November 20, 2012

Addison and Michael review some of the more newsworthy announcements that took place last week at SC12. Read more…

November 16, 2012

AMD is rumored to be looking for a buyer. And, as SC12 wraps up, Addison and Michael suggest some of the big winners and losers from the conference. Read more…

November 14, 2012

PLX Technology, a maker of PCIe switches and bridges, has been spreading the word about using PCIe as a general-purpose HPC interconnect. At SC12 this week, the company went a little further down that path, unveiling their upcoming Express Fabric technology. We asked Vijay Meduri, executive vice president of engineering at PLX to talk about the rationale of using PCIe as an interconnect fabric. Read more…

November 14, 2012

Addison and Michael discuss the trio of HPC accelerators announced on Monday, and review the latest TOP500 list. Read more…

November 13, 2012

Microsoft has unveiled a set of "big compute" capabilities for its Windows Azure offering. The company is courting the HPC space with more powerful hardware, new instance configurations, and the updated Microsoft HPC Pack 2012. Read more…

November 13, 2012

This week at SC12, Italian cluster maker E4 Computer Engineering, launched a new series heterogeneous clusters, which pair an NVIDIA's ARM+GPU Tegra3 with a discrete Quadro GPU. We asked E4's Simone Tinti, who leads the HPC team at E4, to describe the new systems and talk about the advantage they offer to high performance computing users. Read more…

November 12, 2012

Intel Corp. officially made its entry into the manycore realm today as it debuted "Knights Corner," the company's first Xeon Phi coprocessor. The new products clock in at just over a teraflop, double precision, setting the stage for an HPC accelerator battle that will pit Intel against GPU makers NVIDIA and AMD. Both of those companies also released their latest HPC accelerators into the wild earlier today at the annual Supercomputing Conference in Salt Lake City. Read more…

November 12, 2012

In the battle of the DOE labs, Oak Ridge Lab's Titan supercomputer has taken the title from the former TOP500 champ, Lawrence Livermore's Sequoia. The GPU-charged Titan, using the new NVIDIA K20X-equipped XK7 blades from Cray, delivered 17.6 petaflops to Sequoia's 16.3 petaflops on Linpack, the sole metric for TOP500 rankings. Read more…

November 12, 2012

The battle of teraflop accelerators began today as NVIDIA launched a new family of supercomputing GPUs based on the Kepler architecture. The Tesla K20 and the K20X represent the company's latest and greatest and are intended to keep NVIDIA's successful HPC accelerator franchise out in front of the competition. The chipmaker announced the new hardware as the 2012 Supercomputing Conference, in Salt Lake City, got underway. Read more…

November 12, 2012

AMD is launching its most powerful graphics card yet: the dual-GPU FirePro S10000 promises 5.91 teraflops of peak single precision and 1.48 teraflops of peak double precision floating point performance. And with AMD's "Graphics Core Next" (GCN) architecture under the hood, the S10000 can deliver compute and graphics processing simultaneously. Read more…

November 12, 2012

Peter Ungaro lays out the strategy of Cray's acquisition of Appro. Read more…

November 9, 2012

The epic supercomputing event of the year, SC12, will be booting up next week in Salt Lake City, Utah, attracting HPC digerati, vendors, press, and analysts from around the world. And even though the DOE won't be there in full force this year, big crowds are still expected. This year's event should deliver plenty of fodder for those looking to keep up on the latest and greatest in the field. Read more…

November 9, 2012

Cray launches Cascade line of supercomputers, then buys Appro for good measure. Also, an SC12 gets ready to roll. Read more…

November 9, 2012

The celebration surrounding the opening of the Supercomputing Conference traditionally kicks off with Gala Opening on Monday evening. But those in the know leave the convention center and head to the biggest open HPC community party of the year: the Beowulf Bash. HPC guru and Beowulf pioneer Thomas Sterling talks about what makes this particular event so special. Read more…

November 9, 2012

Supercomputer-maker Cray has announced it intends to buy Appro International, a privately held HPC cluster vendor. Cray is paying about $25 million for Appro, and will get at least $3.5 million in working capital from the cluster-maker. News of the deal boosted Cray's stock price, which jumped 10 percent on Friday. Read more…

October 24, 2012

The world's fastest computer has created the fastest computer simulation of the human heart. The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's Sequoia supercomputer, a TOP500 chart topper, was built to handle top secret nuclear weapons simulations, but before it goes behind the classified curtain, it is generating sophisticated cardiac simulations. Read more…

August 31, 2012

The DOE and some other US federal agencies are looking to shrink their presence at SC12. And Intel reveals more details about its upcoming Knights Corner processor. Read more…

August 30, 2012

The upcoming Super-computing Conference (SC12) may not turn out to be the blow-out high performance computing hullabaloo it normally is. The recent GSA scandal involving overzealous spending at one of their conferences a couple of years ago has precipitated new federal policy that is forcing government labs to abandon their exhibits and cutback attendance at the world's largest supercomputing event. Read more…