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MapR smashes MinuteSort benchmark on Google Compute
While supercomputers and workstations have Linpack to rank their number-crunching performance, when it comes to sorting algorithms to rank Big Data systems, there is a collection of tests known as the Sort Benchmarks. And this year it looks like Hadoop is back on top after commercial distie MapR Technologies beat the MinuteSort …
EMC touts screeching Hawq SQL performance for Hadoop
EMC's Pivotal Initiative division made a big splash last week with the launch of its Pivotal HD distribution of Hadoop. This is not a normal Hadoop distribution, but one that takes the parallel guts of the Greenplum database and reworks them to transform the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) into something that speaks …
SGI rejigs financing ahead of possible asset sale
Supercomputer and dense-pack server maker Silicon Graphics has rejiggered its credit facility with Wells Fargo Capital Finance ahead of a possible sale of intellectual property or other assets.
In an 8K filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, SGI said that it had amended its credit agreement with Wells Fargo, …
Wheeeee... CRUNCH: DDN pushes out monster Hadoop appliance for biz
Supercomputer storage firm DataDirect Networks (DDN) has brought out a scale-out Hadoop storage array, the hScaler, to both ingest and digest Big Data using Hadoop, combining compute and storage in one platform.
DDN claims this approach gets rid of the data-transfer bottlenecks that slow down Hadoop servers in the existing …
Australian supercomputer to use geothermal cooling
As Australia’s Square Kilometer Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) telescope takes shape, CSIRO has begun drilling in an unusual approach to cooling supercomputers.
The petascale powerhouse needed by ASKAP is being built in water-short Perth, so instead of sucking nearly 40 million litres of water from the city’s supply, CSIRO plans a …
Red Hat has BIG Big Data plans, but won't roll its own Hadoop
Let's get this straight. Red Hat should package up its own commercial Hadoop distribution or buy one of the three key Hadoop disties before they get too expensive. But don't hold your breath, because Red Hat tells El Reg that neither option is the current plan. Red Hat is going to partner with Hadoop distributors and hope they …
Concurrent gives old SQL users new Hadoop tricks
Application framework specialist Concurrent has given SQL devs a free tool to get at data stored in Hadoop, without having to learn the intricacies of the trendy computational framework.
The "Lingual" tool is an ANSI-standard SQL engine built on top of Concurrent's "Cascading" software, a Java application framework for Hadoop …
Cray readies XC30 supers for Ivy Bridge and coprocessors
Supercomputer maker Cray has trotted out its financial results for 2012, and used the occasion to talk about its plans for its current year after closing out one of the best four quarters it has put together in many seasons.
On a conference call with Wall Street analysts, Cray CEO Peter Ungaro talked generally about Cray's plans …
Could you build a data-nomming HPC beast in a day? These kids can
Analysis Student cluster-building competitions are chock full of technical challenges, both “book learning” and practical learning, and quite a bit of fun too. I mean, who wouldn't want to construct a HPC rig against the clock and kick an opponent in the benchmarks? Here's what involved in the contests.
Whether you’ve been following the …
Scottish uni slams on the Accelerator to boost UK boffinry
The boffins who run two big supercomputers on behalf of the UK government and academic research institutions - as well as one smaller machine aimed at industrial users - have converted those machines into an HPC utility called Accelerator.
And they want you to buy core-hours on their machines instead of wasting your money …
Eager students, huge racks - yes, undergrad cluster wrestling is back
2013 promises to be the breakout year for student cluster-building competitions – the most popular high-performance-computing-related sport in the entire world.
As an indication that pitting undergraduates against the clock to construct powerful number-crunchers is now a credible event, last year the International Supercomputing …
Dell: Shhh, don't tell a soul, but the PC sector ISN'T doomed...
HPC blog 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 …
Day of the Trifid: VPAC fires up new HPC cluster
The Victorian Partnership for Advanced Computing (VPAC), a consortium of Australian universities, has flipped the switch on 45.9 Teraflops of a new $1.22 million HP-based cluster to cope with rising workloads from partners La Trobe University and RMIT, and its other customers.
The Reg understands the 180-node, 2,880 core machine …
World's 'most green' supercomputer in red-hot battle between Intel, Nvidia
Analysis Non-profit consortium CINECA has deployed what may be the greenest supercomputer in the world at its Bologna centre in Italy. Called Eurora, the new machine claims it can perform 3,150 megaflops per watt, compared to the 2,499.44 achieved by Green-500 king the Beacon supercomputer at the National Institute for Computational …
Euro boffins plan supercomputer to SIMULATE HUMAN BRAIN
The European Commission has selected the Human Brain Project (HBP) as one of its Future and Emerging Technologies and will send it up to €1.19b over ten years so it can build a supercomputer capable of simulating the human brain.
The HBP wants to build a simulated brain because we don't know enough about our grey matter. The …
Italian 'Eurora' supercomputer pushes the green envelope
The "Eurora" supercomputer that was just fired up in Italy may not be large, but it has taken the lead in energy efficiency over designs from big HPC vendors like Cray and IBM.
The new machine was built by Eurotech, a server maker with HPC expertise that is based on Amaro, Italy, in conjunction with graphics chip and GPU …
Power-mad HPC fans told: No exascale for you - for at least 8 years
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 …
Company you never heard of builds 3.4 petaflops super for DOE
Nature abhors a vacuum as well as an oligopoly, which is why upstart supercomputer maker Atipa Technologies may find itself having an easier time getting its foot into the data center door now that Cray has eaten supercomputer-maker Appro International.
The company you've never heard of is Atipa, a division of PC and server …
Researchers break records with MILLION-CORE calculation
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.
According to the Stanford researchers, it’s the first time this many cores …
Stanford super runs million-core calculation
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.
The work was conducted by the university’s Centre for Turbulence Research, seeking to get a model for supersonic jet noise that’s more …
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-GPU 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 …
