Developers Tout GPI Model for Exascale Computing

Jun 19, 2013 | Supercomputer architectures have evolved considerably over the last 20 years, particularly in the number of processors that are linked together. One aspect of HPC architecture that hasn't changed is the MPI programming model.
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Supercomputers: Not Always the Best for Big Data

Jun 18, 2013 | The world's largest supercomputers, like Tianhe-2, are great at traditional, compute-intensive HPC workloads, such as simulating atomic decay or modeling tornados. But data-intensive applications--such as mining big data sets for connections--is a different sort of workload, and runs best on a different sort of computer.
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Gordon Flashes Its Versatility in HPC Workloads

Jun 18, 2013 | Researchers are finding innovative uses for Gordon, the 285 teraflop supercomputer housed at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) that has a unique Flash-based storage system. Since going online, researchers have put the incredibly fast I/O to use on a wide variety of workloads, ranging from chemistry to political science.
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Supercomputers: Still the King of the HPC Hill

Jun 17, 2013 | The advent of low-power mobile processors and cloud delivery models is changing the economics of computing. But just as an economy car is good at different things than a full size truck, an HPC workload still has certain computing demands that neither the fastest smartphone nor the most elastic cloud cluster can fulfill.
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TACC Longhorn Takes On Natural Language Processing

Jun 14, 2013 | For all the progress we've made in IT over the last 50 years, there's one area of life that has steadfastly eluded the grasp of computers: understanding human language. Now, researchers at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) are utilizing a Hadoop cluster on its Longhorn supercomputer to move the state of the art of language processing a little bit further.
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Titan Didn't Redo LINPACK for June Top 500 List

Jun 13, 2013 | Titan, the Cray XK7 at the Oak Ridge National Lab that debuted last fall as the fastest supercomputer in the world with 17.59 petaflops of sustained computing power, will rely on its previous LINPACK test for the upcoming edition of the Top 500 list.
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Top Supercomputer Signals Growth of Chinese HPC Industry

Jun 12, 2013 | At 31 petaflops of sustained LINPACK capacity, the new Chinese Tianhe-2 supercomputer will be the fastest supercomputer in the world when this month's Top 500 list comes out, as we reported previously in HPCwire.
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Intel Says Haswell Chips Offer ISVs Full OpenCL Compatibility

Jun 12, 2013 | HPC system makers are lining up to announce compatibility with the new fourth generation Intel Core processor, codenamed "Haswell." The new Iris GPUs based on the Haswell architecture are giving Intel new credibility in the graphics processing department.
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Australia Buys Cray Supercomputer to Model New Submarine

Jun 12, 2013 | A Cray supercomputer will help with the design of Australia's next-generation submarine platform. The government's Department of Defence is expected to take delivery on the new system in July.
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The 5 Minute Guide to Parallel and Vector Software Programming

Jun 10, 2013 | Learning how to write parallel and vector HPC programs will take a lot longer than five minutes. But with a series of five-minute videos introduced this week, Intel's director and parallel programming evangelist James Reinders gives prospective parallel and vector programmers an introduction to the tools and techniques they'll use to write code for the chip giant's latest processors and coprocessors.
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Brazilian Researcher Awarded Grant to Study GPUs and FPGAs

Jun 07, 2013 | HPC researcher Eduardo Marques has received a grant from the São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP) to investigate the use of field-programmable gate-arrays (FPGAs) and graphics processor units (GPUs) to boost throughput in custom HPC machines.
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Mapping the Energy Envelope of Multicore ARM Chips

Jun 06, 2013 | Bigger is not always better in the world of supercomputing. While data scientists almost always desire more computational throughput, the key question is how best to deliver that: through traditional, power-hungry X64 processors, or through the cheap, low-power ARM processors that drive smartphones and tablets? The answer is not always clear.
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Dust Storms Put GPU CPU Performance to the Test

Jun 06, 2013 | A team of researchers modeling environmental events looked to the relative efficiencies of using GPU and CPU approaches for their processing and rendering. While CPUs were needed due to limited on-board GPU memory....
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Researchers Squeeze Record I/O from Hopper

Jun 05, 2013 | Researchers with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Cray squeezed more I/O from the NERSC Cray XE6 "Hopper" supercomputer than ever before in a plasma physics simulation involving more than a trillion particles. The work paved the way for even bigger, exascale HDF5 workloads in the future, and yielded a scientific discovery as a bonus.
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hpc4energy Incubator Touts Successes with Energy Companies

Jun 04, 2013 | HPC can save energy companies enormous amounts of time in the development of new products and technologies compared to the traditional methods, according to hpc4energy.org, an incubator project at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
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Researchers Tap Cray Super to Decode HIV-I Interior

Jun 03, 2013 | Researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign have successfully modeled the interior of the HIV-1 virus using the new Blue Waters supercomputer at that university. The work has the potential to open the door to new antiretroviral drugs that target HIV-1, the virus that causes AIDS.
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TACC's Hadoop Cluster Breaks New Ground

May 30, 2013 | A 256-node Hadoop system at the University of Texas at Austin is breaking down the barriers that have traditionally kept high performance computing relegated to technical experts. Nearly 70 students and researchers at TACC have used the cluster to crunch big datasets, and provide potential answers to questions in the fields of biomedicine, linguistics, and astronomy.
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Running Stochastic Models on HTCondor

May 30, 2013 | In an effort to evaluate creative methods of participating in large scientific projects, research out of Brigham Young University done by Spencer Taylor examined the open source software HTCondor, which makes use of computing power from idle computers to perform jobs on a local network.
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GASPI Targets Exascale Programming Limits

May 28, 2013 | As we look ahead to the exascale era, many have noted that there will be some limitations to the MPI programming model. According to researchers who work on the Global Address Space Programming Interface...
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NASA Builds 'Climate in a Box'

May 23, 2013 | The study of climate change is one of those scientific problems where it is almost essential to model the entire Earth to attain accurate results and make worthwhile predictions. In an attempt to make climate science more accessible to smaller research facilities, NASA introduced what they call ‘Climate in a Box,’ a system they note acts as a desktop supercomputer.
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Building Supercomputers with Raspberries

May 22, 2013 | At some point in the not-too-distant future, building powerful, miniature computing systems will be considered a hobby for high schoolers, just as robotics or even Lego-building are today. That could be made possible through recent advancements made with the Raspberry Pi computers.
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Running Computational Fluid Dynamics in the Cloud

May 16, 2013 | When it comes to cloud, long distances mean unacceptably high latencies. Researchers from the University of Bonn in Germany examined those latency issues of doing CFD modeling in the cloud by utilizing a common CFD and its utilization in HPC instance types including both CPU and GPU cores of Amazon EC2.
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Computing the Physics of Bubbles

May 15, 2013 | Supercomputers at the Department of Energy’s National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) have worked on important computational problems such as collapse of the atomic state, the optimization of chemical catalysts, and now modeling popping bubbles.
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Internet2 Awards Program Seeks Innovative Applications

May 10, 2013 | Program provides cash awards up to $10,000 for the best open-source end-user applications deployed on 100G network.
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Floating Funding to Exascale Island

May 09, 2013 | The Japanese government has revealed its plans to best its previous K Computer efforts with what they hope will be the first exascale system...
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