Startup Aims to Transform HPC Programming

Aug 11, 2011 | Indiana-based MNB Technologies is a small company with big aspirations. The soon-to-be-public corporation is developing an expert-system based development suite designed to greatly simplify the programming of HPC accelerators, in particular FPGAs and GPU. To that end, the company recently announced the beta availability of its flagship product, hprcARCHITECT.
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NSF's Seidel: 'Software is the Modern Language of Science'

Aug 09, 2011 | Edward Seidel, the former director of the NSF's Office of Cyberinfrastructure, told attendees at TeraGrid ’11 that after more than four centuries of science being conducted at a painstakingly slow pace, today’s communications technologies and scientific advances are forcing a dramatic change -- and acceleration -- in all areas of science. At the heart of this change will be software.
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IBM Bails on Blue Waters Supercomputer

Aug 08, 2011 | IBM has pulled the plug on Blue Waters, the 10-petaflop supercomputer that was to be delivered to NCSA. According to a joint statement issued by IBM and NCSA over the weekend, the contract was officially terminated on August 6, citing "increased financial and technical support by IBM beyond its original expectations."
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INCITE Releases Greatest Hits Compilation

Aug 04, 2011 | The Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) has been providing a diverse array of researchers with the ability to run petascale simulations on some of the world's top systems. The group behind the effort released a report recently that highlighted some of the successes, offering a case for the power of simulation to advance science, industry and social goals like shifting to clean energy.
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Silicon Valley Symposium Heats Up Discussion of High Performance Interconnects

Aug 03, 2011 | IEEE's Hot Interconnects symposium that kicks off later this month should be a real treat for the HPC crowd. The event focuses exclusively on cutting-edge developments in the interconnect arena, everything from the latest commodity networking technologies to the K supercomputer's "Tofu" custom network. We asked the technical chairs of the event to share their perspectives on the commodity-proprietary interconnect dichotomy in high performance computing and in the industry at large.
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Nimbus Revs Up Flash Storage Offering

Aug 02, 2011 | Nimbus Data Systems has unveiled its second-generations flash storage system, promising three times the performance and expanded networking options The new S-Class systems will be offered at the same $10,000/TB price as the first-generation product, which was introduced last April. Since then the company has sold dozens of systems, including a 100 TB deployment at eBay.
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The State of the Lustre Community

Aug 01, 2011 | A year ago the Lustre community was stunned by Oracle's message at the 2010 Lustre User Group (LUG). Lustre was no longer a vendor neutral platform; you had to buy Sun/Oracle storage hardware to get future versions of the software. The community uproar was strong to the threat HPC's most popular file system going away.
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Microsoft Reshuffles HPC Organization, Azure Cloud Looms Large

Jul 27, 2011 | For the past few months, there have been rumors of a substantial reorganization in Microsoft's high performance computing group. Indeed this has happened. Ryan Waite, the general manager for High Performance Computing at Microsoft, talks about the new organization and how it reflects their vision of delivering HPC to its customers.
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QLogic Makes Case for Leaner, HPC-Centric InfiniBand

Jul 26, 2011 | It was a bit of a surprise when QLogic beat out Mellanox as the interconnect vendor on the NNSA's Tri-Lab Linux Capacity Cluster 2 contract. Not only was Mellanox the incumbent on the original Tri-Lab contract, but it is widely considered to have the more complete solution set for InfiniBand. Nevertheless, QLogic managed to win the day, and did so with somewhat unconventional technologies.
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UCLA Selects Modular Home for Shared HPC

Jul 25, 2011 | UCLA has added itself to list of institutions moving "outside the box" of brick and mortar solutions. The university recently selected HP's POD containerized datacenter to meet the needs of an expanding research base for its shared HPC cluster program.
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As Supercomputers Approach Exascale, Experts Wrestle with Big Data

Jul 21, 2011 | The current generation of petascale supercomputers are generating enormous quantities of data, and creating unprecedented challenges in managing it. The next generation of multi-petaflop, and eventually exaflop supercomputers, will take these challenges to the next level. Galen Shipman, who heads the Technology Integration group at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF) talks about the data management technologies being employed at OLCF today and what will be needed to support their future exascale machines.
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Intel Takes Aim at Switch Chip Business with Fulcrum Deal

Jul 20, 2011 | Intel has signed a definitive agreement to acquire switch silicon maker Fulcrum Microsystems. The deal adds Ethernet switch chips to Intel's growing portfolio of networking products. The agreement, whose terms remain under wraps, was announced on Tuesday.
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Sounding the Bullhorn for Europe's Tech Future

Jul 19, 2011 | During the International Supercomputing Conference, Bull's Matthew Foxton sounded an alarm bell for the European supercomputing community with his statement that all the R&D will not prove useful to Europe's future without a solid investment in the "D"--not just the "R".
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Software Carpentry Revisited

Jul 18, 2011 | Software engineering is still something that gets too little attention from the technical computing community, much to the detriment of the scientists and engineers writing the applications. Greg Wilson has been on a mission to remedy that, mainly through his efforts at Software Carpentry, where he is the project lead. HPCwire asked Wilson about the progress he's seen over the last several years and what remains to be done.
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JP Morgan Buys Into FPGA Supercomputing

Jul 13, 2011 | One of the largest financial institutions in the world is using FPGA-based supercomputing for analyzing some of its largest and most complex credit derivative portfolios. JP Morgan, along with Maxeler Technologies, has built and deployed a state-of-the art HPC system capable of number-crunching the company's collateralized debt obligation (CDO) portfolio in near real-time.
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The Next Step in Human Brain Simulation

Jul 11, 2011 | Can the human brain devise a system capable of understanding itself? That's been something brain simulation researchers have been working toward for nearly a decade. With recent advances in supercomputing capabilities and modeling techniques, the question may soon be answered.
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HPC Center Traces Storage Selection Experience

Jul 08, 2011 | We often hear about national labs and universities settling on a particular vendor for server and storage solutions, but details about the full evaluation process behind that selection are often sparse. The Utah Center for High Performance Computing's storage lead explains how his team whittled down the list -- and evaluated options against a tricky application.
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Biotech Company Forges Path to High Performance Healthcare

Jul 06, 2011 | GNS Healthcare is one of those companies that couldn't have existed in the 20th century. It promotes itself as "a healthcare IT company that applies technology to optimize patient treatment." As such, GNS is at the forefront of a new era of drug development and delivery that is moving personalized medicine from theory into practice.
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SGI Revamps Altix ICE Design

Jul 05, 2011 | For the past five years, SGI's Altix ICE platform has been the company's bread and butter HPC cluster offering. That trend looks to continue as they gear up for their fifth generation design. But this iteration of Altix ICE, codenamed "Carlsbad 3," is more than just a processor and InfiniBand refresh.
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Moore's Law Meets Exascale Computing

Jun 29, 2011 | Moore's Law is projected to come to an end sometime around the middle of the next decade -- a timeframe that coincides with the epoch of exascale computing. A white paper by Marc Snir, Bill Gropp and Peter Kogge discusses what we should be doing now to prepare high performance computing for the post-Moore's Law era.
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Why Lustre Is Set to Excel in Exascale

Jun 27, 2011 | Exascale computing will bring new challenges to supercomputing, not the least of which is the need for file systems to handle greatly increased I/O loads. To satisfy these I/O demands, should the HPC community start from scratch or build out from current file system technologies? Evolutionary or revolutionary is the key question.
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Startup Brings HPC to Big Data Analytics

Jun 16, 2011 | For all the accolades one hears about German engineering, there are few IT vendors native to that country. Recently though, we got the opportunity to talk with one such company, ParStream, a Cologne-based startup that has developed a bleeding-edge CPU/GPU-based analytics platform that marries high performance computing to big data.
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AMD Fusion Developer Summit Fuels HPC Conversations

Jun 16, 2011 | At the close of the AMD Developer Summit in Bellevue, Washington we bring you a selection of video clips highlighting some of the activity around high performance computing, including thoughts from AMD's Margaret Lewis, Chuck Moore, and researchers finding value in GPU computing.
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Video: AMD and ARM Connect at Fusion Summit

Jun 15, 2011 | This week at the AMD Fusion Developer Summit, AMD invited ARM Fellow and VP of Technology, Jem Davies to highlight the ways that ARM and AMD have the same goals and are following a similar route to success via open standards and innovative archtectures.
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Xyratex Unveils Lustre Storage Appliance for HPC

Jun 14, 2011 | Storage maker Xyratex has announced the ClusterStor 3000, a rack-scale Lustre storage solution purpose-built for high performance computing. The product is the culmination of an effort that began with the aquisition of Lustre startup ClusterStor in 2010. We asked Xyratex Director of Strategic Business Development Ken Claffey to fill us in on his company's newest storage solution.
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