July 27, 2012
A team of researchers at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland has embarked on a palatable study. Using a supercomputer, scientists are simulating ice cream in hopes to improve the popular dessert’s texture and shelf life. NVIDIA reported on the project in a recent blog post.
One of the lead scientists noted that ice cream is a very complex substance. The multiple ingredients found in popular recipes react with each other in a variety of ways over time. To get a better understanding of how they interact, the group decided to perform a computer simulation.
The processing power required to study ice cream at the molecular level would take years for consumer-grade computers to accomplish. To get faster results, the team turned to the Edinburgh Parallel Computing Center (EPCC), where they researched the frozen treat on a 200K-core Cray supercomputer.
During the project, the team realized they were able to perform the same computations on a far smaller, GPU-accelerated cluster. The simulations were migrated from a 200-cabinet system to a 10-cabinet, GPU-accelerated Cray XK6. The smaller cluster had 936 Tesla GPUs, which helped the team complete their simulation two and a half times faster than with CPUs alone.
While ice cream is a tasty and unique substance to learn more about, the same simulations could apply to other soft materials. University of Edinburgh's Alan Gray explained that paint, ketchup, yogurt, and hair products are just a few examples of items applicable to this research.
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...
Although Horst Simon was named Deputy Director of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, he maintains his strong ties to the scientific computing community as an editor of the TOP500 list and as an invited speaker at conferences.
Read more...
Supercomputing veteran, Bo Ewald, has been neck-deep in bleeding edge system development since his twelve-year stint at Cray Research back in the mid-1980s, which was followed by his tenure at large organizations like SGI and startups, including Scale Eight Corporation and Linux Networx. He has put his weight behind quantum company....
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.