My first look at the Chemnitz University of Technology's “Coffee Table of Doom” entry into the recently concluded ISC’13 student cluster-building challenge really gave me pause for thought. Four very large workstations crammed to the brim with 16 accelerators (eight Intel Phi plus eight NVIDIA K20) was something to behold. Two …

What would you get if you combined the World Cup and March Madness with computer science and HPC? You'd have yourself a cluster-building competition for students, and that’s exactly what’s on the docket beginning 17 June. The venue is International Supercomputing Conference 2013 (ISC'13) in Leipzig, Germany, where we’ll see …

The increasing amount of speculation over IBM's potential unloading of all or part of its System x (x86-based servers) business onto Lenovo has high performance computing (HPC) players wondering about the implications for the sector. What would be the eventual impact on IBM, and the HPC market in general, if Big Blue were to …

One of the best things about industry events like the GPU Technology Conference (GTC 2013) is walking around the trade show floor. It gives me a chance to talk to smaller, niche companies who don’t get the media coverage given to the titans of the high-performance computing industry. (Or to Titan the supercomputer, for that …

Dell’s move to take itself private has the tech world buzzing. There’s a lot of talk about the motives behind the deal. Some say Dell is doing it to escape the quarterly visit to the Wall Street meat grinder, where either you meet (or exceed) their expectations or get ground into a fine slurry. Going private frees Dell of public …

Stanford’s Engineering Center for Turbulence Research (SECTR) has claimed a new record in computer science by running a fluid dynamics problem using a code named CharLES that utilised more than one million cores in the hulking great IBM Sequoia at once. According to the Stanford researchers, it’s the first time this many cores …