering, Fills Out Exec Team

Sep 21, 2011 | DataDirect Networks (DDN) has announced the sequel to its original SFA10000 product. The SFA10K-X unveiled on Tuesday is the company's first major upgrade to its Storage Fusion Architecture product line originally launched in June 2009.
Read more...

ScaleMP Brings AMD Opteron Support to Its Virtual SMP Portfolio

Sep 20, 2011 | After five years of shipping Intel Xeon-supported products for its virtual SMP platform, ScaleMP has added support for AMD's Opteron CPU. Starting in this fall, customers will be able to aggregate as many as 128 servers encompassing up to 512 Opteron processors and 64 TB of memory into a single shared memory system.
Read more...

HPC Bests Physicians in Matching Heart Transplant Donors and Recipients

Sep 13, 2011 | Health care analytics is an emerging application area that promises to help cut costs and provide better patient outcomes. To reach that goal though requires sophisticated software that can mimic some of the intelligence of real live physicians. In Sweden, researchers are attempting to do just that by building a model of heart-transplant recipients and donors to improve survival times.
Read more...

Nautilus Harnessed for Humanities Research, Future Prediction

Sep 09, 2011 | The power of the large shared memory machine, Nautilus has been captured to aid in a research endeavor that uses deep analytics to develop connections between the tone and location of news and the course of future events. We talked to the project's lead, Kalev H. Leetaru about big data analytics at the global scale--and how shared memory systems enable new possibilities for researchers.
Read more...

IDC Makes the HPC, Big Data Connection

Sep 12, 2011 | In a recent whitepaper on SGI’s role in the coming wave of data-intensive computing requirements , IDC’s high performance computing (HPC) guru, Steve Conway, presented an overview of how the HPC and “big data” markets are merging in terms of hardware challenges.
Read more...

An Open Source Platform for Virtual Supercomputing

Sep 06, 2011 | Erlang Solutions and Massive Solutions will soon launch a new cloud platform for high performance computing. Last month they announced their intent to bring a virtual supercomputer (VSC) product to market, the idea being to enable customers to share their HPC resources either externally or internally, in a cloud-like manner, all under the banner of open source software.
Read more...

HPC Startup Backs into Cloud

Aug 29, 2011 | One high performance computing vendor with cloudy ambitions found a unique path to building purpose-built HPC hardware--and an unexpected business model along the way. We spoke with the company's co-founders to learn more about what's missing from high performance clouds--and what possibilities await in the next era of cloud and technical computing.
Read more...

Exascale: Power Is Not the Problem!

Aug 29, 2011 | To build exascale systems, power is probably the biggest technical hurdle on the hardware side. In terms of getting to exascale computing, demonstrating the value of supercomputing to funders and the public is a more urgent challenge. But the top roadblock for realizing the potential benefits from exascale is software.
Read more...

Texas Memory Systems Enters Primary Storage Game with eMLC Flash Offering

Aug 23, 2011 | Storage maker Texas Memory Systems has launched the RamSan-810, its first enterprise multi-level cell (eMLC) flash-based product, expanding the company's market reach into the tier 1 storage arena. The move comes as more solid state disk (SSD) vendors are using the technology to challenge disk-based systems on performance-demanding applications.
Read more...

IBM Specs Out Blue Gene/Q Chip

Aug 22, 2011 | At the Hot Chips conference in Santa Clara last week, IBM lifted the curtain on its Blue Gene/Q SoC, which will soon power some of the highest performing supercomputers in the world. Next year, two DOE labs are slated to boot up the most powerful Blue Gene systems ever deployed: the 10-petaflop "Mira" system at Argonne National Lab, and the 20-petaflop "Sequoia" super at Lawrence Livermore. Both will employ the latest Blue Gene/Q processor described at the conference.
Read more...

Taking a Disruptive Approach to Exascale

Aug 18, 2011 | A recent DOE workshop that focused on exascale challenges and current gaps in research and ideology provided food for thought for those seeking a "disruptive" approach to this next level of computing. We highlight a handful of the presentations, delivered by some of the most noteworthy researchers and practitioners in the field.
Read more...

SGI Folds In CFD Business

Aug 16, 2011 | If you are a user of computational fluid dynamics and thought the CFD world begins with ANSYS Fluent and ends with CEI EnSight, that could soon change. SGI has acquired OpenCFD Ltd, a UK-based company that offers an open source CFD package with the name of OpenFOAM. The idea is to bring CFD software to a much wider audience while generating extra revenue with value-added products and services.
Read more...

Adventures with HPC Accelerators: GPUs and Intel MIC Coprocessors

Aug 15, 2011 | For the past few years, the buzz around hardware accelerators, particularly graphics processing units (GPUs), has been growing. Designed with a massive number of floating point units and very high memory bandwidth so as to accelerate certain computing processes, GPUs and other emerging accelerates are being embraced by the scientific computing world as a way to speed up simulation, modeling, visualization, and data analysis.
Read more...