Panasas Unveils New Storage Appliance with SSD Acceleration

Sep 17, 2012 | Panasas has launched ActiveStor 14, the company's fifth-generation storage applicance aimed at high performance computing. The new offering adds solid state drives (SSDs) to what has been almost exclusively a hard disk-based (HDD) NAS storage line-up. The inclusion of SSDs into the company's flagship offering is further proof that flash memory has become a mainstream storage technology for accelerating HPC workloads.
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Now at AMD, John Gustafson Wants to Light a Fire Under GPU Computing

Sep 13, 2012 | AMD looks like it's getting set to jump back into the GPU computing arena with chips a-blazin. A couple of weeks ago, the company signed up HPC industry-heavyweight John Gustafson as the chief architect for the Graphics Business Unit. Gustafson will essentially fill the CTO role there, driving the technology roadmap and direction for the chipmaker's discrete GPU business. And he's got a few ideas on how he's going to do that.
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At 100 Gbps, ESnet Puts Network Research on Fast Track

Sep 12, 2012 | When the Department of Energy announced the Advanced Networking Initiative in 2009 to develop the first 100 gigabit-per-second production-ready science network, it also included funding for a 100 Gbps experimental testbed and a national dark-fiber testbed. The thinking was that researchers from government institutions, universities and industry could use these testbeds to experiment with disruptive network technologies without interfering with traffic on a major production network.
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Intel Weaves Strategy To Put Interconnect Fabrics On Chip

Sep 10, 2012 | Intel has begun to formulate a strategy that will integrate fabric controllers with its server processors. According to Raj Hazra, general manager of the Technical Computing unit at Intel, the company is planning to use the recently acquired IP from Cray, QLogic and Fulcrum to deliver chips that put what is essentially a NIC onto the processor die. In a recent conversation with Hazra, he outlined their new fabric interconnect strategy.
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Intel Adds Programming Support for Latest Silicon

Sep 06, 2012 | We're only a little more than halfway through 2012, but Intel has already announced the 2013 versions Parallel Studio XE and Cluster Studio XE, two software suites that support x86-based parallel programming for high performance computing and beyond. Intel refreshes their software development offerings each year at about this time to sync up its tool support with the latest and greatest silicon and to add new features for developers.
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HP, Intel Score Petaflop Supercomputer at DOE Lab

Sep 05, 2012 | The US Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) has ordered a $10 million HP supercomputer equipped with the latest Intel Xeon CPUs and Xeon Phi coprocessors. When completed in 2013, the system will deliver one petaflop of performance and will take up residence in one of the most energy-efficient datacenters in the world.
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US Government Starts Bailing on SC12

Aug 30, 2012 | The upcoming Super-computing Conference (SC12) may not turn out to be the blow-out high performance computing hullabaloo it normally is. The recent GSA scandal involving overzealous spending at one of their conferences a couple of years ago has precipitated new federal policy that is forcing government labs to abandon their exhibits and cutback attendance at the world's largest supercomputing event.
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Intel Parts the Curtains on Xeon Phi... A Little Bit

Aug 28, 2012 | As Intel's Xeon Phi processor family gets ready to debut later this year, the chipmaker continues to reveal some of the details of its first manycore offering. Although the company isn't yet ready to talk speeds and feeds, this week they did divulge some of their design decisions that they believe will make the Xeon Phi coprocessor shine as an HPC accelerator. The new revelations were presented on Tuesday at the IEEE-sponsored Hot Chips conference in Cupertino, California.
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Adapteva Unveils 64-Core Chip

Aug 22, 2012 | Chipmaker Adapteva is sampling its 4th-generation multicore processor, known as Epiphany-IV. The 64-core chip delivers a peak performance of 100 gigaflops and draws just two watts of power, yielding a stunning 50 gigaflops/watt. The engineering samples were manufactured by GLOBALFOUNDRIES on its latest 28nm process technology.
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A Petabyte of Flash in a Rack

Aug 20, 2012 | Solid state storage specialist Nimbus Data Systems has unveiled its third-generation flash memory array, setting new benchmarks on resiliency, performance, and capacity. The new product, known as Gemini, offers up to 48 TB of capacity and over 1 million IOPS per 2U box. And despite moving to the less expensive and less reliable consumer-grade MLC flash, Nimbus has managed to double the endurance of its storage arrays.
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Analyst Weighs In on 64-Bit ARM

Aug 16, 2012 | In a recent report in Real World Technologies, chip guru David Kanter dissects the new 64-bit ARM design and what it might mean to the IT landscape. His take on the architecture is almost uniformly positive, noting that not only did the designers manage to develop an elegant instruction set that was backwardly compatible with the existing ISA, but they also took the extra step to jettison a few of the poorly designed features of the 32-bit architecture.
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Climate Science Triggers Torrent of Big Data Challenges

Aug 15, 2012 | Supercomputers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory produce some of the world’s largest scientific datasets, many of which are related to climate change research. In this interview, Galen Shipman, data-systems architect for ORNL’s Computing and Computational Sciences Directorate and the person who oversees data management at the OLCF, discusses strategies for coping with the “3 Vs” of big data: variety, velocity, and volume.
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Startup Aims to Upend Enterprise Storage with MLC Flash-Based Systems

Aug 14, 2012 | Silicon Valley startup Skyera has unveiled a solid state storage system that the company believes will be a game changer for enterprise storage. The product, known as Skyhawk, will use consumer-grade multi-level cell (MLC) flash memory as the basis for a bulk storage solution at a price point of less than $3 per gigabyte.
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AMD Unveils Teraflop GPU with ECC Support

Aug 08, 2012 | Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) has launched six new FirePro processors for workstation users who want high-end graphics and computation in a single box. One of them promises a teraflop of double precision performance as well as support for error correcting code (ECC) memory. The new offerings also includes two APUs (Accelerated Processing Units) that glue four CPU cores and hundreds of FirePro GPU stream cores onto the same chip.
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Steven Reiner Urges Scientists to Tell Their Stories

Aug 07, 2012 | At the annual Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) conference in Chicago, journalist Steven Reiner talked about the crucial role scientists play in educating the public about their work. A lifelong journalist and Emmy-award winning producer, Reiner believes it is essential to our society that researchers explain what they do, how they do it, and why it is important. “Scientists have a responsibility to share the meaning and implications of their work,” he said.
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Proving the Case for Climate Change with Hi-Res Models

Aug 02, 2012 | Although serious scientists believe we’re past the point of debating the validity of climate change, the computer models that support this research are not perfect. Fortunately, the latest improvements to high-resolution climate simulations are not only improving the fidelity of the models, but are also deepening our understanding of climate dynamics, both qualitatively and quantitatively.
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Drug Discovery Looks for Its Next Fix

Jul 31, 2012 | Despite the highly profitable nature of the pharmaceutical business and the large amount of R&D money companies throw at creating new medicines, the pace of drug development is agonizingly slow. Over the last few years, on average, less than two dozen new drugs have been introduced per year. One of the more promising technologies that could help speed up this process is supercomputing.
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Australia Goes on Spending Spree in Supercomputing Market

Jul 26, 2012 | While governments in much of the rest of the world are wringing their hands over stagnant or shrinking R&D budgets, Australia is buying up HPC machinery like there is no tomorrow. Just this week, Cray, IBM, and SGI announced supercomputing deals that would send the vendors' latest and greatest HPC equipment Down Under. In this case, the three systems are headed to various research facilities in New South Wales and Western Australia.
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Lack of Minority Representation in Science and Engineering Endangering US Economic Health

Jul 26, 2012 | Rapid growth in certain segments of the nation’s population is pushing the country’s educational challenges to a crisis level, while too many of the “precious few” under-represented minority students pursuing science, technology, engineering, or mathematics (STEM) disciplines are dropping out or changing majors, according to Richard Tapia, an internationally known mathematician.
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NASA Builds Supercomputing Lab for Earth Scientists

Jul 25, 2012 | This week, NASA announced it would soon be launching a new HPC and data facility that will give Earth scientists access to four decades of satellite imagery and other datasets. Known as the NASA Earth Exchange (NEX), the facility is being promoted as a "virtual laboratory" for researchers interested in applying supercomputing resources to studying areas like climate change, soil and vegetation patterns, and other environmental topics.
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Mellanox Roars Through Second Quarter As InfiniBand Revenue Takes Off

Jul 24, 2012 | With the rollout of high performance, lossless Ethernet products over the last few years, there were more than a few analysts predicting the slow retreat of InfiniBand. But thanks to a peculiar confluence of technology roadmaps, a payoff in some investments made by Mellanox, and a pent-up demand for server and storage deployment now being alleviated by Intel's Romley platform, InfiniBand is having a big year.
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Too Big to FLOP?

Jul 19, 2012 | At the cutting edge of HPC, bigger has always been seen as better and user demand has been the justification. However, as we now grapple with trans-petaflop machines and strive for exaflop ones, is evidence emerging that contradicts these notions? Might computers be getting too big to effectively serve up those FLOPS?
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Researchers Squeeze GPU Performance from 11 Big Science Apps

Jul 18, 2012 | In a report published this week, researchers documented that GPU-equipped supercomputers enabled application speedups between 1.4x and 6.1x across a range of well-known science codes. While those results aren't the order of magnitude performance increases that were being bandied about in the early days of GPU computing, the researchers were encouraged that the technology is producing consistently good results with some of the most popular HPC science applications in the world.
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Intel Expands HPC Collection with Whamcloud Buy

Jul 16, 2012 | Intel Corporation has acquired Whamcloud, a startup devoted to supporting the open source Lustre parallel file system and its user community. The deal marks the latest in a line of high performance computing acquisitions that Intel has made over the past few years to expand its HPC footprint.
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DOE Primes Pump for Exascale Supercomputers

Jul 12, 2012 | Intel, AMD, NVIDIA, and Whamcloud have been awarded tens of millions of dollars by the US Department of Energy (DOE) to kick-start research and development required to build exascale supercomputers. The work will be performed under the FastForward program, a joint effort run by the DOE Office of Science and the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) that will focus on developing future hardware and software technologies capable of supporting such machines.
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