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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Xyratex Captures Oracle's Lustre

Feb 21, 2013 | With the announcement this week that storage maker Xyratex has acquired Oracle's Lustre assets, the popular open source parallel file system is once again completely under the control of HPC stakeholders.
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Hartree Centre Puts $45 Million Toward UK Innovation

Feb 21, 2013 | With $45 million in government funding, the research center will develop software to make supercomputers more efficient and to help process data from the SKA, the world's largest radio telescope. The technology is being developed with industry partners, and will be made available to scientific and industrial organizations in the UK.
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The Week in HPC Research

Feb 21, 2013 | The top research stories of the week have been hand-selected from prominent journals and leading conference proceedings. Here's another diverse set of items, including one on GPU programming, distributed file systems, exhaustive search with parallel agents, the benefits of invasive computing, and an HPC cloud proof-of-concept.
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Yottamine Serves Up Predictive Analytics On-Demand

Feb 18, 2013 | Startup Yottamine Analytics is riding the twin waves of cloud and big data. Its cloud-based predictive modeling solution combines the benefits of EC2 spin-up automation and large-scale program parallelism to provide predictive power by the hour for pennies a minute.
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Supercomputing Crucial to Clean Energy Production

Feb 13, 2013 | The Office of Fossil Energy's National Energy Technology Laboratory is the proud owner of a brand new SGI supercomputer. Named High-Performance Computer for Energy and the Environment, or HPCEE for short, the 500 teraflops machine will help NETL scientists undertake a broad range of energy and environmental research, with a focus on coal, natural gas and oil.
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The Week in HPC Research

Feb 14, 2013 | The top research stories of the week have been hand-selected from major science centers, prominent journals and leading conference proceedings. Here's another diverse set of items, including whole brain simulation; a look at High Performance Linpack; the coming GPGPU cloud paradigm; heterogenous GPU programming; and a comparison of accelerator-based servers.
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A Sterling Future For HPC

Feb 11, 2013 | At ISC '13 in Leipzig, Germany in June, Thomas Sterling will deliver a keynote that examines the accomplishments in HPC over the last decade. He plans to reveal "the true achievement of our field." The Father of Beowulf will also offer a collection of predictions for the next decade from key HPC leaders. HPCwire asked him to make a few predictions of his own.
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UK Creates Massive 200,000-Core 'HPC Service'

Feb 07, 2013 | The United Kingdom is rapidly ramping up its HPC capabilities. The nation just launched its third HPC service in the last 12 months, a 200,000-core powerhouse, called "Accelerator," designed to accommodate a wide range of academic and industry workloads.
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The Week in HPC Research

Feb 07, 2013 | The top research stories of the week have been hand-selected from prominent science journals and leading conference proceedings. Here's another diverse set of items, including GPGPU programming challenges, checkpoint-restart for HPC cloud applications, some distributed computing primers, novel methods for detecting concurrency errors, and the latest patent applications.
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Dell Buys Dell In Order To Expand Its Datacenter Server Business

Feb 06, 2013 | Michael Dell's decision to take his company private is his attempt to solve The Innovator's Dilemma. He wants to get beyond the PC business and into datacenters and HPC. It's a bold and risky move, and may be his best chance of making the change happen.
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NVIDIA Scores Green Victory with Italian Supercomputer

Feb 05, 2013 | Last week, Eurotech and NVIDIA announced they had created the most energy-efficient supercomputer in the world, besting the most recent Green500 winner by a margin of 26 percent. NVIDIA credits its new GPU accelerators, along with Eurotech's on-board hot-water cooling system. But Intel has something called the Xeon Phi.
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Steven Chu's DOE Legacy: Big Science, Grand Challenges and Solyndra

Feb 05, 2013 | US Energy Secretary Steven Chu steps down after a controversial term in which he championed high performance computing, launched dozens of energy research centers, and led the government's attempts to help industry transform the country's energy landscape. But his most famous decision was the most politically divisive: backing a company called Solyndra.
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A Small Company Builds a Big Supercomputer

Jan 30, 2013 | Atipa Technologies, a small privately-held division of PC and server maker Microtech Computers, has just sold a $17 million, 3.4 petaflops supercomputer to the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory (EMSL), a DOE government research lab. It's a coup – for Atipa, CPU accelerators and Xeon Phi.
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The Week in HPC Research

Jan 31, 2013 | The top research stories of the week have been hand-selected from prominent science journals and leading conference proceedings. Here's another diverse set of items, including a unique method for in-situ visualization, insight into programming for exascale, a look at green cloud computing and more...
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Stanford Lights Up One Million Sequoia Cores

Jan 28, 2013 | The 20 petaflop, third-generation IBM BlueGene system, Sequoia, may be the number two supercomputer according to the latest TOP500 rankings, but when it comes to max core usage, Sequoia has apparently set a new record. A team of Stanford engineers harnessed one million of Sequoia's nearly 1.6 CPUs in parallel to solve a sophisticated fluid dynamics problem.
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ARM Muscles In on Intel's Dominance in Datacenters

Jan 28, 2013 | ARM chips are moving beyond the mobile device market and into the datacenter. A series of announcements in 2012 point to the enormous interest in the low-power chip architecture. So far, however, customers are just evaluating the business. 2013 will show how well ARM can compete...
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Chelsio Looks to Close Ethernet-InfiniBand Gap

Jan 24, 2013 | This week Chelsio Communications unveiled its latest Ethernet adapter ASIC, which brings 40 gigabit speeds to its RDMA over TCP/IP (iWARP) portfolio. The fifth-generation silicon, dubbed Terminator T5, brings bandwidth and latency within spitting distance of FDR InfiniBand, and according to Chelsio, will actually outperform its IB competition on real-world HPC codes.
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The Week in HPC Research

Jan 24, 2013 | As the name implies, this new feature highlights the top research stories of the week, hand-selected from prominent science journals and leading conference proceedings. This week brings us a wide-range of topics from stopping the spread of pandemics, to the latest trends in programming and chip design, and new tools for enhancing the quality of simulation models.
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STARnet Alliance Seeks Revolution in Chip Design

Jan 23, 2013 | The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC) have launched a new consortium to advance the pace of semiconductor innovation in the US as the technology approaches the limits of miniaturization. The main thrust of the project is the creation of the Semiconductor Technology Advanced Research Network, aka STARnet.
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Waiting for Exascale

Jan 22, 2013 | By current estimates, we're about a decade away from having exascale computing capability. Never before has the HPC community focused so intensively on a machine so far beyond its grasp. Nevertheless, stalwart cadres around the globe are drafting strategies, plans, and roadmaps to get from here to exascale.
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Micron Readies Hybrid Memory Cube for Debut

Jan 17, 2013 | The next-generation memory-maker Micron Technology was one of the many innovative companies demonstrating its wares on the Supercomputing Conference (SC12) show floor last November. Micron's General Manager of Hybrid Technology Scott Graham was on hand to discuss the latest developments in their Hybrid Memory Cube (HMC) technology, a multi-chip module that aims to address one of the biggest challenges in high performance computing: scaling the memory wall.
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DOE to Field Pre-Exascale Supercomputers Within Four Years

Jan 16, 2013 | The national labs at Oak Ridge, Argonne and Lawrence Livermore are banding together for their next refresh of supercomputers. In late 2016 or early 2017, all three Department of Energy (DOE) centers are looking to deploy their first 100-plus petaflop systems, which will serve as precursors to their exascale machine further down the line. The labs will issue a request for proposal (RFP) later this year with the goal of awarding the work to two prime subcontractors.
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HPC Programming in the Age of Multicore: One Man's View

Jan 14, 2013 | At this June's International Supercomputing Conference (ISC'13) in Leipzig, Germany, Gerhard Wellein will be delivering a keynote entitled, Fooling the Masses with Performance Results: Old Classics & Some New Ideas. HPCwire caught up with Wellein and asked him to preview some of the themes of his upcoming talk and expound on his philosophy of programming for performance in the multicore era.
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