March 20, 2013
As NCSA's Blue Waters supercomputer approaches full service status, we thought it would be appropriate to see how the machine was built.
This video from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) takes viewers inside the hallowed hallways of Cray's manufacturing center in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, for a look at the primary components that make up a Cray G34 compute blade assembly for the XE6 computer system.
The Director of Manufacture Logistics Group at Cray, Steve Samse, shows off the compute blades that include Blue Waters' processors, interconnect and memory: "the heart of what will be one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world."
In the year since this video was filmed, work on the system was completed and Blue Waters was installed at NCSA. The 11.6 petaflops (peak) supercomputer contains 237 XE cabinets, each with 24 blade assemblies, and 32 cabinets of the Cray XK6 supercomputer with NVIDIA Tesla GPU computing capability.
Currently available in "friendly-user" mode for NCSA-approved teams, Blue Waters provides sustained performance of 1 petaflop or more on a range of real-world science and engineering applications.
The Xeon Phi coprocessor might be the new kid on the high performance block, but out of all first-rate kickers of the Intel tires, the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) got the first real jab with its new top ten Stampede system.We talk with the center's Karl Schultz about the challenges of programming for Phi--but more specifically, the optimization...
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Although Horst Simon was named Deputy Director of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, he maintains his strong ties to the scientific computing community as an editor of the TOP500 list and as an invited speaker at conferences.
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Supercomputing veteran, Bo Ewald, has been neck-deep in bleeding edge system development since his twelve-year stint at Cray Research back in the mid-1980s, which was followed by his tenure at large organizations like SGI and startups, including Scale Eight Corporation and Linux Networx. He has put his weight behind quantum company....
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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.