Saddling Phi for TACC’s Stampede

May 17, 2013 | 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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"No Exascale for You!" An Interview with Berkeley Lab's Horst Simon

May 15, 2013 | 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 Vet Champions Quantum Cause

May 13, 2013 | 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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Xyratex Targets Missing Middle with Scaled-Down ClusterStor 1500

May 09, 2013 | In what has become a week of news around bringing HPC technology to the midrange market, Lustre file system gatekeeper, Xyratex, hashed out new boxes to bring down some parallel file system barriers and put higher performance on x86 cluster within closer reach for simulation and....
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Cray Answers Mid-Market's Call

May 07, 2013 | Seattle-based supercomputer maker Cray has revealed the latest addition to its portfolio: the Cray XC30-AC (air-cooled) supercomputer. The new product leverages Cray's XC30 flagship technology to address technical enterprise price points and new classes of users.
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Exterminating at Extreme Scale

May 07, 2013 | Since the first bug was eradicated from a Mark II system at Harvard in 1940s (an actual moth wedged in a relay, which drove the machine to a standstill) system exterminators have faced a constant spray of challenges. We talk with Allinea co-founder David Lecomber about challenges on Titan and Blue Waters--and the future of debugging exascale ...
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Emerging Technologies at SC13: A Chat with the Chairs

May 05, 2013 | SC13 is launching a new program called "Emerging Technologies". This focus area will concentrate on real hardware prototypes and demonstrations of software as well as project presentations in other formats. To learn more, HPCwire spoke with the co-chairs to get a sense of which technologies are....
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Intel’s Big Data to HPC Interconnect

May 02, 2013 | It's been a notable week for Intel, with the announcement of two new leadership positions, including the pushing of 30-year veteran engineer, Brian Krzanich into the top slot. With this in mind, we revisit this week's discussion led by Intel's John Hengeveld on where the trends of big data and HPC tend to converge on the interconnect and its role in...
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The Week in HPC Research

May 02, 2013 | We've scoured the journals and conference proceedings to bring you the top research stories of the week. This diverse set of items includes the latest CAREER award recipient; the push to bring parallel computing to the classroom; HPC in accelerator science; the emerging Many-Task Computing paradigm; and a unified programming model for data-intensive computing.
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IDC Posits Processor Possibilities

May 01, 2013 | This week we're at the IDC User Forum in Tucson, staying cool amidst some heated talks about which processor, coprocessor and accelerator approaches are going to push into the lead in the next few years. To take this pulse, we sat down with IDC's Steve Conway to talk about some general trends that are a tall drink of water for a few key vendors, including Intel, NVIDIA.....
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NERSC Managers Shed Light on 'Edison'

Apr 29, 2013 | The Department of Energy's National Energy Research Scientific Computing (NERSC) Center accepted the first phase of its new Cray Cascade system, named Edison. To find out the reasoning behind the design and deployment of Edison and what it means to NERSC's 4,500 users, Jon Bashor of Berkeley Lab Computing Sciences spoke with NERSC Division Director Sudip Dosanjh, NERSC Systems Department Head Jeff Broughton and Advanced Technologies Group Leader Nick Wright.
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The Week in HPC Research

Apr 25, 2013 | We've scoured the journals and conference proceedings to bring you the top research stories of the week. This diverse set of items includes advancements in petascale-era development environments; balancing performance with power efficiency; optimizing computer science instruction; and a possible path to extreme heterogeneity.
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George Michael Fellowship Helps HPC Community Thrive

Apr 26, 2013 | For doctoral candidates in supercomputing, the George Michael Memorial HPC Fellowship offers a rapid plug-in to the global network of leading high performance computing organizations, from research institutions to industry.
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Adapteva Shows Off $99 Supercomputer Boards

Apr 23, 2013 | Last week, Adapteva revealed the first production units of its $99 Linux "supercomputer." Speaking at the Linux Collaboration Summit in San Francisco, California, CEO Andreas Olofsson announced the first batch of Parallella final form factor boards will be shipped to the chipmaker's 6,300 Kickstarter supporters by this summer.
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A Conversation with Dr. Hans Meuer and Dr. Horst Gietl

Apr 22, 2013 | Gearing up for ISC'13, contributor Miha Ahronovitz examines where HPC has been and where it's headed. In this in-depth interview, Drs. Hans Meuer and Horst Gietl recount the origins of the TOP500 list and wax prophetic on the future of supercomputing, including the peril and promise of parallel programming as well as the long-term shift away from compute centrism.
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Big Red II Colors New Page for Hybrid Systems

Apr 19, 2013 | Later this month, Indiana University will formally introduce the successor to the Big Red system, the aptly-named, Big Red II. The Cray-crafted and tuned system is 25 times faster than its baby brother (the 4100-core original Big Red from 2006) and sports some notable improvements across its 1,020 nodes. According to Thomas Sterling, there are theoretical lessons that can be applied to...
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The Week in HPC Research

Apr 18, 2013 | A giant leap in bone structure research paves the way for advances in osteoporosis treatment; details from UCSD's Research CyberInfrastructure (RCI) Program reveal what PIs really want; and a cloud computing programming model puts the focus on predictable performance. Plus GPU-related research and more...
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Middleware Is Cool

Apr 16, 2013 | Despite the important advances that middleware enables in both the HPC and enterprise spheres, it generally fails to elicit the same excitement as, say, brand-new leadership class hardware. But middleware, such as Adaptive Computing's intelligent management engine, Moab, is cool and you don't have to take Adaptive's word for it. During the company's annual user event last week, Gartner gave Adaptive its "Cool Vendor" stamp of approval.
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Future Challenges of Large-Scale Computing

Apr 15, 2013 | Ahead of his opening conference keynote at ISC'13, Bill Dally, chief scientist at NVIDIA and senior vice president of NVIDIA Research, shares his views on where HPC is headed. Among the key topics covered are the demand for heterogenous computing, overcoming the memory wall, the implications of government belt-tightening, and much more...
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Exascale Blood Dries on U.S. Axe

Apr 11, 2013 | The federal R&D budget figures for 2014 have been released and as many suspected following last year’s pushback on the exascale timeline, there was no room left in the government wallet for one quintillion FLOPS. According to Dr. John Holdren, who remarked on the federal research and development...
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Moonshot Highlights HPC’s Longshot

Apr 11, 2013 | While Moonshot might be wooing the mobile and hosting camp, there is something more compelling here for HPC. This concept presents high-density, low-power servers with the ability to swap in accelerators, DSPs, GPUs, FPGAs to create an efficient heterogeneous platform that is tailored around specific workloads.
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The Week in HPC Research

Apr 11, 2013 | The top research stories of the week include an evaluation of multi-stage programming with Terra; a look at parallel I/O for multicore architectures; a survey of on-chip monitoring approaches used in multicore SoCs; a review of grid security protocols and architectures; and a discussion of the finer distinctions between HPC and cloud computing.
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Heterogeneous Computing in Firing Range

Apr 08, 2013 | Despite developer hassle, this is a great problem from the perspective of companies who are finding ways to tailor clean layers around complex code for heterogeneous computing. Take, for example, Atlanta-based AccelerEyes, which is seeing booming business because of the demand for GPU acceleration and interest in kicking the Xeon Phi co-processor tires.
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Revelations on Roadrunner's Retirement

Apr 04, 2013 | Following our news report this week on the shuttering of the petaflop pioneer system at Los Alamos National Lab, Roadrunner, we were finally able to snag someone to share on the post-mortem plans for the system, not to mention what some of the considerations were for housing a unique architecture like....
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Stacking Stairs Against the Memory Wall

Apr 02, 2013 | With ever-mounting CPU advancements that promise superior performance, the blame for lousy delivery on those chip promises lies squarely on memory. This problem isn’t just a matter of application performance—it’s also a matter of efficiency. This week Micron with partners Intel and others, including Altera, IBM, ARM, Xilinx and others.....
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