May 25, 2012
BOLOGNA, Italy, May 22 -- Xcelerit, a Dublin-based software company specialising in cross-platform acceleration tools, was awarded First Prize in the competition for the Most Innovative Industrial HPC Solution in Europe. The award was presented at the 4th PRACE Industrial Seminar, the annual PRACE event aimed at developing relationships with industry.
The objective of the competition was to recognise the boldest industrial HPC application and illustrate how far this technology can be taken to change the present best practice of European industry.
The event attracted 96 attendees from 15 countries, including 67 companies and research organizations not affiliated to PRACE. The event lasted two half-days and it included 20 talks, 4 workshops and a networking event, putting 30 speakers on the podium. The main purpose of the seminar was to announce the Open R&D Access Model that PRACE has developed to allow companies to conduct open research using the organization’s resources.
The selection of the overall winner was carried out by a jury consisting of members of the PRACE Scientific Steering Committee. At the Seminar, the award was presented by Dr. Maria Ramalho, PRACE Director, and Prof. Richard Kenway representing PRACE’s Scientific Steering Committee.,.
"HPC is playing a vital role in driving economic recovery. This award signals PRACE’s commitment to encourage innovation and coincides with our first call for industry-led proposals to exploit our world-leading HPC infrastructure. Together they announce to the world that PRACE is for science and industry!”, said Prof. Richard Kenway.
According to PRACE, Xcelerit’s solution addresses the key obstacles to adopting HPC by businesses as identified in a number of studies, including PRACE’s own report ‘The Requirements of Industrial Users’. Among these obstacles are: a lack of knowledge about HPC, the cost of adopting and maintaining new technologies and lack of easy-to-use application tools. The learning curve for developing HPC applications is steep and companies that recognize the potential of using HPC usually face the challenge of having to pay expensive software licenses, the fees of engineering or consultancy companies, or having to hire specialized, hard-to-find staff in order to develop on-site products. The Xcelerit SDK (software development kit) addresses this problem by providing a framework that enables engineers with no knowledge of parallel computing to produce results taking advantage of HPC machines. The solution presented by Xcelerit will thus help to broaden the use of HPC within European industry.
PRACE is looking forward to next year’s contestants, knowing that Xcelerit has set the standard high.
About PRACE
The Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE) is an international non-profit association with its seat in Brussels. The PRACE Research Infrastructure (RI) provides a persistent world-class High Performance Computing (HPC) service for scientists and researchers from academia and industry. The Implementation Phase of PRACE receives funding from the EU’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreements n° RI-261557 and n° RI-283493.
-----
Source: PRACE
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...
The Xeon Phi coprocessor might be the new kid on the high performance block, but out of all first-rate kickers of the Intel tires, the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) got the first real jab with its new top ten Stampede system.We talk with the center's Karl Schultz about the challenges of programming for Phi--but more specifically, the optimization...
Read more...
May 22, 2013 |
At some point in the not-too-distant future, building powerful, miniature computing systems will be considered a hobby for high schoolers, just as robotics or even Lego-building are today. That could be made possible through recent advancements made with the Raspberry Pi computers.
Read more...
May 16, 2013 |
When it comes to cloud, long distances mean unacceptably high latencies. Researchers from the University of Bonn in Germany examined those latency issues of doing CFD modeling in the cloud by utilizing a common CFD and its utilization in HPC instance types including both CPU and GPU cores of Amazon EC2.
Read more...
May 15, 2013 |
Supercomputers at the Department of Energy’s National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) have worked on important computational problems such as collapse of the atomic state, the optimization of chemical catalysts, and now modeling popping bubbles.
Read more...
May 10, 2013 |
Program provides cash awards up to $10,000 for the best open-source end-user applications deployed on 100G network.
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.