November 01, 2012
BURTON-ON-TRENT, UK, Nov. 1 — Integrex HPC, a UK HPC integrator, has been successful in a competitive bid to supply a 1000 core cluster to Keele University. The system is unique in that 256 cores of the cluster will be connected via the lastest Numascale fabric. The remaining cores are connected via QDR InfiniBand.
The total solution will be unified under a single cluster management solution adopting IBM Platform HPC Suite 3.2. Under this environment jobs are submitted via LSF (Load Share Facility) to either the InfiniBand nodes or to the Numascale machine with 576GB RAM and 256 cores. The Numa machine comprises 8 x 36 core servers acting as a single machine with single operating system image.
The system, due for installation in December 2012, will provide a test bed for Raphael Hirschi at Keele University, who will comprehensively contrast and compare the two architectures.
ERC starting grant worth 1.4 Million Euro awarded to Keele Academic
Dr Raphael Hirschi, Astrophysics group, iEPSAM, building upon his European funding profile (scientist in charge for a Marie Curie IIF and associate partner for the EUROCORE Eurogenesis programme) has secured a prestigious grant from the European Research Council (ERC), the first awarded to a Keele Academic.
The ERC starting grant will fund a 5-year multi-disciplinary project entitled SHYNE (Stellar HYdrodynamics, Nucleosynthesis and Evolution), which starts this month. The grant will enable Dr Hirschi to build a team of two post-doctoral researchers and two PhD students, all based at Keele, and to acquire a dedicated computer cluster comprising 1000+ CPU cores. The computer cluster will have 288 cores virtually sharing memory through the innovative hardware developed by the Norwegian company Numascale. The SHYNE team will collaborate with Numascale in order to determine the best balance between shared and distributed memory architectures, adding an inter-sectoral component to the project.
The SHYNE project will develop an innovative software suite that draws upon numerical techniques from several disciplines, with the goal of extending them in their application to produce state of the art theoretical models of stars. This software suite will produce comprehensive datasets of stellar evolution models that will provide a theoretical framework of analysis for astronomical observing facilities (ESO VLT, E-ELT & ESA GAIA). This project will also use stellar models as a virtual nuclear physics laboratory to guide and boost the return on investments in large nuclear physics experiments (e.g. FAIR at GSI, D).
This project will tackle many challenging questions and unsolved problems: How are the elements we are made of created? What are the properties of the most massive stars and what is their fate? Do electron-capture supernovae exist? What are the most important nuclear reaction rates and what precision in nuclear physics experiments is desirable for astrophysics applications? How does one improve 1-dimensional models using modern computers and multi-dimensional simulations? What is the best computer platform for medium- and large-scale simulations? The SHYNE project will thus have a wide ranging impact on the various disciplines involved and also build a promising bridge with a high-tech company.
-----
Source: Integrex HPC
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...
Not content to let the Tianhe-2 announcement ride alone, Intel rolled out a series of announcements around its Knights Corner and Xeon Phi products--all of which are aimed at adding some options and variety for a wider base of potential users across the HPC spectrum. Today at the International Supercomputing Conference, the company's Raj....
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...
Jun 13, 2013 |
Titan, the Cray XK7 at the Oak Ridge National Lab that debuted last fall as the fastest supercomputer in the world with 17.59 petaflops of sustained computing power, will rely on its previous LINPACK test for the upcoming edition of the Top 500 list.
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.