The Leading Source for Global News and Information Covering the Ecosystem of High Productivity Computing
November 19, 2008
John West talks with John Lee, vice president of advanced technology solutions for Appro; Steve Cumings, director of infrastructure for HP's Scalable Computing and Infrastructure Group; Morgan Littlewood, vice president of Violin Memory; Jim Falgout, chief technologist for Pervasive's DataRush; and Dave Ellis, director of HPC architecture for LSI, on the SC08 show floor. John also finds a few more unsuspecting conference-goers to participate in our Two-Option Audio Quiz.
John Lee, Vice President of Advanced Technology Solutions for Appro
Yesterday HPCwire got a chance to sit down with John Lee, the vice president of advanced technology solutions for Appro to talk about the company, what they're showing on the show floor this year, and where Appro is headed. Joining us for the conversation was Graeme Hackland, the IT manager for the Renault F1 team, one of Appro's big HPC customers. An interesting thing about Formula 1 racing is that nearly everything -- from the engine with its 19000 RPM limit to the Bridgestone tires that all the teams use -- is the same. So Formula 1 comes down to the driver, who (sadly) cannot be engineered, and aerodynamics. CFD is one of the disciplines that have historically made excellent use of HPC, and Formula 1 racing is one sport where a supercomputer can make the difference between winning and losing. Graeme was there to talk about HPC from a user's perspective, and to keep his championship 2006 Formula 1 racecar company as it drew visitors like a magnet to Appro's booth.
Download the audio (MP3).
Steve Cumings, Director of Infrastructure for HP's Scalable Computing and Infrastructure Group, Gives Tour of HP's Pod
On Tuesday HPCwire had a chance to do a walking tour of HP's Pod, one of the IT shipping container solutions that have come on the market in the past year. I was surprised at how interesting this tour was -- there is a lot of engineering that goes into cramming a datacenter in to a shipping container, and that plus the fit and finish make HP's Pod one of the few pieces of datacenter kit that have to be experienced to be fully appreciated. At an equipment density of over 1800 watts per square foot, and the potential of keeping the "cold" aisle at a balmy 90 degrees (fahrenheit, of course!), this container solution can offer a lot of environmentally friendly datacenter capacity. The Pod was outside the show floor in the parking lot of one of the conference hotels, and it was a beautiful afternoon in the American West as Steve Cumings, director of infrastructure for HP's Scalable Computing and Infrastructure group, walked me through a turn around this fascinating collection of technology.
Download the audio (MP3).
Morgan Littlewood, Vice President of Violin Memory
HPCwire spent some time with Morgan Littlewood, vice president memory appliance maker Violin Memory, talking about their new 2U appliance that scales to 4 TB of flash memory but presents as a disk system to your compute environment. The company has had early wins with database customers, but they are now also growing into customers with an HPC workload, particularly those with applications in biotechnology and pharmaceutical research where users need to rapidly move through very large quantities of data.
Download the audio (MP3).
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Petascale Computing: Algorithms and Applications, edited by David A. Bader, is the first book in CRC's Computational Science Series, edited by Horst Simon. Although the book is a collection of papers, Bader has done an excellent job of creating a compilation that holds together and covers a broad topic very well.
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Cilk++ used in parallelization of the FP-tree algorithm for pattern mining; Istanbul benchmark results posted; and the latest on the NVIDIA Tesla shortage. John West recaps those stories and more in our weekly wrap-up.
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Last week's International Supercomputing Conference (ISC'09) was a convenient excuse for vendors to announce a raft of new products, but three, in particular, stood out.
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Jul 01 | GenomeWeb Daily News | The popularity of cloud computing in the life sciences community was on full display at April's Bio-IT World conference. Read more...
Jul 01 | Linux Magazine | How can getting to the ocean help with HPC computing? Read more...
Jun 29 | GCN.com | Agency issues RFI for "Ubiquitous High Performance Computing" systems. Read more...
Jun 29 | Computerworld | The bottom of the TOP500 reveals the coming revolution in truly accessible high-end computing. Read more...
Jun 18 | EE Times | Parallel software also takes spotlight at Stanford confab. Read more...
Apr 14 | | Many HPC IT departments are feeling the rising pressure to deliver more capacity computing and performance while trying to reduce the total cost of ownership. This white paper discusses how an environmentally-friendly and open-standards HPC building block based computing system using flexible interconnect options helps address capacity computing needs.
Source: Addison Snell, GM/VP, Tabor Research; sponsored by Dell
Many organizations that could benefit from the use of HPC clusters find that it is complicated to get the systems up and running because of limited IT resources or the complexities of the clusters themselves. Learn how the Intel Cluster Ready program, for which Dell was an original partner, seeks to address this challenge for entry level and mid-range HPC users.
BlueArc's Titan architecture represents an evolutionary step in file servers by creating a hardware-based file system that can scale bandwidth, IOPS, and overall data capacity well beyond conventional software-based devices. With its ability to virtualize a massive storage pool of up to four usable petabytes of tiered storage, Titan can scale with growing data requirements, offering a competitive advantage for businesses, researchers, or other enterprises seeking to better manage data growth while still ensuring optimal performance.
Sun Studio Compilers and Tools and Sun HPC ClusterTools allow you to create high performance parallel applications for OpenSolaris, Solaris and Linux. Sun Studio Express 11/08 includes MPI performance analysis capabilities and full OpenMP 3.0 compiler support. Learn about all this and the latest in Sun HPC ClusterTools 8.1.