I recently stumbled upon a transcript from a very recent interview with HPC luminaries Jack Dongarra (University of Tennessee, Oak Ridge, Top500 list) and Horst Simon (deputy director at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab.) The topic? Nothing less than the future of supercomputers. These are pretty good guys to ask, since they’re both intimately involved with designing, building, and using some of the largest supercomputers to ever walk the earth.

SC12 Early on the last day of the SC12 Student Cluster Competition, I hit a couple of morning meetings and then went wandering around the competition area. Most of the teams had at least two or three reps in the booths monitoring the systems and just sort of hanging around. They had turned in their final scientific results the night before, so all that was left to do was wait for the results and then tear down their systems in preparation for the trip back home.

HPC blog 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.

Stanford University engineers are claiming a record for the year-old Sequoia supercomputer, after running up a calculation that used more than a million of the machine’s cores at once.