Hybrid Memory Cube Angles for Exascale

Jul 10, 2012 | Computer memory is currently undergoing something of an identity crisis. For the past 8 years, multicore microprocessors have been creating a performance discontinuity, the so-called memory wall. It's now fairly clear that this widening gap between compute and memory performance will not be solved with conventional DRAM products. But there is one technology under development that aims to close that gap, and its first use case will likely be in the ethereal realm of supercomputing.
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Green500 Turns Blue

Jul 05, 2012 | The latest Green500 rankings were announced last week, revealing that top performance and power efficiency can indeed go hand in hand. According to the latest list, the greenest machines, in fact the top 20 systems, were all IBM Blue Gene/Q supercomputers. Blue Gene/Q, of course, is the platform that captured the number one spot on the latest TOP500 list, and is represented by four of the ten fastest supercomputers in the world.
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NERSC Signs Up for Multi-Petaflop "Cascade" Supercomputer

Jul 03, 2012 | The US Department of Energy's National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) has ordered a two-petaflop "Cascade" supercomputer, Cray's next-generation HPC platform. The DOE is shelling out $40 million dollars for the system, including about 6.5 petabytes of the company's Sonexion storage. Installation is scheduled for sometime in 2013.
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The Uber-Cloud Experiment

Jun 28, 2012 | Even with its promise of easy access to pay-per-use computing, HPC-as-a-Service as a delivery model has yet to be widely embraced by high performance computing users. In this article, authors Wolfgang Gentzsch and Burak Yenier describe an HPC service experiment that brings together industry users, resource providers, software providers, and HPC experts, which they believe will help pave the way for wider adoption.
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Lawrence Livermore, IBM Offer Petascale Supercomputer to Industry

Jun 27, 2012 | One by one, US government HPC labs are getting into the industry partnership business. The latest is Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), who this week announced it was teaming with IBM to form "Deep Computing Solutions," a collaboration that is being folded into LLNL’s new High Performance Computing Innovation Center,
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An HPC Programming Model for the Exascale Age

Jun 26, 2012 | As the supercomputing faithful prepare for exascale computing, there is a great deal of talk about moving beyond the two-decades-old MPI programming model . The HPC programmers of tomorrow are going to have to write codes that are able to deal with systems hundreds of times larger than the top supercomputers of today, and the general feeling is that MPI, by itself, will not make that transition gracefully. One of the alternatives being offered is a PGAS model known as GASPI...
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Exascale Computing: The View from Argonne

Jun 21, 2012 | As a result of the dissolution of DARPA's UHPC program, the driving force behind exascale research in the US now resides with the Department of Energy, which has embarked upon a program to help develop this technology. To get a lab-centric view of the path to exascale, HPCwire asked a three of the top directors at Argonne National Laboratory -- Rick Stevens, Michael Papka, and Marc Snir -- to provide some context for the challenges and benefits of developing these extreme scale systems.
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TOP500 Gets Dressed Up with New Blue Genes

Jun 19, 2012 | The 39th TOP500 list was released today at the International Supercomputing Conference in Hamburg, Germany, with a new machine at the top. Sequoia, an IBM Blue Gene/Q machine, delivered a world record 16 petaflops on Linpack, knocking RIKEN's 10-petaflop K Computer into second place. The Japanese K machine had held the TOP500 title for a year.
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Intel Will Ship Knights Corner Chip in 2012

Jun 18, 2012 | On Monday at the International Supercomputing Conference in Hamburg, Intel announced that Knights Corner, the company's first manycore product, would be in production before the end of 2012. The company also released a few more details about the upcoming product line, including the creation of a new Xeon brand for the architecture, some performance updates on pre-production silicon, and Cray's adoption of MIC as part of its future Cascade supercomputer.
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Mellanox Cracks 100 Gbps with New InfiniBand Adapters

Jun 18, 2012 | Mellanox has developed a new architecture for high performance InfiniBand. Known as Connect-IB, this is the company’s fourth major InfiniBand adapter redesign, following in the footsteps of its InfiniHost, InfiniHost III and ConnectX lines. The new adapters double the throughput of the company’s FDR InfinBand gear, supporting speeds beyond 100 Gbps.
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HPC Lists We’d Like to See

Jun 15, 2012 | Since the release of the first TOP500 list in June of 1993, the HPC community has been motivated by the competition to place high on that list. We’re now approaching the twentieth anniversary of the TOP500. In recent years, two additional lists have gained traction: the Green500 and the Graph 500. Would a few more lists be useful?
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SGI Launches Second Generation UV Supercomputer

Jun 14, 2012 | The sequel to SGI's UV supercomputer has arrived. Dubbed UV 2, the new platform doubles the number of cores and quadruples the memory that can be supported under a single system. The product, which will be officially announced next week at the International Supercomputing Conference in Hamburg, represents the first major revision of SGI's original UV, which the company debuted in 2009.
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Xyratex Doubles Storage Throughput in Latest Lustre Offering

Jun 14, 2012 | Today storage maker Xyratex introduced ClusterStor 6000, a Lustre-based storage platform which doubles the throughput of the company’s first generation product. HPCWire spoke with Eric Lomascolo, director of solutions marketing and Mike Stolz, VP of marketing at Xyratex to get the particulars about the new system.
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The TOP500 Celebrates 20th Anniversary, Will it Survive 20 More?

Jun 12, 2012 | With the upcoming release of the TOP500 next week, the latest rankings are usually a hot topic of discussion this time of year. Over the past 20 years, the list has proven to be a useful and popular compilation of supercomputers for the HPC community. In this exclusive interview, Professor Hans Meuer, considered by many to be the driving force behind the project, offers his thoughts on the TOP500; its past, present, and future.
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Cray Expands Narrative on Blue Waters Supercomputer and Company's New Storage Business

Jun 12, 2012 | Two of Cray's more notable achievements in 2011 -- the contract win of the "Blue Waters" supercomputer re-bid and the addition of a high-performance storage line -- are reaping dividends in 2012. In this interview with Barry Bolding, Cray's vice president of storage and data management, HPCwire takes a behind-the-scenes look at that unusual procurement and the company's subsequent move into the storage business.
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Intel Releases Knights Corner ISA, Lays Groundwork for MIC Launch

Jun 11, 2012 | Intel has released a partial software stack for Knights Corner, the company's first commercial chip based on its Many Integrated Core (MIC) architecture. Also released were a number of documents describing the processor's micro-architecture, including the Knights Corner Instruction Set (ISA) Manual, which will help toolmakers and application developers build software for the upcoming chip.
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Petaflop In a Box

Jun 06, 2012 | As we move down the road toward exascale computing and engage in discussion of zettascale, one issue becomes increasingly obvious: we are leaving a large part of the HPC community behind. But it needn't be so. If we developed compact, power efficient petascale computers, not only could we help broaden the base of high-end users, but we could also provide a foundation for future bleeding-edge supercomputers.
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AMD Cranks Up Opteron Speeds

Jun 04, 2012 | AMD has announced an update to their Opteron 6200 family aimed at HPC and performance-driven enterprise applications. The new 16-core Opteron 6278 and 6284 SE processors fall under the Bulldozer architecture, sporting similar core density and cache as their predecessors.
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Calxeda Takes Aim at Big Data HPC with ARM Server Chip

May 31, 2012 | With Dell's news this week of its renewed plans to bring ARM-based servers to datacenters and Intel's recent unveiling of new Xeon CPUs aimed at ultra-low-power servers, the "microserver" marketplace is being primed for some commercial offerings. Chip startup Calxeda has been working to bring its own ARM-based SoC technology into the datacenter and, with the help of its OEM partners, the company is positioning the technology for its commercial debut.
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ARM Gets Behind Accelerator Programming Project

May 29, 2012 | ARM Holdings, along with seven other academic and industrial partners, is ramping up a European research project designed to bring accelerator programming to mainstream developers. Known as CARP (Correct and Efficient Accelerator Programming), the effort is focused on developing hardware-independent programming tools around OpenCL, the industry standard parallel computing environment for GPUs and other accelerators.
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HP Jettisons 8 Percent of Workforce, Refocuses Priorities

May 24, 2012 | This week HP announced it will slash 27,000 workers from the payroll over the next couple of years as part of a company-wide restructuring. When complete, the effort is expected to generate between $3.0 to $3.5 billion of savings per year. The workforce reduction is the largest in the company's 73-year history and reflects how far HP has drifted into unprofitable businesses.
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NVIDIA Works On CPU Co-Dependency Issues with Kepler GPU

May 22, 2012 | NVIDIA is telling everyone that the GK110, its new Kepler GPU aimed at supercomputing, is all about improving performance per watt. But the other driving theme behind the new architecture is reducing the GPU's reliance on its CPU host. How well it accomplishes both these goals areas could determine the success of the new chip in high performance computing.
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OpenACC Starts to Gather Developer Mindshare

May 17, 2012 | PGI, Cray, and CAPS enterprise are moving quickly to get their new OpenACC-supported compilers into the hands of GPGPU developers. At NVIDIA's GPU Technology Conference this week, there was plenty of discussion around the new HPC accelerator framework, and all three OpenACC compiler makers, as well as NVIDIA, were talking up the technology.
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NVIDIA Launches Kepler Into HPC

May 15, 2012 | NVIDIA has introduced its first Kepler-generation GPU product for high performance computing, and revealed some of the inner working of the new architecture. The announcement took place at the kickoff of the company's GPU Technology Conference taking place this week in San Jose, California.
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Intel Rolls Out New Server CPUs

May 14, 2012 | Intel Corp. has launched three new families of Xeon processors, joining the Xeon E5-2600 series the chipmaker introduced in March. These latest chips span the entire market for the Xeon line, from four- and two-socket servers, down to entry-level workstations and microservers. A number of HPC server makers, including SGI, Dell, and Appro announced updated hardware based on the new silicon.
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