My Supercomputer is Bigger Than Yours!

Jun 18, 2013 | Contributing commentator, Andrew Jones, offers a break in the news cycle with an assessment of what the national "size matters" contest means for the U.S. and other nations...
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Alternatives Emerge as Linpack Loses Ground

Jun 18, 2013 | Today at the International Supercomputing Conference in Leipzing, Germany, Jack Dongarra presented on a proposed benchmark that could carry a bit more weight than its older Linpack companion. The high performance conjugate gradient (HPCG) concept takes into account new architectures for new applications, while shedding the floating point....
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Intel Snaps New Grips to HPC Hook

Jun 17, 2013 | Not content to let the Tianhe-2 announcement ride alone, Intel rolled out a series of announcements around its Knights Corner and Xeon Phi products--all of which are aimed at adding some options and variety for a wider base of potential users across the HPC spectrum. Today at the International Supercomputing Conference, the company's Raj....
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Top 500 Results Reveal Global Acceleration, Balance Shift

Jun 17, 2013 | The Top 500 list of the world's fastest computers has just been announced. Not surprisingly, since it's been reported on prior to the official announcement, the Chinese Tianhe-2 system tops the list. And that is an understatement. We talk with Jack Dongarra, Horst Simon, Hans Meuer and others from the....
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Six Can't Miss Sessions for ISC'13

Jun 13, 2013 | Outside of the main attractions, including the keynote sessions, vendor showdowns, Think Tank panels, BoFs, and tutorial elements, the International Supercomputing Conference has balanced its five-day agenda with some striking panels, discussions and topic areas that are worthy of some attention....
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Intel Carves Mainstream Highway for Lustre

Jun 12, 2013 | Today Intel announced some new pitches to push Lustre in front of enterprise eyeballs with usability features for Lustre and a total rip and replace for the native Hadoop file system designed to appeal to the HPC-oriented Hadoop set. We talked with Brent Gorda, former CEO and founder of Whamcloud, which Intel acquired just a tick under a year ago about how....
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The Network as a Scientific Instrument

Jun 10, 2013 | Greg Bell was recently tapped to head the U.S. Department of Energy's Energy Sciences Network, better known as ESnet. In this piece, he describes how the network itself is part of the scientific process. During his Q&A with Berkley Lab's Jon Bashor, Bell notes how there are.....
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Blacklisted Russian Supercomputing Company Speaks to Suspicions

Jun 07, 2013 | A few months ago, the U.S. Department of Commerce named the Russian supercomputer company, T-Platforms, on their entity list based on vaguely worded assertions that they were involved with supplying systems designed to create weapons of mass destruction. The company has, not surprisingly, denied the allegations and gave HPCwire an exclusive interview to....
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Dell Boxes Up HPC for Life Sciences

Jun 05, 2013 | This week Dell announced a tailored offering for the genomics set with its Active Infrastructure for HPC Life Sciences offering. Outfitted with up 32 nodes in a single rack, the company is pitching Infiniband, Lustre, Terascala and Bright Computing options at the sequencing set that they say wants to focus on science, not servers. The Intel-powered...
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Full Details Uncovered on Chinese Top Supercomputer

Jun 02, 2013 | With help from a draft report from Jack Dongarra of the University of Tennessee and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, who also spearheads the process of verifying the top of the pack super, we are able to share the full processor, Xeon Phi coprocessor, custom interconnect, storage and memory, as well as power and cooling information. The supercomputer out of China will be...
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Blue Waters Seals Off with Tape

May 30, 2013 | This week the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) confirmed that its anticipated 380 petabyte High Performance Storage System (HPSS) is up and running to support the data-laden needs of Blue Waters. The collaborative efforts behind HPSS are...
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Details Emerge About China's 50+ Petaflop Chart-Topper

May 29, 2013 | We have some new details that filtered in with some credible community input through the night about China's 50+ petaflop system. We have been able to confirm a number of the points of speculation and rumor, including the vendor, the exact Linpack results, the location of the system, and the fact that it is a MIC....
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Is China Set to Unveil Record-Shattering Supercomputer?

May 28, 2013 | When so many folks from the HPC community come at us with credible details about something as important as the next top system on the planet, it's hard to ignore. To quiet things down (and hopefully bring forth more information) we've published the consistent details about what we know from (very) credible sources.about this year's upcoming Top500 announcement. While unconfimed, we have....
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Grid Engine Pistons Pump Past HPC

May 28, 2013 | Since its early days, Grid Engine has enjoyed a special spot in high performance computing, especially in the realms of scientific and research computing. However, with changes in Platform Computing's operations and a new era of high performance (but not HPC) business apps, Univa's Grid Engine is almost all enterprise-based. We recently chatted with Univa CEO, Gary Tyreman and...
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Exascale Advocates Stand on Nuclear Stockpiles

May 23, 2013 | In quieter times, sounding the bell of funding big science with big systems tends to resonate further than when ears are already burning with sour economic and national security news. For exascale's future, however, the time could be ripe to instill some sense of urgency....
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NSF Forges Further Beyond FLOPs

May 22, 2013 | In a recent solicitation, the NSF laid out needs for furthering its scientific and engineering infrastructure with new tools to go beyond top performance, Having already delivered systems like Stampede and Blue Waters, they're turning an eye to solving data-intensive challenges. We spoke with the agency's Irene Qualters and Barry Schneider about..
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CERN, Google Drive Future of Global Science Initiatives

May 21, 2013 | Large-scale, worldwide scientific initiatives rely on some cloud-based system to both coordinate efforts and manage computational efforts at peak times that cannot be contained within the combined in-house HPC resources. Last week at Google I/O, Brookhaven National Lab’s Sergey Panitkin discussed the role of the Google Compute Engine in providing computational support to ATLAS, a detector of high-energy particles at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
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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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