Top 10 Objections to GPU Computing Reconsidered

Jun 09, 2011 | As we approach the four-year release anniversary of NVIDIA CUDA, arguably the ground zero of the GPGPU movement, there are many who have flirted, piloted and adopted the technology, but many more who are sitting on the sidelines for various reasons. In our work, we have come across many of the latter, and have thus compiled a list of the most common questions, concerns and assertions that preempt efforts to evaluate the technology.
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Appro Comes Up Multi-Million Dollar Winner in HPC Procurement for NNSA

Jun 08, 2011 | For the second time in five years, Appro has been tapped to provide the National Nuclear Security Administration with HPC capacity clusters for the agency's Advanced Simulation and Computing and stockpile stewardship programs. The Tri-Lab Linux Capacity Cluster 2 award is a two-year contract that will have the cluster-maker delivering HPC systems across three of the Department of Energy's national labs. The deal is worth tens of millions of dollars to Appro and represents the biggest contract in the company's 20-year history.
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Startup Cooks Up Software Sauce for SSDs

Jun 07, 2011 | VeloBit, which emerged from stealth today following an undisclosed round of funding, is talking up its soon-to-launch software cure for SSD performance ills. Although their product won't appear until later in the year, they claim their solution packs an order of magnitude price-performance improvement for solid-state drives.
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Researchers Challenge NAND Flash with Phase Change Memory

Jun 06, 2011 | Researchers at the University of California, San Diego have built a solid state storage system that they claim outperforms state-of-the-art flash memory products. The new system, know as Moneta, uses phase change memory, a technology that some predict will replace the NAND flash memory used in nearly every solid state drive today.
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Computing Personal Genomics

Jun 02, 2011 | The notion of "personal genomics" has generated a great deal of buzz over the last several years but according to one researcher, many of the promises that lie at the "plateau of productivity" for this technology are tied to some significant computational-side complexities.
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The Weekly Top Five

Jun 02, 2011 | The Weekly Top Five features the five biggest HPC stories of the week, condensed for your reading pleasure. This week, we cover NERSC's acceptance of its first petascale supercomputer, the potential for magnets to revolutionize computing; NCSA's private sector supercomputer; the official debut of Australia's MASSIVE supercomputer; and PRACE's biggest supercomputing allocation yet.
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Lighting a Fire Under Combustion Simulation

Jun 01, 2011 | Combustion simulation might seem like the ultimate in esoteric technologies, but auto companies, aircraft firms and fuel designers need increasingly sophisticated software to serve the needs of 21st century engine designs. HPCwire recently got the opportunity to take a look at Reaction Design, one of the premier makers of combustion simulation software, and talk with its CEO, Bernie Rosenthal.
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A Dark Matter for Astrophysics Research

May 31, 2011 | Projects like the Sloan Digital Sky Survey have provided a wealth of cosmological data for scientists to explore in detail. However, making use of those terabytes -- and generating far more data in the process of simulating and analyzing new concepts -- is highlighting the bottlenecks for scientific computing at massive scale.
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D-Wave Sells First Quantum Computer

May 26, 2011 | On Wednesday, D-Wave Systems made history by announcing the sale of the world's first commercial quantum computer. The buyer was Lockheed Martin Corporation, who will use the machine to help solve some of their "most challenging computation problems." D-Wave co-founder and CTO Geordie Rose talks about the new system and the underlying technology.
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The Weekly Top Five

May 26, 2011 | The Weekly Top Five features the five biggest HPC stories of the week, condensed for your reading pleasure. This week, we cover the NC State effort to overcome the memory limitations of multicore chips; the sale of the first-ever commercial quantum computing system; Cray's first GPU-accelerated machine; speedier machine learning algorithms; and the connection between shrinking budgets and increased reliance on modeling and simulation.
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Storage at Exascale: Some Thoughts from Panasas CTO Garth Gibson

May 25, 2011 | Exascale computing is not just about FLOPS. It will also require a new breed of external storage capable of feeding these exaflop beasts. Panasas co-founder and chief technology officer Garth Gibson has some ideas on how this can be accomplished and we asked him to expound on the topic in some detail.
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Cray Unveils Its First GPU Supercomputer

May 24, 2011 | Cray has released the details of its GPU-equipped supercomputer: the XK6. The machine is a derivative of the XE6, an AMD Opteron-based machine that the company announced a year ago. Although Cray is calling this week's announcement the XK6 launch, systems will not be available until the second half of the year.
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A New Generation of Smarter, Not Faster, Supercomputers

May 19, 2011 | When it comes to the power-hungry systems of the pending era of exascale, next-generation systems will need to employ "brains" not just brawn to tackle new challenges. This is a concept Bill Nitzberg of Altair's PBS Works described to us this week as he highlighted the ways smarter management can tackle some of the greatest challenges ahead for billion-core machines.
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The Weekly Top Five

May 19, 2011 | The Weekly Top Five features the five biggest HPC stories of the week, condensed for your reading pleasure. This week, we cover NCSA's newest 153-teraflop supercomputer; Dassault Systèmes latest SIMULIA Abaqus release; an optimistic forecast for technical software spending; NVIDIA's fastest parallel processing Tesla GPU; the Fraunhofer Parallel File System upgrade.
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Texas Memory Systems Pushes SSD Envelope

May 18, 2011 | Enterprise SSD maker Texas Memory Systems (TMS) has been kicking up some dust lately, announcing record-breaking performance results with its RamSan-630 product and launching its latest PCIe flash offering. Specifically, TMS recently put up some rather impressive numbers in two key benchmarks established by the Storage Performance Council. And then this week, the company introduced its next-generation PCIe flash memory product, the RamSan-70.
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NVIDIA Revs Up Tesla GPU

May 17, 2011 | GPU maker NVIDIA has ratcheted up the core count and clock speed on its Tesla GPU processor. The new M2090 module for servers delivers 665 double precision gigaflops, representing close to a 30 percent increase over the previous generation Tesla part. The memory bandwidth on the device was bumped up as well, from 150 GB/second to 178 GB/second. The new GPU boosts performance significantly across a number of HPC codes.
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Temple Opens Vault on Hybrid System

May 16, 2011 | Temple University will soon be home to a new hybrid GPU-CPU system to support a broad range of research needs. Computer scientists at the new Center for High Performance Computing and Networking will also have a dedicated space to explore challenges related to parallel programming in conjunction with the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center and other HPC sites.
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International Project Readies Climate Models For Exascale Era

May 12, 2011 | The first international effort to bring climate simulation software onto the next-generation exascale platforms got underway earlier this spring. The project, named Enabling Climate Simulation (ECS) at Extreme Scale, is being funded by the G8 Research Councils Initiative on Multilateral Research and brings together some of the heavy-weight organizations in climate research and computer science, not to mention some of the top supercomputers on the planet.
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The Weekly Top Five

May 12, 2011 | The Weekly Top Five features the five biggest HPC stories of the week, condensed for your reading pleasure. This week, we cover the Cray/Sandia partership to found a knowledge institute; RenderStream's FireStream-based workstations and servers; NVIDIA's latest CUDA centers; Reservoir Labs and Intel's extreme scale ambitions; and Jülich Supercomputing Centre's new hybrid cluster.
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A Global Mood Ring for Financial Markets

May 11, 2011 | Research out of Indiana University is seeking to make sense of global social network data in near real-time to arrive at a sense of universal mood. Johan Bollen and his team have a way to mine the tweets of the world to mesh data into an overall sense of emotion--a concept that is finding an eager audience among financial services players.
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Pullback on Government Spending Slows Cray Momentum

May 10, 2011 | Supercomputer maker Cray has posted a modest loss for the first quarter of 2011 and downgraded its low-end revenue expectations for the year by $20 million. In a conference call with investors, Cray CEO Peter Ungaro blamed most of this on a slowdown in government funding, as countries retreat from the spending spree of the last couple of years. Despite that, Ungaro and company are still aiming for a profitable year as they prepare to roll out new supercomputer offerings in the second half of 2011.
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Oak Ridge Supercomputers Modeling Nuclear Future

May 09, 2011 | The Department of Energy has backed the Consortium for Advanced Simulation of Light Water Reactors at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. This sweeping five-year effort will unleash the power of HPC to simulate innovative designs that could dramatically improve nuclear safety, output, and waste reduction.
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The Weekly Top Five

May 05, 2011 | The Weekly Top Five features the five biggest HPC stories of the week, condensed for your reading pleasure. This week, we cover ISRO's newest supercomputer; Tokyo Tech's selection of EM Photonics' CULA library; Intel's 3-D transistor breakthrough; the latest LSF Tools from Platform Computing; and SciNet's new NextIO GPU-based system.
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Sun Cofounder Evangelizes Liquid Blade Server

May 04, 2011 | What does a Sun Microsystems cofounder do with his spare time? Well, if you're Scott McNealy, you spend some if it lending your expertise to promising tech vendors that are looking to break into the IT big leagues. One such company that he has taken a personal interest in is Hardcore Computer, which recently introduced a line of servers that use liquid submersion technology. HPCwire spoke with McNealy to get his take on the technology and to ask him why he thinks the company deserves the spotlight.
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Startup Launches Manycore Floating Point Acceleration Technology

May 03, 2011 | Semiconductor startup Adapteva has demonstrated a manycore floating point processor architecture that promises ten times the performance per watt as the best chip technology on the market today. The architecture, called Epiphany, is aimed initially at embedded applications, but has general applicability across all math-intensive workloads in mobile computing, telecommunications and high performance computing.
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