2010 Supercomputing Conference Archives

Addison and Michael consider the results of the TOP500 and Green500, pick the winners and losers of SC10, and discuss the biggest news of the week. Read more…

By Nicole Hemsoth

Conference Highlights Dividing Lines Across GPGPUs

November 19, 2010

If there was a dominating theme at the Supercomputing Conference this year, it had to be GPU computing. Read more…

By Michael Feldman

InfiniBand Continues Upward Climb in Top Supers

November 17, 2010

Lost in the hoopla about the ascendency of China and GPGPUs in the TOP500 is the continuing saga of the InfiniBand-Ethernet interconnect rivalry. Read more…

By Michael Feldman

A Call to Arms for Parallel Programming Standards

November 16, 2010

Although the parallel programming landscape is relatively young, it's already easy to get lost in. Beside legacy frameworks like MPI and OpenMP, we now have NVIDIA's CUDA, OpenCL, Cilk, Intel Threading Building Blocks, Microsoft's parallel programming extensions for .NET, and a whole gamut of PGAS languages. And according to Intel's Tim Mattson, that's not necessarily a good thing. Read more…

By Nicole Hemsoth

The Not-So-Unlikely Marriage of CUDA and x86

November 16, 2010

NVIDIA's CUDA is easily the most popular programming language for general-purpose GPU computing. But one of the more interesting developments in the CUDA-verse doesn't really involve GPUs at all. In September, HPC compiler vendor PGI (The Portland Group Inc.) announced its intent to build a CUDA compiler for x86 platforms. The technology will be demonstrated for the first time in public at SC10 this week in New Orleans. Read more…

By Nicole Hemsoth

Graph 500 Takes Aim at a New Kind of HPC

November 15, 2010

Data-intensive applications are quickly emerging as a significant new class of HPC workloads. For this class of applications, a new kind of supercomputer, and a different way to assess them, will be required. That is the impetus behind the Graph 500, a set of benchmarks that aim to measure the suitability of systems for data-intensive analytics applications. Read more…

By Nicole Hemsoth

SGI Gets Its Mojo Working for Supercomputing Conference

November 15, 2010

SGI has made good on its promise to create a petaflop-in-a-cabinet supercomputer that can scale up to tens and even hundreds of cabinets. Developed under the code name "Project Mojo," the company has dubbed the new product Prism XL. SGI will be showcasing the system this week in their exhibit booth at the Supercomputing Conference in New Orleans. Read more…

By Michael Feldman

GPGPUs, China Take the Lead in TOP500

November 15, 2010

Top seven supercomputers make it into the petaflop club. Read more…

By Michael Feldman

The Business of Disruptive Innovation

November 14, 2010

Like every technology-based sector, high performance computing takes its biggest leaps by the force of disruptive innovation, a term coined by the man who will keynote this year's Supercomputing Conference (SC10) in New Orleans. Clayton M. Christensen doesn't know a whole lot about supercomputing, but he knows a great deal about the forces that drive it. Read more…