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

Europe’s Most Powerful Supercomputer Powers Up

NVIDIA Tesla GPUs Boost Performance of AcuSolve CFD Software

Mellanox Announces Scalable HPC Solutions with NVIDIA GPUDirect Technology

SGI Announces New ICE Cube Modular Containers

T-Platforms Chosen to Manage $6M Nanotechnology and Supercomputing Program

SGI Partners with Irish Centre for High-End Computing to Provide GPGPU Services

PNNL Researchers Design Supercomputers from the Ground Up

Cray Launches the Cray XE6 Supercomputer

Penguin Computing Builds Top-100 Supercomputer for Georgia Tech

Numascale Demonstrates NumaConnect SDK at ISC’10

ScaleMP Announces vSMP Foundation 3.0

Convey Announces Record-Breaking Smith-Waterman Results

Mellanox Provides Adapters for Chinese Academy of Sciences Petaflop Supercomputer

Grid Dynamics, Microsoft to Deliver Windows HPC Server Solutions

Tokyo Tech Announces Plans for 2.4 Petaflop GPU-based Supercomputer

This Wednesday, the Tokyo Institute of Technology (Tokyo Tech) announced that it will soon begin construction on a 2.4 petaflop supercomputer. The green, cloud-enabled system, dubbed “Petakon,” will be built in partnership with NEC Corporation (NEC) and Hewlett-Packard (HP). The companies were selected via a bidding process.

This system will have a theoretical maximum performance of 2.4 petaflops, currently the world’s fastest. This is 30 times faster than the performance of TSUBAME 1.0, the predecessor to TSUBAME 2.0, and 12 times faster than Japan’s current fastest system, which is operated by Japan’s National Atomic Energy Agency.

The supercomputer will include the latest Intel Westmere-EP and Nehalem-EX processors along with NVIDIA Fermi hardware. With this “mixed scalar-vector architecture,” Tokyo Tech hopes to achieve world-class computing, as well as a spot on the TOP500 list.

The system will have more than 1,400 compute nodes and a large solid-state drive (SSD), backed by Voltaire’s QDR InfiniBand network. DataDirect Networks storage technology will provide the fastest total data I/O performance at 0.66 terabytes/second.

Petakon is scheduled to begin operation this fall.

Scientists Create First Synthetic Cell

In some controversial news, you probably heard that the world’s first synthetic bacterial cell was developed by researchers at the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI) last Thursday. The fascinating story is all over the Internet and being discussed by the usual television “talking heads” and radio personalities.

The synthetic cell, called Mycoplasma mycoides JCVI-syn1.0, was designed by a computer and chemically made in the laboratory without using any pieces of natural DNA. It was then transplanted into a recipient cell where it produced a new self-replicating cell. The research appears in the May 20th edition of Science Express and will also appear in an upcoming print issue of Science.

In the official press release, J. Craig Venter, Ph.D., founder and president of JCVI and senior author on the paper, made the following statement:

“For nearly 15 years Ham Smith, Clyde Hutchison and the rest of our team have been working toward this publication today — the successful completion of our work to construct a bacterial cell that is fully controlled by a synthetic genome. We have been consumed by this research, but we have also been equally focused on addressing the societal implications of what we believe will be one of the most powerful technologies and industrial drivers for societal good. We look forward to continued review and dialogue about the important applications of this work to ensure that it is used for the benefit of all.”

In a San Diego Union Tribune article, Venter described the cell as a self-replicating living species, saying: “Its only genetic code is what we built into it chemically. Every protein is dictated by that genetic code. This is a new, independent species whose origin was the computer, not some genetic relative.”

JCVI scientists see this latest development in synthetic genomics leading to important new applications and products in the fields of biofuels, vaccines, pharmaceuticals, clean water and food products.

The researchers are also looking at safegaurds to prevent the technology from being used in harmful ways, for example, in a bioterrorism attack. The complete announcement includes an overview of the ethical considerations posed by synthetic biology.