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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Requiem for Roadrunner

Apr 01, 2013 | Over the weekend the IBM Roadrunner, which broke the petascale barrier five years ago, was shuttered in favor of a smaller, more nimble and energy efficient at Los Alamos--Cielo. Before it is dismantled and given a full OS, memory and routing autopsy by LANL researchers, we thought it would be a good time to look back...
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HTC, Big Data and the God Particle

Mar 29, 2013 | Contributor Miha Ahronovitz traces the history of high throughput computing (HTC), noting the particularly enthusiastic response from the high energy physics world and the role of HTC in such important discoveries as the Higgs boson. As one of the biggest generators of data, this community has been dealing with the "big data" deluge long before "big data" assumed its position as the buzzword du jour.
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NSF Official On New Supers, Data-Intensive Future

Mar 28, 2013 | This week we spoke with Alan Blatecky who directs the NSF’s Division of Advanced Cyberinfrastrcture about two of supercomputing's biggest announcements of the year-both of which came out in nearly in tandem this week. The introduction of TACC's Dell-Intel powered Stampede and the storied Blue Waters system Cray retailored caused Blatecky to reflect on the balance of data-intensive and....
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The Week in Research

Mar 28, 2013 | There are a few themes that run along this week’s pick for the top research items that emerged over the last seven days. Among these are making systems running HPC applications more efficient, both at the VM and storage layers. Further, we present research on energy efficiency, job scheduling and resource sharing.
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FLOPS Fall Flat for Intelligence Agency

Mar 27, 2013 | The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) is putting out some RFI feelers in hopes of pushing new boundaries with an HPC program. However, at the core of their evaluation process is an overt dismissal of benchmarks, including floating operations per second (FLOPS).
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SGI Snatches Oil and Gas Giant with “Cool” Super

Mar 26, 2013 | European oil and gas giant, Total, has looked to SGI again to supply a super that meets their modeling and simulation needs--but that is focused on power and cooling. The result, based on the SGI ICE X, should pull a top ten ranking on this year's Top 500 list--the most powerful commercial....
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On the Other Side of Moore's Law

Mar 25, 2013 | Intel Senior Fellow Stephen Pawlowski has watched Moore's Law in action for 30 years, helping to develop new microprocessors at the company that Gordon Moore co-founded. Through that time he has made some observations and developed a prediction of his own: A faster version of Moore's Law called Moore Squared, the topic of his coming keynote at ISC'13. We ask him a few questions.
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Volta Adds Charge to GPU Roadmap

Mar 21, 2013 | This week at NVIDIA's GPU Technology Conference, the priorities for GPU computing's future, including providing snappy access to high memory bandwidth, were cited as critical to growing user ranks. The energy consumption, data volume and velocity requirements are giving way to new, more efficient and higher bandwidth approaches, including Volta, which was revealed during the keynote event.
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Penguin Pushes Envelope on Compute Density

Mar 21, 2013 | Penguin Computing keeps finding increasing demand for servers that go heavy on the GPUs (or other coprocessors). Based on feedback from one such customer, it has designed the Relion 2808GT server, which it says now has the highest compute density of any server on the market.
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The Week in HPC Research

Mar 21, 2013 | The top research stories of the week include an evaluation of sparse matrix multiplication performance on Xeon Phi versus four other architectures; a survey of HPC energy efficiency; performance modeling of OpenMP, MPI and hybrid scientific applications using weak scaling; an exploration of anywhere, anytime cluster monitoring; and a framework for data-intensive cloud storage.
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What Will the Sequester Mean to HPC (and Federal) Research?

Mar 20, 2013 | Prominent figures in government, national labs, universities and other research organizations are worried about the effect that sequestration and budget cuts may have on federally-funded R&D in general, and on HPC research in particular. They have been defending the concept in hearings and in editorial pages across the country. It may be a tough argument to sell.
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Swiss 'GPU Supercomputer' Will Be Fastest in Europe

Mar 19, 2013 | During his keynote address for the annual GPU Technology Conference, NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang revealed that the Swiss National Supercomputing Center (CSCS) is building Europe's fastest GPU-accelerated supercomputer, an extension of a Cray system that was announced last year. This will be the first Cray supercomputer equipped with Intel Xeon processors and NVIDA GPUs.
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NREL's Supercomputer Debuts New Technology

Mar 13, 2013 | The DOE's National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) has just completed construction on a state-of-the-art datacenter in preparation for a brand new supercomputer. The high-efficiency 1-petaflops system features the latest servers from HP, including a proprietary direct-to-chip cooling system. NREL has already taken delivery of an initial 200-teraflops machine, and expects the system to reach full capacity this summer.
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The Week in HPC Research

Mar 14, 2013 | The top research stories of the week include the 2012 Turing Prize winners; an examination of MIC acceleration in short-range molecular dynamics simulations; a new computer model to help predict the best HIV treatment; the role of atmospheric clouds in climate change models; and more reliable HPC cloud computing.
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HPC Bolsters Life Sciences

Mar 14, 2013 | HPC, cloud and big data are experiencing this rich synergy, and it seems nowhere is this more evident than in life sciences. The Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Center (MGHPCC), a new state-of-the-art facility in Western Mass., just received more than $4.5 million in funding for a cloud-based system for computational biology that will tap into this union.
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New OpenSFS Rep on the Future of Lustre

Mar 12, 2013 | OpenSFS has chosen its Community Representative Director for 2013: Tommy Minyard, director of Advanced Computing Systems (ACS) at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC). We got the new director's views on Lustre's opportunities in big data and exascale, maintaining a single source tree, and new features on the horizon.
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Jordan Unveils PS3-based Supercomputer

Mar 07, 2013 | The Jordanian government has requisitioned a custom-built supercomputer, which is now being used by universities across the country. What it's made of may be surprising – but it's not unprecedented.
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The Week in HPC Research

Mar 07, 2013 | The top research stories of the week include novel methods of data race detection; a comparison of predictive laws; a review of FPGA's promise; GPU virtualization using PCI Direct pass-through; and an analysis of the Amazon Web Services High-IO platform.
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NetApp, SGI Flex HPC Storage Muscle

Mar 07, 2013 | NetApp and SGI made simultaneous announcements yesterday of new storage systems specifically targeted at HPC and big data applications. NetApp launched its latest offering in the E-Series line of controllers, the NetApp E5500, and OEM partner SGI adopted the technology for its InfiniteStorage 5600 RAID system.
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Mellanox Plots Death of Proprietary Ethernet

Mar 05, 2013 | Mellanox wants to move the world away from closed-code Ethernet switches. The "Generation of Open Ethernet" initiative has been months in the planning. Here's why Mellanox wants to do it...
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XPRESS Route to Exascale

Feb 28, 2013 | The Center for Research in Extreme Scale Computing (CREST) at Indiana University just got a $1.1 million grant to help further the move to exascale computing. Director Thomas Sterling is using some of the money to bolster UI's research into highly parallel processing for HPC. He talks to HPCwire about his plans.
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Utility Supercomputing Heats Up

Feb 28, 2013 | The HPC in the cloud space continues to evolve and one of the companies leading that charge is Cycle Computing. The utility supercomputing vendor recently reported a record-breaking 2012, punctuated by several impressive big science endeavors.
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The Week in HPC Research

Feb 28, 2013 | The top research stories of the week include lessons learned from system failures; a cross-platform OpenCL implementation; the best memory to extract GPU's potential; innovative ideas for next-generation interconnects; and the benefits of cloud storage to HPC applications.
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TOP500: The Missing Puzzle Pieces

Feb 27, 2013 | The TOP500 list provides a valuable source of information to the HPC community. But every year, some of the data requested by the organizers is missing. And wouldn't it be a good idea to add some new data points to the list?
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