August 07, 2012
While the world’s greatest athletes were competing for gold at this year’s summer Olympics, some of the greatest minds in space exploration were similarly attempting a world-class achievement. On Sunday evening, NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory (MSL), also known as Curiosity, successfully landed on Mars with help from HPC resources. Yesterday, Dell announced that two clusters housed at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) assisted with the complex landing sequence.
Galaxy and Nebula systems, each based on Dell’s PowerEdge servers, were used to analyze large amounts of data in preparation of the Curiosity’s landing sequence. Prior to the launch, the clusters were tasked with validating parameters created by the mission team. This information was then uploaded to the rover one week before its arrival.
The anticipation was nerve-wracking to say the least. This was a project that had been active since 2004 and cost $2.5 billion. The delivery method was one of a kind, as the Curiosity team had to develop unique systems to safely lands the car-sized rover on the red planet. The moment was aptly named “seven minutes of terror”.
Thankfully, the landing was successful, marking a memorable event in NASA’s history. Jere Carroll, general manager of civilian agencies at Dell Federal, spoke of the collaboration while congratulating the NASA team.
"We're proud to work hand-in-hand with NASA, a true American institution that provides the world with the understanding that modern day pioneering delivers optimism and the drive to go further,” he said. “Most importantly, we are honored to be able to test and validate this mission's most critical portion, landing on the Red Planet."
In quieter times, sounding the bell of funding big science with big systems tends to resonate further than when ears are already burning with sour economic and national security news. For exascale's future, however, the time could be ripe to instill some sense of urgency....
Read more...
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...
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.