Earlier HPC
AMD aims at big data crunchers with SeaMicro SM15000
Earlier this week, ahead of the kickoff of the Intel Developer Forum, cheeky AMD launched its next generation of microservers sporting both Intel and AMD chips and a revamped SM15000 chassis that links storage arrays directly into the system "Freedom" interconnect fabric at the heart of the SeaMicro system it acquired earlier …
US energy lab's pump-happy petaflopper goes green
The US Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory has hooked up with HP, Intel, and partners to design a new hybrid supercomputer and an energy-efficient data center wrapper for it that will – among other green gains – use the exhaust heat from the supercomputer to heat adjacent offices.
After all, when you're …
Intel teaches Xeon Phi x86 coprocessor snappy new tricks
Hot Chips It took fifteen years for Intel to shrink the computing power of the teraflops-busting ASCI Red massively parallel Pentium II supercomputer down to something that fits inside of a PCI-Express coprocessor card – and the Xeon Phi coprocessor is only the first step in a long journey with coprocessor sidekicks riding posse with CPUs …
Supercomputing takes a slight pause in Q2
With all of the relatively cheap computing power available today, and with the expanding focus from traditional supercomputers to clusters that can run simulations or big data workloads, you'd think that the HPC market would be growing like gangbusters. Not so.
That's the latest news from the box counters at IDC. But there's …
Fujitsu to embiggen iron bigtime with Sparc64-X
Hot Chips While Fujitsu has made some very respectable Sparc64 chips aimed at the supercomputing market, it has been a long time since the Japanese chip and server maker has put out a new Sparc64 processor that went into general purpose servers.
That changes in a big way with the forthcoming Sparc64-X processor, which will be used in …
Mellanox rips covers off virt-SAN beast, claims Fibre Channel vanquish
InfiniBand vendor Mellanox has demonstrated a Fibre Channel-beating virtual SAN appliance at VMworld, claiming it's six times faster than FC SANs.
Virtual SAN appliances (VSAs) are becoming more serious. They started out as SAN try-outs using server SW and the server's local disks to produce a shared block-access storage area …
D-Wave goes public with 81-qubit protein modeling
D-Wave – whose claims to have a working quantum computer have been met with skepticism and major contracts in equal measure – has published a paper in Nature in which it demonstrates the application of quantum annealing to protein folding analysis.
Protein folding is a difficult problem in the classical world, because of the …
Networking industry to collaborate on TERABIT Ethernet
Sensing mounting frustration that movies Linux ISOs aren't downloading fast enough, the IEEE has announced a new group that aims to bring wired Ethernet speeds up to 1Tbps by 2015 and as fast as 10Tbps by 2020.
The announcement comes shortly after the publication of the IEEE 802.3 Ethernet Bandwidth Assessment report, which …
Tokyo U gets second FX10 Sparc supercomputer
The University of Tokyo has gone back to Fujitsu for a second helping of K supercomputer.
The Institute for Solid State Physics is looking forward to next spring, when Fujitsu will fire up a PrimeHPC FX10 supercomputer that will be used to conduct materials research in high-performance solid state devices. The supercomputer will …
Why gov labs presenting HPC tech ≠ officials wolfing overpriced sushi
HPC blog Our buddy Rich Brueckner over at insideHPC broke some news this week when he published a story about new conference and travel spending restrictions that might radically scale back US government agency participation in HPC industry events like the upcoming SC12 conference in Salt Lake City this November.
The new strictures are …
Cray to plug Kepler GPUs into future Cascade supers
Cray's next-generation "Cascade" supercomputer is based on a future Intel "Ivy Bridge" Xeon processors, and the company has just taken $140m from Chipzilla in exchange for the intellectual property and people associated with its "Gemini" and "Aries" supercomputer interconnects. So it was no surprise that Cray talked about using …
Red ink deeper at SGI as sales shrink
Jorge Titinger, who was tapped to be the CEO at server and supercomputer maker Silicon Graphics back in February, has his work cut out for him amind slowing sales and mounting losses.
It is a situation that many CEOs at SGI (and at rival Cray) have found themselves in time and time again. But SGI is now in a new fiscal year and …
UK's HECToR supercomputer in 27PB MEGA-storage boost
HECToR, the Edinburgh-based supercomputer used by UK researchers to tackle science's more thorny mathematical problems, is having petabytes of disk and tape storage installed in a massive storage expansion.
HECToR stands for the High End Computing Terra Scale Resource and has been built in several phases. It is a Cray-built 800 …
Murchison adds astronomical cluster
Hard on the heels of yesterday’s win for Cray at The Pawsey Centre, the Murchison widefield array in Western Australia is pulling in some new iron in the form of a high-powered Linux cluster from IBM.
As previously noted in The Register, modern radioastronomy poses a considerable computing challenge: it generates too much data …
Cray bags $21m Cascade super deal down under
Supercomputer maker Cray has bagged a $21m contract to supply the Perth, Australia, Pawsey Centre for supercomputing which will be used to run simulations for geology, life sciences, and nanotechnology research, as well as support radio-astronomy workloads that are the organization's main work.
The contract was awarded to Cray …
Intel gobbles Lustre file system expert Whamcloud
Intel's ambition to dominate the exascale era of computing is a little closer to realisation, as Chipzilla has written a cheque to acquire Whamcloud, a company which develops and supports the open source Lustre clustered file system.
Brent Gorda, president and CEO at Whamcloud, quietly announced the deal late last Friday.
The …
US Energy dept starts handing out cash for exaflop superputer quest
The Department of Energy is continuing to dole out cash to pay for some of the basic research that needs to be done if the United States is going to field exascale-class supercomputers by 2020 or so. This time around, Nvidia and Intel have taken down some contracts, and El Reg hears that Big Blue is getting some funding as well …
DOE doles out cash to AMD, Whamcloud for exascale research
The US Department of Energy used its massive budget to push supercomputers to gigaflops, teraflops, and petaflops in the prior three decades and it is being tasked to put the pedal to the exaflops metal before the end of this decade.
To get there, the DOE has to fund primary research at IT vendors who might otherwise not get …
Finland beefs up HPC oomph with Cray 'Cascade' super
Finland's main academic supercomputing center, the IT Center for Science (CSC), has been embiggening its number-crunching and data storage capacity throughout 2012, and is at it again this week with the acquisition of a future "Cascade" supercomputer from Cray.
CSC is managed by the Finnish Ministry of Education and Culture, and …
Rutherford Appleton Lab fires up ceepie-geepie hybrid
A consortium of universities in Oxfordshire and the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory has finished building two new supercomputer clusters for academic and corporate researchers to let their codes loose upon.
Perhaps the most interesting of the new machines is the one called "Emerald", paying homage to Nvidia and its green theme, …
Tsinghua, NUDT flatten rivals in ISC cluster smackdown
ISC 2012 The 2012 ISC Student Cluster Challenge ended last week, and it’s high time we take a look at the winners, the awards and some of the results.
Each of the five teams put in months of work designing its cluster and learning how to optimise it to run the various benchmarks and application codes featured in the competition. They …
Berkeley Lab to air-cool Cray Cascade super
Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, which runs the big and unclassified science projects for the US Department of Energy, is sticking with Cray for its next-generation supercomputer, tentatively called NERSC-7.
That's short for National Energy Research Scientific Center, which is one of the largest basic science computational …
US nuke lab goes back for BlueGene/Q seconds
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, one of the big nuke labs funded by the US Department of Energy, does a lot of super-secret classified nuclear weapons design and management work but it also lets the scientific community play with its biggest machines during shakedown phases and keeps around some iron that they can use on …
HPC whizzkids battle own software on final day of student compo
ISC 2012 It's the last day of the 2012 ISC Student Cluster Competition, and Stony Brook University (profile here) has had their work cut out for them so far... From the very beginning, they had software problems with their cluster, requiring them to concentrate on troubleshooting and repairing while their competitors were running code. …
ISC 2012: China's 'Pop Idols' seek Klusterkamph glory
ISC 2012 The Tsinghua University team (profile here) didn’t take the easy route to the ISC 2012 Student Cluster Competition in Hamburg. They had to fight their way in a Pop Idols-style smackdown along with five other universities, which all competed to carry the Chinese flag in an intra-country play-in round.
Tsinghua won that …
China's NUDT students hope GPUs will grind down rivals
ISC 2012 China’s National University of Defense Technology (NUDT, profile here) is staying true to its heritage by being the only team to use a hybrid CPU/GPU system at the ISC 2012 Student Cluster Competition in Hamburg.
NUDT, like Team Tsinghua, had to fight its way through five other Chinese university competitors to secure its spot …
ISC cluster kids KIT plan to drive off with vendor swag
ISC 2012 The home team at the 2012 ISC Student Cluster Challenge, Team KIT (profile here), are a confident bunch. Not quite cocky, but confident. They made it through their first cluster competition with almost-flying colours – they had significant problems on only one of the surprise applications (WRF) on the first day of competition. …
T-shirt race stragglers aim for student cluster compo crown
ISC 2012 We catch up with the University of Colorado team (profile here) on the last day of the 2012 ISC Student Cluster Competition (aka Hell on the Elbe) in Hamburg.
Even though they were the last team to get started on the challenge (owing to their lackadaisical approach to the opening t-shirt scramble), they feel good about the …
T-Platforms to roll out itsy-bitsy HPC cluster
If you are looking for a desktop supercomputer cluster that can use X86 or a mix of X86 and GPU coprocessors to run simulations, then Russian supercomputer maker T-Platforms has a machine for you. Or rather, it will by this fall.
It's called the T-Mini P, and it is basically a P8000 blade enclosure mounted on wheels. Not so you …
Taiwanese weathermen pick Fujitsu PrimeHPC super
Taiwan CWB map
Fujitsu got a big wad of yen last year from the Japanese government to build the K supercomputer, which until this month was the fastest parallel supercomputer in the world.
Now Fujitsu is on a tear to commercialize the supercluster, which it sells with upgraded processors as the PrimeHPC FX10. So it was quite …
Sequoia: Can anyone learn to wield this mighty HPC weapon?
Podcast Here at ISC 2012 in Hamburg, I sat in on a podcast with Rich Brueckner of insideHPC and Dr Jack Dongarra, co-founder of the Top500 list. We talked about the 20-year evolution of the list and, of course, Sequoia, the BlueGene/Q system that topped the June 2012 rankings.
Dr Dongarra spoke about Sequoia’s very impressive number of …
Supercomputer flash kings: TLC needs, er, TLC
ISC12 Here at Hamburg's supercomputer fest, three merchants of flash were plying their wares. What did they think about the chances of 3-layer cell (TLC) NAND, the stuff that's cheaper than MLC but slower and with a drastically shorter working life? Cue shaking of heads and whole stack engagement.
The problem is well-known. MLC flash …
Samsung offers cool green RAM for the same cold hard greenbacks
ISC12 Samsung is promoting its green memory here at ISC 2012 in Hamburg, Germany, saying its 20nm-class DRAM uses less electricity than 50nm-class RAM and runs cooler too. Oh, and it costs the same.
To set the scene, consider an HPC set-up with 400 compute nodes, each with 96GB of 50nm-class RAM. Going by a Samsung figures that would …
Whamcloud flogs wild Lustre pig into obedience with data whip
ISC 2012 Whamcloud is adding enterprise-type data management features to the open-source Lustre parallel file system.
Whamcloud is a Lustre development company counting some Lustre inventors in its ranks. Lustre is a parallel file system enabling hundreds and thousands of supercomputer compute nodes to access file data at the same time, …
Team America, take two: Meet Colorado's cluster kids
HPC blog The other US-based team in the 2012 ISC Student Cluster Challenge is the University of Colorado, whose members hail from Boulder. Colorado is by far the most experienced team in the ISC version of this competition, having sent teams to all six SC cluster competitions.
In fact, I recognised several of their current Hamburg team …
What do we know about GPUs? Tianhe-1A lives at our school
HPC blog China’s NUDT (National University of Defense Technology) was the first Chinese team to compete at a Student Cluster Competition, making the trek to SC in Seattle in 2010. They came very close to winning the whole competition, finishing a very close second to Taiwan’s Tsinghua University.
They also survived a gruelling intra- …
Meet China's cluster Pop Idol winners, Team Tsinghua
HPC blog China universities have gone student cluster crazy over the past year. When China was allotted two team slots at the ISC 2012 Student Cluster Competition, more than 300 universities expressed interest in participating.
Thirty schools submitted proposals, forcing the country to have a play-in round to select which two teams would …
US veterans Stony Brook face cluster compo crunch
HPC blog The Stony Brook Seawolves are one of two US teams competing in the ISC 2012 Student Cluster Challenge in Hamburg this week. This isn’t the first time the school has participated in a contest like this, but it’s probably their longest road trip in terms of distance and culture (although NYC to Portland, Oregon is a close second …
Student HPC whizzkids in unusual competition start
HPC blog The ISC Student Cluster Challenge kicked off last night in a unique manner. Rather than a simple shouted “Go!” or a loud tone sent over a bullhorn, the organisers confronted the university teams with a physical challenge, along the lines of the old Le Mans auto races.
Each team had to run across the show floor to gather up six …
ISC Klusterkamph: Meet the home squad, Team KIT
Germany's cluster-competition entry, team KIT, is defending their home turf at the ISC 2012 Student Cluster Challenge this week in Hamburg. We spent a few minutes chatting with them as the competition was beginning. They were all smiles, but it was clear that they are serious about winning the competition.
This is the first …
ISC cluster smackdown: Students whip out their tools
HPC blog The final system configurations for the ISC 2012 Student Cluster Challenge have been locked down and can now be revealed. For the ISC inaugural event, we’re seeing a lot of sameness but a few key differences.
On the "sameness" side, every team is sporting various flavours of Intel Sandy Bridge processors, with speeds ranging …
EMC confesses burning Lustre lust
ISC 2012 no-show EMC launched a high-performance computing version of its generic mid-range VNX array today.
The VNX HPC Appliance series is a pre-configured hardware and software appliance and marks EMC's first real thrust into the HPC market. This followed a claim in November last year when it announced a performance density …
