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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Salvaging Encanto

Jan 11, 2013 | Once intended to save New Mexico from economic uncertainty, now the Encanto supercomputer needs saving. This former number-three superstar is headed to the chopping block. The state is planning to sell off parts of the system to local research universities to recoup some of its investment and pay off outstanding debts.
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A One-of-a-Kind Supercomputer to Map the Cosmos

Jan 09, 2013 | A new petascale supercomputer built to study the universe is one of the fastest calculating machines in the world, and certainly the fastest of its kind. The supercomputer is part of ALMA, a new radio telescope that is claimed to be "largest ground-based astronomical project in existence."
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Berkeley Lab Contemplates Stepping Stone to Exascale Supercomputer

Jan 08, 2013 | The National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) at Berkeley Lab has recently begun installing Edison, the Cray supercomputer that will exceed two peak petaflops when its fully deployed in a couple of months. But the center is already prepping for its next-generation system, which is expected to be an order of magnitude more powerful. That supercomputer may be the center's last big deployment prior to the exascale era.
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Polish HPC Consortium Boosts Prospects for Local Scientists

Jan 02, 2013 | Poland is not usually thought of as a supercomputing powerhouse. Until recently, most of the local research and academic centers housed only modest-sized HPC clusters for Polish researchers. That is now changing with the POWIEW project, a consortium devoted to bringing world-class high performance computing to the nation's scientists.
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Top 10 Hits and Misses for 2012

Dec 13, 2012 | In the world of high performance computing, a lot of the important news this year revolved around heterogeneous computing, big data, and HPC interconnects. Two vendors that perhaps embodied those technologies more so than others were Cray and Intel, both of which figured prominently in some of the biggest HPC stories in 2012. Here are HPCwire's highlights and lowlights for the year.
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BP Brings Petascale Computing to Oil and Gas Industry

Dec 12, 2012 | British multinational BP revealed it is building a new datacenter in Houston to house a 2-petaflop supercomputer. When installed in 2013, it will likely be the most powerful system deployed by a commercial entity, at least of the ones that have been publicly revealed. The upcoming petaflopper will support the company's oil and gas exploration efforts and other research objectives.
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HPC as a Service: Lessons Learned

Dec 10, 2012 | After a fast-paced three months, round 1 of the HPC Experiment (also known as the Uber-Cloud Experiment) concluded last month, with more than 160 participating organizations and individuals from 25 countries, working together in 25 international teams. In this article we present their main findings, challenges, and their lessons learned.
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The New Breed of Accelerators from NVIDIA, Intel and AMD Square Off

Dec 06, 2012 | With the recent introduction of Intel's first Xeon Phi coprocessors, NVIDIA's latest Kepler GPUs, and AMD's new FirePro S10000 graphics card, the competition for HPC chip componentry has entered a new phase. The three chipmakers have taken somewhat different paths though, and it will be up to the market to decide which vendor's approach will win the day.
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GPU Monster Shreds Password Hashes

Dec 06, 2012 | Today's notion of safe passwords may soon be a thing of the past. Thanks to cheaper hardware, cloud software, and free password cracking programs, it's easier than ever to hack these digital keys. Just how easy? Earlier this week, a custom-built GPU cluster tore through 348 billion password hashes per second during the Passwords^12 Conference in Oslo, Norway.
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Neutron Science and Supercomputing Come Together at Oak Ridge National Lab

Dec 04, 2012 | As the data sets generated by the increasingly powerful neutron scattering instruments at ORNL's Spallation Neutron Source (SNS) grow ever more massive, the facility's users require significant advances in data reduction and analysis tools. To meet the challenge, SNS data specialists have teamed with ORNL's Computing and Computational Sciences Directorate.
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DOE Commissions Extreme Computing Study

Dec 03, 2012 | The Council on Competitiveness has been awarded a $914,000 grant from the Department of Energy to explore the implications of the emerging post-petaflop era and the challenges associated with extreme computing. HPCwire talks to Council on Competitiveness Senior Vice President Cynthia R. McIntyre to learn more about the project.
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