HPCwire: The Week in Review

The Leading Source for Global News and Information Covering the Ecosystem of High Productivity Computing

HPCwire >> Topic >> Systems

January 21, 2010

The Week in Review

by Tiffany Trader, Associate Editor, HPCwire

Here is a collection of highlights from this week's news stream as reported by HPCwire.

MIT Researchers Use Ranger to Improve Solar Photovoltaic Cells

ISC'10 Seeks Proposals, Student Volunteers

Pico Computing Offers New Platform for FPGA Algorithm Prototyping

Inphi Samples a New Class of Memory Modules

Quantum Releases StorNext 4.0 Software

H1N1 Modeling Shows Short-Term School Closures May Worsen Flu Pandemics

IBM Reports 2009 Fourth-Quarter and Full-Year Results

Founder Driggers Purchases Verari Systems' Assets

Fujitsu, A*STAR's IHPC Partner to Develop Petascale Applications

Platform Computing Integrates Symphony with Calypso's Galapagos Product

Acceleware Delivers 100X Speed Up for Solar Cell Simulations

Voltaire InfiniBand Fabric Accelerates South Africa's Largest Supercomputer

New Research Resolves Conflict in Theory of How Galaxies Form

Virtual supercomputing moves one step closer

A team of researchers from Northwestern University, Sandia National Labs and the University of New Mexico have recently completed the largest study of the virtualization of a parallel supercomputing system. The team successfully virtualized Sandia's Red Storm supercomputer using a virtual machine monitor called Palacios. They tested up to 4,096 nodes, double the number of previous studies.

Peter A. Dinda, associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science at Northwestern's McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science, sums up the challenges involved in virtualizing supercomputing resources:

"Virtualizing a parallel supercomputer is particularly challenging because of the need to support extremely low latency, high-bandwidth communication among thousands of virtual machines," Dinda says. "Supercomputing users and the owners of supercomputers will not tolerate any performance compromises because the machines are so expensive to acquire and maintain, but, on the other hand, they also want access to the benefits of virtualization."

Because virtualization effectfully cuts the connection between the hardware and operating system, it allows researchers to run their programs without having to first tune them to the supercomputer's specific software/hardware specs. And there are other benefits to virtualization, like being able to share memory and run multiple operating systems. But none of that means much to researchers if running their application on a virtualized system results in a big performance hit. That's why it's important to note that overhead on Palacios measured at under 5 percent. Not bad, considering the number of nodes involved.

Overall, the cost, space and power benefits conveyed by virtualization are so attractive that researchers will continue to look for ways to virtualize HPC resources, despite the latency and bandwidth challanges. This week, they just got a little closer to the holy grail of a virtual supercomputer.

Princeton University plans new research computing center

Princeton University announced plans to build a new high-performance computing facility on the Forrestal Campus, about three miles north of the main campus. The new High-Performance Research Computing Center will be located near the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Lab, where it will serve as the home of TIGRESS, the Terascale Infrastructure for Groundbreaking Research in Engineering and Science Center. The center would also support part of the schoool's administrative computing capacity.

From the release:

The new facility would have approximately 40,000 square feet and would comprise three functional components: a computing area; an electrical and mechanical support area; and a small office/support area. The two-story building would be about 50 feet high.

...
TIGRESS is intended to create a well-balanced set of high-performance computing resources to meet the broad computational requirements of the University research community.

According to Curt Hillegas, director of TIGRESS, the university needed to take action to create a new center and relocate TIGRESS because computational demands are exceeding the capacity of current resources. The Forrestal site's location will enhance university partnerships with nearby sites, the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Lab and the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory.

If all goes as planned, the facility will be operational in 2011 with a three-person support staff. While the facility is expected to serve the university's needs through at least 2017, the site proposal allows for future expansion, and a second phase of construction could double square footage.

Article Tools

Share Options

(Digg, Technorati, more)

Subscribe

Subscribe to HPCwire

Discussion

There are 0 discussion items posted.

Join the Discussion

You must be a registered user in order to comment on HPCwire stories.

Members enjoy:

	Access to Special Content, including Podcasts, Webcasts, and Whitepapers and more!
	Ability to take an active role in the discussions that are shaping the HPC technology discipline!
	Special offers available only to HPCwire members!

Become a Registered User Today!

Registered Users Log in Here to Comment

Email Address:	Password (case sensitive)

Remember me	Forgot Password?

RSS Feeds

Feeds by Topic

Feeds by Industry

Feeds by Content Type

Feature Articles

Moscow State University Supercomputer Has Petaflop Aspirations

The Moscow State University supercomputer, Lomonosov, has been selected for a high-performance makeover, with the goal of tripling its processing power to achieve petaflop-level performance in 2010. T-Platforms, who developed and manufactured the supercomputer, is the odds-on favorite to lead the project.
Read More...

Intel Ups Performance Ante with Westmere Server Chips

Right on schedule, Intel has launched its Xeon 5600 processors, codenamed "Westmere EP." The 5600 represents the 32nm sequel to the Xeon 5500 (Nehalem EP) for dual-socket servers. Intel is touting better performance and energy efficiency, along with new security features, as the big selling points of the new Xeons.
Read More...

The Week in Review

The ACM Turing Award goes to the creator of the modern personal computer; and Voltaire announces a mid-range InfiniBand switch and new technology that accelerates distributed applications. We recap those stories and more in our weekly wrapup.
Read More...

Read more HPCwire features...

Top Headlines

AMD: OEMs primed for Opteron 6100s

Mar 17 | The Register | But what about the tier ones? Read more...

Arrival of the Desktop Supercomputer

Mar 17 | Cadalyst Magazine | A new generation of workstations is changing the nature of technical computing. Read more...

Scheduling HPC In The Cloud

Mar 17 | Linux Magazine | Latest iteration of Sun Grid Engine able to tap into Cloud. Read more...

Tailoring Medicine with Supercomputers

Mar 16 | Bio-IT World | Biotech firm builds genetic models from patient data. Read more...

Gelsinger Stuns Analysts and Colleagues with Storage Pool Plan

Mar 15 | The Register | EMC's grand vision for unified global storage. Read more...

Read more headlines...

Featured Whitepapers

Virtualization for Aggregation And The vSMP Architecture™

Jan 12 | | In-depth look at vSMP Foundation server virtualization technology, technical implementation, use cases and capabilities. The technical whitepaper provides an architectural overview and details on the three vSMP Foundation products: vSMP Foundation for SMP, vSMP Foundation for Cluster and vSMP Foundation for Cloud.

Copper Cable Technologies for High Performance Computing

Jan 18 | | This white paper discusses Gore’s copper cable assemblies, and how they continue to exceed the standards for providing reliable, cost-effective solutions for high-performance computer applications.

View the White Paper Library

Multimedia

Webcast: Virtualized Data Center Roundtable

Join this online panel discussion for live Q&A with leading industry experts, analysts, and end-users to discuss the latest innovations, best practices, barriers to implementation, and measurable benefits of server virtualization with a particular focus on today's real world solutions.

Webcast: Watch SC09 Birds of a Feather Video: Scalable Fault-Tolerant HPC Supercomputers

Learn about scalable fault-tolerant architectures and examples of energy efficient and scalable supercomputing clusters using dual QDR InfiniBand to combine capacity computing with network failover capabilities with the help of programming languages such as MPI and a robust Linux cluster management package.

Webcast: High Performance Computing for a Smarter Planet

LIVE@SCO9: The IBM team discusses new innovations in hardware, software and services that help clients better understand their workloads and get insight from their R&D efforts. Technology demonstrations include the soon-to-be-released Power7 HPC processor, the DCS990 system with 2.4 petabytes of storage, the xCAT management tool, secure HPC cloud computing and more. Winners of two HPCwire Readers' and Editors’ Choice Awards! Take the IBM virtual tour at SC09 or more information go online to: http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/deepcomputing/sc09.html