The Week in Review

By John E. West

July 31, 2008

Here’s a collection of highlights, selected totally subjectively, from this week’s HPC news stream as reported at insideHPC.com and HPCwire.

>>10 words and a link

Va Tech building a new Mac cluster;
http://insidehpc.com/2008/07/25/vt-building-new-mac-cluster/

IBM’s blades in Rackable’s can;
http://insidehpc.com/2008/07/29/ibms-blades-in-rackables-can/

Tata’s Eka gets efficiency bump to 132.8 TFLOPS;
http://insidehpc.com/2008/07/28/tatas-eka-supercomputer-now-faster-well-not-really/

NCAR Q&A on how they used CUDA to accelerate WRF;
http://insidehpc.com/2008/07/28/ncar-plus-cuda-equal-faster-weather-simulation-community-benefits/

HPC appliance company Acceleware not doing well, restructuring;
http://insidehpc.com/2008/07/28/acceleware-not-doing-well-restructuring/

Purdue works to find SiCortex sweet spot;
http://insidehpc.com/2008/07/29/finding-sicortexs-sweet-spot/

HP, Intel, and Yahoo announce Cloud Computing Test Bed;
http://insidehpc.com/2008/07/29/hp-intel-and-yahoo-create-global-cloud-computing-research-test-bed/

Dallas/Fort-Worth HPC users group formed;
http://insidehpc.com/2008/07/29/dallasfort-worth-hpc-users-group/

Berman urges shift in thinking about cyberinfrastructure;
http://insidehpc.com/2008/07/31/berman-urges-shift-in-thinking-about-ci/

Bull gets PFLOPS order for French military, atomic authority;
http://insidehpc.com/2008/07/31/bull-gets-pflops-order/

>>SGI lays off 105 workers

Found via Joe Landman’s blog, a post to this article at TradingMarkets.com:

California-based Silicon Graphics Inc. reported it was eliminating more than 100 jobs, about 7 percent of its workforce, in a recent filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

SGI, which specializes in high-performance computing, closed its datacenter and labs in Mountain View, Calif. on June 17, a move the [sic] cut about 15 jobs. The data processing activities will be absorbed by the company’s manufacturing facility in Chippewa Falls. According to the filing, “the company plans to hire additional personnel in Chippewa Falls to accommodate these activities.”

On July 15, SGI cut about 90 more employees from its worldwide workforce.

SGI has about 1,600 employees, so this isn’t a huge cut, but given the company’s flagging performance since May of ’07, this is another sign of hard times for the company. You can read the details in the summary of SGI’s 21 July SEC filing.

>>WETA quietly building an HPC powerhouse for digital film effects

You know WETA Digital’s work: the New Zealand-based animation company did the special effects for the Lord of the Rings series, among other stuff. As you might imagine, all that rendering takes computers.

HP announced during ISC in Dresden that WETA had installed 100 TFLOPS of rendering capablity in four different clusters that rank 219-222 on the current TOP500 list. If they were ganged together, WETA would rank somewhere in the first 30 of the Top500. While I don’t know for sure why WETA configured the system in this way, a large customer of HP tells me that the company often encourages customers to break systems up in this way when the aggregate system won’t pierce the very top of the list in order to boost the proportion of the TOP500 slots they hold. Interesting.

WETA is using the new ProLiant BL2×220c blade that lets users cram 12 TFLOPS in a rack about which I wrote in detail here. This blade is part of HP’s launch of its new Scalable Computing & Infrastructure group. As I wrote in that article, that group came from two groups within HP:

…the HPC team with which we are all familiar, and HP’s Scalable Datacenter Infrastructure team. The SDI team has spent the last two years out of the public eye at HP, focused exclusively on a small group of large media and internet services companies, like Weta Digital (the team that did special effects for the Lord of the Rings series), Fox Interactive Media, and snapfish.com (HP’s photo sharing site).

And there’s the WETA connection. The HP systems replaced WETA’s previous IBM BladeCenter systems that held ranks 157, 481, 493, and 496 on the June 2006 list. HP’s site has a few articles referencing their WETA Digital work here and here.

The TOP500 site shows that the config of each ranked system is an HP Cluster Platform 3000 BL2×220 with 624 Intel EM64T Xeon L54xx (Harpertown) 2500 MHz (10 GFLOPS) Quad Core processors. I hear from people familiar with WETA’s installation that HP installed a total of 10 racks for these clusters, or 2,560 sockets. Since the TOP500 configuration shows 2,496 sockets in each cluster, this leaves 16 sockets doing front end and I/O activities. A familiar configuration.

Given the amount of work that rendering takes and the demand for WETA’s skills in Hollywood, it’s not hard to imagine an upgrade to the capability that they’ve already installed. Growing the configuration will be challenging, however, given the power and cooling needs of systems at this scale. There is a lower wattage processor in this configuration that could save the company on infrastructure costs.

According to this report at Forbes in June, New Zealand is in a prolonged drought, and with 60 percent of the country’s power coming from hydroelectric plants, power use is a big concern over there. If you’re from the area, can you confirm this?

I’ll watch the next couple lists for you and see how WETA evolves its infrastructure. It should be interesting.

—–

John West is part of the team that summarizes the headlines in HPC news every day at insideHPC.com. You can contact him at [email protected].

Subscribe to HPCwire's Weekly Update!

Be the most informed person in the room! Stay ahead of the tech trends with industry updates delivered to you every week!

Q&A with Nvidia’s Chief of DGX Systems on the DGX-GB200 Rack-scale System

March 27, 2024

Pictures of Nvidia's new flagship mega-server, the DGX GB200, on the GTC show floor got favorable reactions on social media for the sheer amount of computing power it brings to artificial intelligence.  Nvidia's DGX Read more…

Call for Participation in Workshop on Potential NSF CISE Quantum Initiative

March 26, 2024

Editor’s Note: Next month there will be a workshop to discuss what a quantum initiative led by NSF’s Computer, Information Science and Engineering (CISE) directorate could entail. The details are posted below in a Ca Read more…

Waseda U. Researchers Reports New Quantum Algorithm for Speeding Optimization

March 25, 2024

Optimization problems cover a wide range of applications and are often cited as good candidates for quantum computing. However, the execution time for constrained combinatorial optimization applications on quantum device Read more…

NVLink: Faster Interconnects and Switches to Help Relieve Data Bottlenecks

March 25, 2024

Nvidia’s new Blackwell architecture may have stolen the show this week at the GPU Technology Conference in San Jose, California. But an emerging bottleneck at the network layer threatens to make bigger and brawnier pro Read more…

Who is David Blackwell?

March 22, 2024

During GTC24, co-founder and president of NVIDIA Jensen Huang unveiled the Blackwell GPU. This GPU itself is heavily optimized for AI work, boasting 192GB of HBM3E memory as well as the the ability to train 1 trillion pa Read more…

Nvidia Appoints Andy Grant as EMEA Director of Supercomputing, Higher Education, and AI

March 22, 2024

Nvidia recently appointed Andy Grant as Director, Supercomputing, Higher Education, and AI for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA). With over 25 years of high-performance computing (HPC) experience, Grant brings a Read more…

Q&A with Nvidia’s Chief of DGX Systems on the DGX-GB200 Rack-scale System

March 27, 2024

Pictures of Nvidia's new flagship mega-server, the DGX GB200, on the GTC show floor got favorable reactions on social media for the sheer amount of computing po Read more…

NVLink: Faster Interconnects and Switches to Help Relieve Data Bottlenecks

March 25, 2024

Nvidia’s new Blackwell architecture may have stolen the show this week at the GPU Technology Conference in San Jose, California. But an emerging bottleneck at Read more…

Who is David Blackwell?

March 22, 2024

During GTC24, co-founder and president of NVIDIA Jensen Huang unveiled the Blackwell GPU. This GPU itself is heavily optimized for AI work, boasting 192GB of HB Read more…

Nvidia Looks to Accelerate GenAI Adoption with NIM

March 19, 2024

Today at the GPU Technology Conference, Nvidia launched a new offering aimed at helping customers quickly deploy their generative AI applications in a secure, s Read more…

The Generative AI Future Is Now, Nvidia’s Huang Says

March 19, 2024

We are in the early days of a transformative shift in how business gets done thanks to the advent of generative AI, according to Nvidia CEO and cofounder Jensen Read more…

Nvidia’s New Blackwell GPU Can Train AI Models with Trillions of Parameters

March 18, 2024

Nvidia's latest and fastest GPU, codenamed Blackwell, is here and will underpin the company's AI plans this year. The chip offers performance improvements from Read more…

Nvidia Showcases Quantum Cloud, Expanding Quantum Portfolio at GTC24

March 18, 2024

Nvidia’s barrage of quantum news at GTC24 this week includes new products, signature collaborations, and a new Nvidia Quantum Cloud for quantum developers. Wh Read more…

Houston We Have a Solution: Addressing the HPC and Tech Talent Gap

March 15, 2024

Generations of Houstonian teachers, counselors, and parents have either worked in the aerospace industry or know people who do - the prospect of entering the fi Read more…

Alibaba Shuts Down its Quantum Computing Effort

November 30, 2023

In case you missed it, China’s e-commerce giant Alibaba has shut down its quantum computing research effort. It’s not entirely clear what drove the change. Read more…

Nvidia H100: Are 550,000 GPUs Enough for This Year?

August 17, 2023

The GPU Squeeze continues to place a premium on Nvidia H100 GPUs. In a recent Financial Times article, Nvidia reports that it expects to ship 550,000 of its lat Read more…

Shutterstock 1285747942

AMD’s Horsepower-packed MI300X GPU Beats Nvidia’s Upcoming H200

December 7, 2023

AMD and Nvidia are locked in an AI performance battle – much like the gaming GPU performance clash the companies have waged for decades. AMD has claimed it Read more…

DoD Takes a Long View of Quantum Computing

December 19, 2023

Given the large sums tied to expensive weapon systems – think $100-million-plus per F-35 fighter – it’s easy to forget the U.S. Department of Defense is a Read more…

Synopsys Eats Ansys: Does HPC Get Indigestion?

February 8, 2024

Recently, it was announced that Synopsys is buying HPC tool developer Ansys. Started in Pittsburgh, Pa., in 1970 as Swanson Analysis Systems, Inc. (SASI) by John Swanson (and eventually renamed), Ansys serves the CAE (Computer Aided Engineering)/multiphysics engineering simulation market. Read more…

Choosing the Right GPU for LLM Inference and Training

December 11, 2023

Accelerating the training and inference processes of deep learning models is crucial for unleashing their true potential and NVIDIA GPUs have emerged as a game- Read more…

Intel’s Server and PC Chip Development Will Blur After 2025

January 15, 2024

Intel's dealing with much more than chip rivals breathing down its neck; it is simultaneously integrating a bevy of new technologies such as chiplets, artificia Read more…

Baidu Exits Quantum, Closely Following Alibaba’s Earlier Move

January 5, 2024

Reuters reported this week that Baidu, China’s giant e-commerce and services provider, is exiting the quantum computing development arena. Reuters reported � Read more…

Leading Solution Providers

Contributors

Comparing NVIDIA A100 and NVIDIA L40S: Which GPU is Ideal for AI and Graphics-Intensive Workloads?

October 30, 2023

With long lead times for the NVIDIA H100 and A100 GPUs, many organizations are looking at the new NVIDIA L40S GPU, which it’s a new GPU optimized for AI and g Read more…

Shutterstock 1179408610

Google Addresses the Mysteries of Its Hypercomputer 

December 28, 2023

When Google launched its Hypercomputer earlier this month (December 2023), the first reaction was, "Say what?" It turns out that the Hypercomputer is Google's t Read more…

AMD MI3000A

How AMD May Get Across the CUDA Moat

October 5, 2023

When discussing GenAI, the term "GPU" almost always enters the conversation and the topic often moves toward performance and access. Interestingly, the word "GPU" is assumed to mean "Nvidia" products. (As an aside, the popular Nvidia hardware used in GenAI are not technically... Read more…

Shutterstock 1606064203

Meta’s Zuckerberg Puts Its AI Future in the Hands of 600,000 GPUs

January 25, 2024

In under two minutes, Meta's CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, laid out the company's AI plans, which included a plan to build an artificial intelligence system with the eq Read more…

Google Introduces ‘Hypercomputer’ to Its AI Infrastructure

December 11, 2023

Google ran out of monikers to describe its new AI system released on December 7. Supercomputer perhaps wasn't an apt description, so it settled on Hypercomputer Read more…

China Is All In on a RISC-V Future

January 8, 2024

The state of RISC-V in China was discussed in a recent report released by the Jamestown Foundation, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank. The report, entitled "E Read more…

Intel Won’t Have a Xeon Max Chip with New Emerald Rapids CPU

December 14, 2023

As expected, Intel officially announced its 5th generation Xeon server chips codenamed Emerald Rapids at an event in New York City, where the focus was really o Read more…

IBM Quantum Summit: Two New QPUs, Upgraded Qiskit, 10-year Roadmap and More

December 4, 2023

IBM kicks off its annual Quantum Summit today and will announce a broad range of advances including its much-anticipated 1121-qubit Condor QPU, a smaller 133-qu Read more…

  • arrow
  • Click Here for More Headlines
  • arrow
HPCwire