February 09, 2012
February 8 -- Dave Hart and Irfan Elahi from the National Center for Atmospheric Research ( NCAR ) will host a workshop on campus for University of Wyoming faculty interested in using the NCAR-Wyoming Supercomputing Center ( NWSC ) for research.
The workshop is from 1-3 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 23, in Room 222 of the Classroom Building. Hart is the user services manager at NCAR, and Elahi is head of the organization's supercomputer services group.
Approximately 75 million core hours per year will be reserved for UW researchers and their collaborators at the facility. Research time and use -- focused on computationally or data intensive earth system science -- will be allocated by the Wyoming-NCAR Resource Advisory Panel (WRAP).
"With these requests, UW faculty will be asking for computer time, short-term storage, data analysis and visualization, and long-term storage," says Bryan Shader, a UW professor of mathematics and special assistant to the vice president of research and economic development. "The currency of the realm is a core hour; one core hour represents the usage of one processor for one hour. For each of the other resources, there is a core-hour equivalent conversion factor."
UW faculty will have an opportunity to submit their allocation requests for a pre-review March 6. Faculty will then have until March 26 to incorporate suggestions from the pre-review to strengthen their final allocation request, he says.
"For many faculty, this will be the first time for an allocation request of this size," Shader says. "It's in their best interest to put together the best proposal for a pre-review. We want UW allocation requests to be top quality."
Because the overall time allocation of the supercomputing center for UW is finite, Shader says the WRAP evaluates allocation requests on computational experimental design, computational effectiveness, efficiency of resource use, progress from prior allocations, and broader impacts.
"This is a $30 million machine with a useable life-span of three to four years. You want to run it at the highest capacity you can," he says. "Every time you run it without much thought, you're wasting money. Researchers must carefully plan how to most wisely and effectively use the resource."
Additional information about the allocation process can be found at http://www.uwyo.edu/nwsc .
The NWSC is being developed in partnership with UW, the state of Wyoming, Cheyenne LEADS, the Wyoming Business Council, Cheyenne Light, Fuel and Power; and the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research. NCAR is sponsored by the National Science Foundation.
The NWSC will contain some of the world's most powerful supercomputers dedicated to improving scientific understanding of climate change, severe weather, air quality and other vital atmospheric science and geoscience topics. The center also will house a premier data storage and archival facility that holds irreplaceable historical climate records and other information.
It is expected that UW allocations will be awarded in May, and available for usage starting in fall 2012.
To help plan for the workshop, interested faculty are requested to send an RSVP to bshader@uwyo.edu by Feb. 16.
-----
Source:University of Wyoming
During a conversation this week with Cray CEO, Peter Ungaro, we learned that the company has managed to extend its reach into the enterprise HPC market quite dramatically--at least in supercomputing business terms. With steady growth into these markets, however, the focus on hardware versus the software side of certain problems for such users is....
Read more...
Contributing commentator, Andrew Jones, offers a break in the news cycle with an assessment of what the national "size matters" contest means for the U.S. and other nations...
Read more...
Today at the International Supercomputing Conference in Leipzing, Germany, Jack Dongarra presented on a proposed benchmark that could carry a bit more weight than its older Linpack companion. The high performance conjugate gradient (HPCG) concept takes into account new architectures for new applications, while shedding the floating point....
Read more...
Jun 19, 2013 |
Supercomputer architectures have evolved considerably over the last 20 years, particularly in the number of processors that are linked together. One aspect of HPC architecture that hasn't changed is the MPI programming model.
Read more...
Jun 18, 2013 |
The world's largest supercomputers, like Tianhe-2, are great at traditional, compute-intensive HPC workloads, such as simulating atomic decay or modeling tornados. But data-intensive applications--such as mining big data sets for connections--is a different sort of workload, and runs best on a different sort of computer.
Read more...
Jun 18, 2013 |
Researchers are finding innovative uses for Gordon, the 285 teraflop supercomputer housed at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) that has a unique Flash-based storage system. Since going online, researchers have put the incredibly fast I/O to use on a wide variety of workloads, ranging from chemistry to political science.
Read more...
Jun 17, 2013 |
The advent of low-power mobile processors and cloud delivery models is changing the economics of computing. But just as an economy car is good at different things than a full size truck, an HPC workload still has certain computing demands that neither the fastest smartphone nor the most elastic cloud cluster can fulfill.
Read more...
Jun 14, 2013 |
For all the progress we've made in IT over the last 50 years, there's one area of life that has steadfastly eluded the grasp of computers: understanding human language. Now, researchers at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) are utilizing a Hadoop cluster on its Longhorn supercomputer to move the state of the art of language processing a little bit further.
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.
Join HPCwire Editor Nicole Hemsoth and Dr. David Bader from Georgia Tech as they take center stage on opening night at Atlanta's first Big Data Kick Off Week, filmed in front of a live audience. Nicole and David look at the evolution of HPC, today's big data challenges, discuss real world solutions, and reveal their predictions. Exactly what does the future holds for HPC?
Join our webinar to learn how IT managers can migrate to a more resilient, flexible and scalable solution that grows with the data center. Mellanox VMS is future-proof, efficient and brings significant CAPEX and OPEX savings. The VMS is available today.