Earlier HPC
SGI swings to a gain despite $50m in 'LMDs of profit destruction'
Supercomputer and cloud server maker Silicon Graphics ran a dog and pony show last week on Wall Street at the Needham Growth Conference, and because it was going to talk about its business the company had to release preliminary financial results for its second quarter of fiscal 2013 to avoid being busted for selective disclosure …
2012 in supercomputing: Ceepie-geepies, a weak ARM and the need for speed
HPC blog A lot has happened in HPC over the past year. I would say that the speeding up of development of accelerators and the rising number of hybrid CPU+GPU systems are probably the most noteworthy trends we saw in 2012. Over the next year we’re going to see even more use cases for hybrid systems, and I expect to see much wider use in …
Storage glitches fell Australian supercomputers
Supercomputers at two Australian research organisations have experienced substantial downtime after glitches hit their storage area networks.
West Australia’s iVEC experienced an outage, detailed here, that saw its Data Direct Networks (DDN) array and the 1152-core Fornax machine unavailable for around four days.
iVEC’s …
DDN grabs first slab of 100PB storage cloud
Data Direct Networks (DDN) will provide storage for a node of Australia's Research Data Storage Infrastructure (RDSI), a $AUD50m project aimed at creating a pool of storage the nation's researchers can use to house large quantities of data, the better to feed it into the nation's supercomputers and subject it other forms of …
Cray beats out SGI at German HPC consortium
The Höchstleistungsrechnen is going to have a different brand name and architecture on it at the Norddeutschem Verbund für Hoch- und Höchstleistungsrechnen (HLRN) supercomputing alliance in Northern Germany, now that Cray has beat out SGI for a big bad box that will have a peak theoretical performance in excess of 2 petaflops. …
Potty-mouthed Watson supercomputer needed filth filter
IBM's Watson supercomputer was smart enough to beat two human opponents on US quiz show Jeopardy!, but there is apparently some knowledge that the system is still too immature to handle – namely, the contents of the Urban Dictionary.
Watson is perhaps the most sophisticated artificial intelligence computer system developed to …
China to build ANOTHER 100 petaflops hybrid supercomputer by 2014?
We passed through the 10 petaflops barrier in the supercomputer racket last year, and the next station on the train to exaflops is 100 petaflops.
China already admitted at last year's International Super Computing '12 shindig that it was working on a kicker to Tianhe-1A hybrid CPU-GOU supercomputer, with the goal of having the …
Where do old supercomputers go to die? New Mexico
Moore's Law puts supercomputers out to pasture because power – not just the cost of electricity, but the availability of juice – is the biggest constraint at the big supercomputing centers. And sometimes the lack of budget helps lock the gate, and HPC cloud computing butchers the cow.
That's the case with the massive 28-rack …
Cray misses revenue targets for Q4
Veteran supercomputer-maker Cray has warned Wall Street moneymen to expect lower-than-forecast results for its 2012 financial report.
Cray has been absolutely clear that the multi-petaflopping "Blue Waters" and "Titan" supercomputers being installed respectively at the University of Illinois and Oak Ridge National Laboratory …
Mellanox trips on faulty InfiniBand cables in Q4
InfiniBand and Ethernet switch and adapter maker Mellanox Technologies said after the market closed on Wednesday that the company was not going to make its revenue targets for the fourth quarter and full 2012 year – in part because of the jittery economy but mostly because of a bug in InfiniBand cables.
In a statement, Mellanox …
IBM taps Red Hat for cut-throat priced Linux on big supers
Big Blue is going to Red Hat for a Linux environment for its largest supercomputers, and it is mothballing its own LoadLeveler workload manager for x86 clusters in favor of the Platform LSF control freak that it acquired a little more than a year ago.
It is no surprise that IBM has chosen Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 as the Linux …
Big bad boxes drive explosive growth for HPC in Q3
The server market as a whole is having its issues, with both virtualization and the jittery global economy holding down physical box counts – and therefore revenues – more than they might otherwise be. But the supercomputer market is chugging right along. Networks keep getting faster, virtualization has yet to touch its boxes, …
Free HPC cluster to good home
HPC blog Interested in getting your hands on some serious system hardware for free?
Well, with a few provisos, you could get your hands on a nearly new HPC cluster. First off, you'll need to be in the research game - in a US- or Canada-based academic or government lab, or some other non-profit research institution. (We’re talking about …
EXTREME computer sports: Meet the cluster war winners
SC12 The 2012 Student Cluster Competition (SCC) is in the books and we have all of the results, right here, right now. First, as was released earlier, China’s Team NUDT ran away with the Highest LINPACK Award, an SCC record 3.014 Teraflop/s score. Their compatriots, Team USTC, locked in second place with 2.793 Teraflops/s, and the …
HPC cluster cowboys bag overall award, haul it home to Texas
SC12 I caught up with Team Longhorn just before they turned in their final results for the SC12 Student Cluster Competition (SCC). As you can see in the short video, they’re pretty cool and composed, but I thought I sensed a little bit of anxiety under the surface. As it turns out, they should have been more relaxed – they were on …
FINAL NIGHT: Boston kids power down cluster compo systems
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 …
Team Utah grabs Mini Iron crown at little cluster compo
SC12 Until this year, the annual SC Student Cluster Competition focused entirely on seeing how much work teams of university students could wring out of 26 amps of juice. They can use any hardware/software combination that will run the required apps; the only limitation is that their configuration has to be shipping by the time of …
Team Boilermaker: We hammer the code... not the booze
SC12 We had a chat with Team Boilermaker on the last day of the SC12 Student Cluster Competition. While the team did visit several of the vendor parties the night before, they assert that they didn’t overindulge, and claim that the absence of some team members is due to meetings, not hangovers. I think I buy that explanation; the …
NUDT on HPC battle: Total cluster supremacy - Who needs it?
SC12 Team NUDT (China’s own National University of Defense Technology) was all smiles when I stopped by their booth on the final day of the SC12 Student Cluster Competition (SCC). And what’s not to smile about? They had just won the LINPACK award with their record-breaking 3 Teraflop/s score and were considered a serious contender …
High school kids fend off university challenge in student cluster battle
SC12 The SC Student Cluster Competition (SCC) has seen university teams from around the world vying to prove their cluster competence. But this year has been marked by a number of firsts, including the first team composed entirely of high school students. The Skyline High School Eagles, located in Salt Lake City, entered the LittleFe …
10,000 cities, 1 salesman, 6 nodes: It's LittleFe cluster CRUNCH TIME
SC12 It was the last day of last week’s SC12 Student Cluster Competition, and Pennsylvania university students Team Slippery Rock chatted to us during the LittleFe battle. In this competition track, teams of university students (plus a high school team) pushed their six-node LittleFe mini-iron to the limit, attempting to find the …
IBM recasts Power 775 Blue Waters super as big data muncher
IBM has yanked the chain on the petaflopping 'Blue Waters' supercomputer that it was going to install at the University of Illinois this fall because it was too expensive to make at the budgeted price.
But that doesn't mean the Power 775 server nodes that comprised IBM's Blue Waters machine are not useful. Ditto for the PERCS …
Cluster compo newcomers slap down winning hand: 6 NVIDIA Tesla cards
SC12 Here’s a short look at what the team from China’s University of Science & Technology was up to on the last day of the SC12 Student Cluster Competition (SCC). There’s a pretty big language barrier here – one that’s made worse by my inability to speak slowly and clearly after drinking a quart of press room coffee.
(A note/rant …
Comp sci boffins Venus: HPC newbies post respectable score
SC12 We spent a few minutes on the last day of the SC12 Student Cluster Competition (SCC) talking to Team Venus from the University of the Pacific. This is not only their first year in the cluster competition, but also the first time any of the students have done anything at all HPC-related.
Under the mentorship of Oak Ridge …
Team Taiwan: We're ready to win this thing
SC12 I’ve covered Taiwan’s National Tsing Hua University (NTHU) Student Cluster Competition team for three years now. And every time I talk to them they’re personable, friendly, and modest.
Very modest. Too modest. This is a team with a serious pedigree that’s backed up by the best track record in the game.
First of all, they’re …
Team Venus disappears at computer sports smackdown
SC12 It was an exciting start to the real-time, non-stop 48-hour cluster challenge, in which the teams of undergrads design and assemble a small cluster and race to demonstrate the greatest sustained performance across a series of applications.
Here’s a short video covering the beginning of the SC12 edition of the Student Cluster …
Cluster cake pulled open: Oozes cores, GPU gravy, mineral oil
SC12 At last, I can reveal the final configurations of the systems the SC12 Student Cluster Competition (SCC) warriors brought to Salt Lake City last week.
Here’s the gear they were running…
First, kudos to all of the sponsors who generously provided so much equipment at no cost to the cluster crown competitors. (There isn’t a real …
SGI UV 2000 supers are Intel and Nvidia inside
Supercomputer makers used to stuffing processors and networks into machines to build clusters or shared memory systems have to adapt their machines to take advantage of various kinds of compute accelerators that offers cheaper flops, and Silicon Graphics is no exception.
To that end, the company has reworked its high-end UV 2000 …
HP ProLiant SL270s Gen8 beast masters eight coprocessors
If you have decided that you want to build a grunting number-cruncher that crams a hefty number of Tesla or Xeon Phi coprocessors into a single chassis, then Hewlett-Packard wants to talk to you about the new ProLiant SL270s Gen8 server.
The new SL270s Gen8 slides into the SL6500 "scalable system" modular chassis, which makes it …
Chinese baby war-boffins bust 3Tflops, snatch student LINPACK crown
SC12 Salt Lake City is abuzz with news that China's NUDT team has once again snared the LINPACK benchmark crown at a student cluster-building competition. The team's record-breaking score of 3.014 TFLOPS topped all other competitors and marked the first time a student cluster team has broken through the 3 TFLOPS barrier.
This is the …
Cray notches up two Urika graph analysis appliance sales
It has been a busy couple of weeks for supercomputer maker Cray, with the rollout of the 27-petaflops "Titan" supercomputer, the debut of the next-generation XC30 system, and the acquisition of sometime HPC rival Appro International. News that Cray had sold two of its Urika big data analytics appliances got a little lost in the …
Boiler Makers swing hammer at SC12, Team Taiwan tries for a three-peat
SC12 Team Taiwan (from Taiwan’s National Tsing Hua University) has a chance to become a three time Overall Award winner at the SC12 Student Cluster Competition here in Salt Lake City. They notched their first win at SC10 in New Orleans, repeated the feat the next year in Seattle, and are now looking for the hat trick in Salt Lake. …
Tianhe-1A schoolkids bring their best game, GPUs to cluster punchup
SC12 Here’s a look at one of the two Chinese entries into the SC12 Student Cluster Competition. These kids are from the University of Science and Technology and are not only battling their cluster competitors, but are also fighting jet-lag, 8.5 inches (21cm) of snow, and my inability to speak slowly/clearly enough to be understood …
Texans forget deep fryer, add GPUs to lasso data-crunching crown
SC12 Meet the 2012 edition of the Texas Longhorn Student Cluster Competition team. This video was shot right after they received the scientific application data sets and had begun their initial processing.
We discuss how they parcel up the work in their cluster and how they now have tools that give them a much better idea of what …
DataDirect plunks $100m on storage array disguised as a super
Supercomputer storage supplier DataDirect Network is setting up a $100m exascale computing lab.
The goal is to hit one quintillion floating-point operations per second, and DDN hopes this mind-boggling level of number-crunching will be reached by 2018. The company is going to direct its funds to:
Accelerating IO with a new file …
Snow and ice fail to freeze battlin' Big Iron bots in their tracks
SC12 It's time, once again, to meet some more plucky contenders in the SC12 Student Cluster Competition.
Team Slippery Rock
We meet the Slippery Rock team for the first time. They’re competing in the Mini Iron LittleFe division of the cluster-building contest. In the video they explain their strategy for achieving the best …
Meet the all-girl HPC cluster boffins of 'Team Venus' - on Video
SC12 It's time to meet some of the Big Iron cluster war contenders. Team Venus, the all-female Student Cluster Competition (SCC) team from the University of the Pacific, tells us how they found their way into the competition in their profile video below.
They also discuss how they’re looking to encourage women to enter STEM ( …
Dell to sell Brit firm's 'fastest in the world' HPC arrays
Dell is going to resell Xyratex ClusterStor high-performance computing arrays, which should be good news for the UK data-storage firm after its recent Q4 tumble on the back of crummy enterprise demand and tumbling disk drive sales.
ClusterStor is Xyratex's supercomputing and high-performance computing (HPC) storage array, billed …
AMD fires off crazy-fast FirePro double-whammy GPU card
SC12 AMD, a company that knows a thing or two about building powerful graphics processors, has whipped out a card that has more flops than either Nvidia's K20 high-end GPUs or Intel's x86-based Xeon Phi coprocessors.
That's one sure way to cut through all the noise that Nvidia and Intel are making about their just-released offerings …
Intel Xeon Phi battles GPUs, defends x86 in supercomputers
SC12 Intel's Xeon Phi might have started out with the goal of creating an x86-based graphics engine, but it ended up defending the x86 architecture's hegemony in high-performance computing against the onslaught of GPU coprocessors from Nvidia and AMD.
However, it ends up being a battle among GPUs anyway – but in a different market …
Mellanox stretches InfiniBand across campuses, metro areas
SC12 With InfiniBand on the march, taking market share away from Ethernet in the upper echelons of the supercomputer racket, Mellanox Technology could sit back and enjoy itself a little. But instead, the company is tweaking its InfiniBand lineup to make its switches and adapters more appealing and to keep InfiniBand rolling.
The …
Accelerators tag team in Top500 supercomputer CPU smackdown
SC12 This fall's Top500 supercomputer sites ranking continues the smackdown between massively parallel supercomputers based on CPUs and somewhat less-massive machines using a mix of CPUs and accelerators. In this round, the hybrid ceepie-geepies, which mix CPUs and GPU coprocessors, have the CPU-only boxes on the ropes – and the …
