November 23, 2011

It's been a little over a year since Nimbix announced the initial beta launch of its Nimbix Accelerated Compute Cloud (NACC). During the SC11 show in Seattle last week, HPC in the Cloud sat down with Nimbix Co-Founder and CEO Steve Hebert to find out where the company fits in with the small-but-growing stable of cloud providers who specialize in supporting HPC workloads. Read more…

November 22, 2011

Indiana University's Scinet Research Sandbox entry sets new records, renews promise of cloud for data-intensive science workloads. Read more…

November 19, 2011

HPC in the Cloud talks to Cycle Computing CEO Jason Stowe at SC11 to get the details on the CycleCloud BigScience Challenge 2011. Cycle crafted the contest based on the noble ideal that science should not be hindered by lack of computational resources. So the company put out the call to non-profit institutions: do you have an HPC problem that will benefit humanity in a large-scale way? Read more…

November 18, 2011

If you thought Lustre and GPFS were your only two choices for a high performance, scalable parallel file system, then you've probably never heard of OrangeFS. We talked with three of the file system's developers and backers to discuss the unique attributes of OrangeFS and how it's being used in the field. Read more…

November 18, 2011

When NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang delivered his keynote at SC11 this week, it was easy to forget that a few short years ago, the company and its GPU products had absolutely nothing to do with supercomputing. Today, of course, the technology is a driving force in the HPC ecosystem and is challenging the entrenched interests of chip makers Intel, AMD, and IBM. Read more…

November 17, 2011

With a number of government and commercial exascale projects in full swing, SC11 has provided a convenient venue for vendors, academics and government types to tout their vision of the future of supercomputing. To get a broad perspective on these efforts, we spoke with Thomas Sterling, Professor of Informatics and Computing Indiana University, and one of the foremost experts on supercomputing architectures. Read more…

November 17, 2011

Advances in silicon photonic integration will present an opportunity for hardware engineers to reconsider basic computer designs. That topic is the theme of a Disruptive Technology session at SC11 on Thursday conducted by Keren Bergman of Columbia University and Nadya Bliss of MIT Lincoln Laboratory. Prior to the conference, we asked Bergen and Bliss to discuss the technology issues surrounding integrated photonics and how it could impact computer systems, including HPC machines. Read more…

November 16, 2011

Amazon Web Services just announced its most powerful offering yet for supercomputing users that require the power of a large cluster on demand. The newest EC2 Cluster Compute Instance, called Cluster Compute Eight Extra Large (CC2), is aimed at businesses and researchers who require additional HPC capacity in an elastic, pay-as-you-go format. Read more…