Top 10 Hits and Misses for 2012

Dec 13, 2012 | In the world of high performance computing, a lot of the important news this year revolved around heterogeneous computing, big data, and HPC interconnects. Two vendors that perhaps embodied those technologies more so than others were Cray and Intel, both of which figured prominently in some of the biggest HPC stories in 2012. Here are HPCwire's highlights and lowlights for the year.
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BP Brings Petascale Computing to Oil and Gas Industry

Dec 12, 2012 | British multinational BP revealed it is building a new datacenter in Houston to house a 2-petaflop supercomputer. When installed in 2013, it will likely be the most powerful system deployed by a commercial entity, at least of the ones that have been publicly revealed. The upcoming petaflopper will support the company's oil and gas exploration efforts and other research objectives.
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HPC as a Service: Lessons Learned

Dec 10, 2012 | After a fast-paced three months, round 1 of the HPC Experiment (also known as the Uber-Cloud Experiment) concluded last month, with more than 160 participating organizations and individuals from 25 countries, working together in 25 international teams. In this article we present their main findings, challenges, and their lessons learned.
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The New Breed of Accelerators from NVIDIA, Intel and AMD Square Off

Dec 06, 2012 | With the recent introduction of Intel's first Xeon Phi coprocessors, NVIDIA's latest Kepler GPUs, and AMD's new FirePro S10000 graphics card, the competition for HPC chip componentry has entered a new phase. The three chipmakers have taken somewhat different paths though, and it will be up to the market to decide which vendor's approach will win the day.
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GPU Monster Shreds Password Hashes

Dec 06, 2012 | Today's notion of safe passwords may soon be a thing of the past. Thanks to cheaper hardware, cloud software, and free password cracking programs, it's easier than ever to hack these digital keys. Just how easy? Earlier this week, a custom-built GPU cluster tore through 348 billion password hashes per second during the Passwords^12 Conference in Oslo, Norway.
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Neutron Science and Supercomputing Come Together at Oak Ridge National Lab

Dec 04, 2012 | As the data sets generated by the increasingly powerful neutron scattering instruments at ORNL's Spallation Neutron Source (SNS) grow ever more massive, the facility's users require significant advances in data reduction and analysis tools. To meet the challenge, SNS data specialists have teamed with ORNL's Computing and Computational Sciences Directorate.
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DOE Commissions Extreme Computing Study

Dec 03, 2012 | The Council on Competitiveness has been awarded a $914,000 grant from the Department of Energy to explore the implications of the emerging post-petaflop era and the challenges associated with extreme computing. HPCwire talks to Council on Competitiveness Senior Vice President Cynthia R. McIntyre to learn more about the project.
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The HPC Triple Crown

Nov 28, 2012 | The semi-annual HPC “500 list” time and its attendant fall iron horse racing season are upon us. Thanks to the hard work of the list keepers, we currently enjoy three major ones to review, compare and contrast: TOP500, Green500 and Graph 500. Each focuses on a distinct aspect of HPC – number crunching, energy efficiency, and data crunching, respectively – and together they allow us to construct our own type of Triple Crown.
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Adaptive Revs Moab, Debuts Remote Virtualization Edition

Nov 28, 2012 | At SC12, Adaptive announced its Moab HPC Suite 7.2 release, which includes several productivity enhancements and introduces support for Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors. The workload management vendor also launched two new products as part of its Moab HPC Suite: Application Portal Edition and Remote Visualization Edition.
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OpenMP Takes To Accelerated Computing

Nov 27, 2012 | OpenMP, the popular parallel programming standard for high performance computing, is about to come out with a new version incorporating a number of enhancements, the most significant one being support for HPC accelerators. Version 4.0 will include the functionality that was implemented in OpenACC, the accelerator API that splintered off from the OpenMP work, as well as offer additional support beyond that. The new standard is expected to become the the law of the land sometime in early 2013.
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Convey Cooks Personality into New MX Line

Nov 21, 2012 | Last week at SC12 in Salt Lake Convey pulled the lid off its MX big data-driven architecture designed to shine against graph analytics problems, which were at the heart of the show’s unmistakable data-intensive computing thrust this year. The new MX line is designed to exploit massive degrees of parallelism while efficiently handling hard-to-partition big data applications.
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Grid Software Creates Virtual Windows Supercomputer

Nov 20, 2012 | What if you could combine the benefits of virtualization, grid and cloud computing to accelerate Windows-based applications? An Israeli company, Xoreax, is doing just that. We spoke with Xoreax at SC12 in Salt Lake City, Utah, last week to learn more about their offering.
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Texas Instruments Puts ARM-DSP Processors Into Play for HPC

Nov 20, 2012 | NVIDIA, Intel and AMD were not the only chip vendors unveiling new HPC accelerators last week SC12. Texas Instruments (TI) announced a set of heterogeneous processors that they believe will offer among the best performance per watt in the industry. In this case, the chipmaker glued an ARM CPU and DSP together on the same die, offering a low-power SoC with an impressive number of FLOPS.
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Blue Waters Opts Out of TOP500

Nov 16, 2012 | NCSA's Blue Waters system is one of the fastest supercomputers in the world, but it won't be appearing on the TOP500 list, nor will it be taking part in the HPC Challenge awards. HPCwire spoke with Project Director Bill Kramer to get the full story on this important decision.
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Michio Kaku Sketches Technological Wonderland of the Future at SC12

Nov 16, 2012 | Imagine a world where a computer chip costs just a penny. They could be embedded anywhere and everywhere. Celebrity physicist Michio Kaku talked about the implications of this and much more in his much-anticipated keynote address at Supercomputing 2012 (SC12) this week in Salt Lake City, where he discussed the huge role that high performance computing will play in the year 2100.
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The Six Personalities of Supercomputing

Nov 16, 2012 | In a part serious, part provocative style, here is a light-hearted look at the different personality stereotypes involved in high performance computing. This is by no means an exclusive list, but it does illustrate the range of people who contribute to the flavor of the world of supercomputing.
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PLX Looks to Bring PCIe Fabric to Market

Nov 14, 2012 | PLX Technology, a maker of PCIe switches and bridges, has been spreading the word about using PCIe as a general-purpose HPC interconnect. At SC12 this week, the company went a little further down that path, unveiling their upcoming Express Fabric technology. We asked Vijay Meduri, executive vice president of engineering at PLX to talk about the rationale of using PCIe as an interconnect fabric.
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E4 Computer Engineering Unveils New ARM-GPU Clusters

Nov 13, 2012 | This week at SC12, Italian cluster maker E4 Computer Engineering, launched a new series heterogeneous clusters, which pair an NVIDIA's ARM+GPU Tegra3 with a discrete Quadro GPU. We asked E4's Simone Tinti, who leads the HPC team at E4, to describe the new systems and talk about the advantage they offer to high performance computing users.
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Microsoft Outfits Azure Cloud for Big Compute

Nov 13, 2012 | Microsoft has unveiled a set of "big compute" capabilities for its Windows Azure offering. The company is courting the HPC space with more powerful hardware, new instance configurations, and the updated Microsoft HPC Pack 2012.
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Intel Brings Manycore x86 to Market with Knights Corner

Nov 12, 2012 | Intel Corp. officially made its entry into the manycore realm today as it debuted "Knights Corner," the company's first Xeon Phi coprocessor. The new products clock in at just over a teraflop, double precision, setting the stage for an HPC accelerator battle that will pit Intel against GPU makers NVIDIA and AMD. Both of those companies also released their latest HPC accelerators into the wild earlier today at the annual Supercomputing Conference in Salt Lake City.
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Titan Knocks Off Sequoia as Top Supercomputer

Nov 12, 2012 | In the battle of the DOE labs, Oak Ridge Lab's Titan supercomputer has taken the title from the former TOP500 champ, Lawrence Livermore's Sequoia. The GPU-charged Titan, using the new NVIDIA K20X-equipped XK7 blades from Cray, delivered 17.6 petaflops to Sequoia's 16.3 petaflops on Linpack, the sole metric for TOP500 rankings.
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NVIDIA Unveils 1.3 Teraflop GPU for Supercomputing

Nov 12, 2012 | The battle of teraflop accelerators began today as NVIDIA launched a new family of supercomputing GPUs based on the Kepler architecture. The Tesla K20 and the K20X represent the company's latest and greatest and are intended to keep NVIDIA's successful HPC accelerator franchise out in front of the competition. The chipmaker announced the new hardware as the 2012 Supercomputing Conference, in Salt Lake City, got underway.
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AMD Hatches FLOP-Monster GPU Card

Nov 12, 2012 | AMD is launching its most powerful graphics card yet: the dual-GPU FirePro S10000 promises 5.91 teraflops of peak single precision and 1.48 teraflops of peak double precision floating point performance. And with AMD's "Graphics Core Next" (GCN) architecture under the hood, the S10000 can deliver compute and graphics processing simultaneously.
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Cray to Buy Appro for $25 Million

Nov 09, 2012 | Supercomputer-maker Cray has announced it intends to buy Appro International, a privately held HPC cluster vendor. Cray is paying about $25 million for Appro, and will get at least $3.5 million in working capital from the cluster-maker. News of the deal boosted Cray's stock price, which jumped 10 percent on Friday.
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An SC12 Party for the Rest of Us

Nov 09, 2012 | The celebration surrounding the opening of the Supercomputing Conference traditionally kicks off with Gala Opening on Monday evening. But those in the know leave the convention center and head to the biggest open HPC community party of the year: the Beowulf Bash. HPC guru and Beowulf pioneer Thomas Sterling talks about what makes this particular event so special.
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