Earlier HPC
China aims to redraw the petaflop graph with 100 Pflops in 2015
HPC blog China shocked the supercomputing world in late 2010 with a chart-topping 2.56 Petaflop/sec Tianhe-1A. It was a surprising system on several levels: 1) it topped the incumbent number one box (Oak Ridge’s Jaguar) by almost 50%; 2) it was the first (and, so far, only) hybrid commodity combo of Intel Xeon and NVIDIA Tesla processors …
VLSCI's supercomputer passes acceptance test, lands in top 50
The Victorian Life Sciences Computation Initiative – VLSCI to its friends – is close to opening up its BlueGene/Q powerhouse for user jobs.
The system passed its acceptance testing over the weekend of June 18, and is expected to be in full production in a matter of weeks, the organisation’s CEO Peter Taylor has told The Register …
Nvidia shows off Tesla K10 performance
ISC 2012 The Top 500 supercomputer ranking is based on the performance of machines running the Linpack Fortran matrix math benchmark using double-precision floating point math, but a lot of applications will do just fine with single-precision math. And it is for these workloads, graphics chip maker and supercomputing upstart Nvidia says …
Intel slaps Xeon Phi brand on MIC coprocessors
ISC 2012 The name "Many Integrated Core" doesn't roll off the tongue – and even Intel doesn't know whether to pronoun MIC as "mick" or "mike" – so with the future "Knights Corner" x86 coprocessors intended to thwart the coprocessor plans of Nvidia and its Tesla family, Chipzilla is settling on the brand name of Xeon Phi to peddle its …
IBM US nuke-lab beast 'Sequoia' is top of the flops (petaflops, that is)
ISC 2012 For the second time in the past two years, a new supercomputer has taken the top ranking in the Top 500 list of supercomputers – and it does not use a hybrid CPU-GPU architecture. But the question everyone will be asking at the International Super Computing conference in Hamburg, Germany today is whether this is the last hurrah …
Swinburne flicks switch on $AU3 million GPU
Swinburne University has brought a new 120 teraflop GPU-based supercomputer from SGI to help cope with astronomers' ever-increasing need for lots of computing power.
The 636 Intel GPU, 121 NVIDIA GPU, quad-InfiniBand machine, gSTAR, is one of just six similar grunt-boxes in Australia. The power boost over Swinburne’s previous …
German KIT v Fighting Seawolves in student cluster deathmatch
HPC blog According to bettors, the upcoming ISC’12 Student Cluster Challenge in Hamburg will come down to a competition between home-country team KIT (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology) and the New York-based Stony Brook University Fighting Seawolves. (No, I don’t know what a ‘Seawolf’ is either.)
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The competition …
Australian company claims world’s fastest switch
A new Australia company, Zeptonics, has created what it claims is the world’s fastest network switch.
The company’s “Zeptomux” bills itself as a “23-to-1 multiplexing switch that operates with a fibre-to-fibre latency (including SFP+s) of ~130ns.” The Zeptomux can achieve that speed over copper or fibre, and uses 10G Ethernet …
Newbie German team 3-to-1 fave in cluster building compo
HPC Blog Early money makes Germany’s Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) a heavy favorite to win both the LINPACK and Overall number-crunching benchmark competitions at next week’s Student Cluster Challenge in Hamburg, Germany.
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The high-performance computing competition, also known as “Hell on the Elbe: Student …
Supercomputers need standard shot glass to measure out juice
Webcast The biggest challenge in getting to the next level of supercomputer performance – Exascale – is the massive amounts of electricity these systems will consume. On a smaller scale, energy consumption also inhibits HPC installations. The problem isn’t just getting enough plugs from your walls to the grid; it’s also the cost of …
Students face off in Hamburg home-cooked cluster clash
HPC blog We’re a little less than two weeks away from the tip-off of the first ISC/HPCAC 2012 Student Cluster Competition. University teams representing the US, China, and host nation Germany will meet in an epic benchmark battle to prove which team can design and build the fastest homemade cluster. The only constraint is electricity – …
Kobe University gets a prime cut of K super
If you have built the largest supercomputer in the world, which the Japanese government has (once again) done with the 10.5 petaflops K supercomputer, the one thing you can't do is have it sitting there being idle.
So Fujitsu, which built the K machine, has been making the rounds of the Japanese universities and is peddling …
IBM rejigs Platform control freakery for supers
Big Blue wants everything to be about Smarter Planet, but its acquisition of grid computing pioneer Platform Computing back in October 2011 was about giving IBM a place in the cloudy, gridded, and automated cluster management space and some necessary tools to maintain some sort of control – both literally and financially – in …
China sends likely pair to student cluster smackdown
ISC 2012 China is sending two teams to the ISC Student Cluster Competition (iSCC) this June in Hamburg. Tsinghua University and the National University of Defense Technology were survivors of a rigorous Hunger Games-style play-in competition; they had to beat out four other teams for the coveted Hamburg spots. Chinese server/services …
Americans invade Euro cluster compo
ISC 2012 Two American universities vie for cluster fame and glory in the inaugural ISC'12 Student Cluster Competition (iSCC) in Hamburg next month. This competition, sponsored by Airbus, the HPC Advisory Council and ISC, gives university teams the chance to design, build, and benchmark their clusters against four teams of peers. They’re …
Germany's KIT drives hot-shot boffins to Klusterkampf
ISC 2012 Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) in Karlsruhe, Germany is the lone European entry in the ISC'12 Student Cluster Competition. As such, they’re carrying a huge weight on their solid Teutonic shoulders. KIT, as Team Germany, is charged with defending home-country student clustering honour against powerhouse teams from China …
The stage is set: Prepare for Hamburg cluster carnage
ISC 2012 Now that China has settled on its two entrants to the ISC’12 Student Cluster Challenge (I’m dubbing it iSCC for short), it’s time to get a feel for the number-cruncher design competition and what the entrants will face.
Airbus is the big-name sponsor of the iSCC this year and has played a vital role in getting this fledgling …
Student cluster warriors to face off on new battlefield: ISC
HPC blog I’ve been following the annual SC Student Cluster Competition (SCC) for a few years now. It’s a great programme that pits teams of university undergrads against each other in the quest to design, build, and benchmark their own clustered systems. In the process they learn a lot about HPC, get a lot of exposure to the industry, …
Fusion-io stuffs workstation storage into bulging hand luggage
HPC blog Fusion-io nabbed prime real estate on the GTC 2012 exhibit floor – right inside the entryway. They took advantage of it by offering a hosted oxygen bar, complete with an oxygen bartender and a wide selection of coloured/flavoured airs. I got the lowdown on their offerings (it's hospital grade oxygen – something I insist upon) …
Big Blue supers crunch kaon decay
Looking at the fundamental properties of matter can take some serious computing grunt.
Take the calculation needed to help understand kaon decay – a subatomic particle interaction that helps explain why the universe is made of matter rather than anti-matter: it soaked up 54 million processor hours on Argonne National Laboratory’ …
Crazy Texans dunk servers in DEEP FRYERS
HPC blog | Vid I first met the Green Revolution guys back at SC09 in Portland, Oregon. As I roamed the exhibit hall, people kept telling me to check out “those guys with the deep fryers full of servers”. At last I found them out in the lobby, which is the kids’ table section of the show.
Above is a quick video of their demo that I shot while …
Mega 12ft interactive electro-whiteboard lures GTC12 punters
HPC blog While wandering the exhibit floor at GTC12, my attention was captured by what looked like a massive (12ft x 4ft, 3.66m x 1.22m) electronic whiteboard with fast-moving screens portraying information in lots of different forms. Each window was being created, resized, moved, then closed at high speed without lag or distracting …
Minority Report-style swishery demoed with cheap webcam
HPC blog New tech at GTC12 lets punters pretend to be Tom Cruise in Minority Report: opening windows, moving them, closing them, and essentially acting like a cool, futuristic cop.
Eyesight Mobile Technologies performed an interesting demonstration on the exhibit floor. In the video, marketing director Liat Rostock shows us how the firm' …
Big names unleash 1,000-node Hadoop stampede
Hadoop, the distributed big-data processing system named after a toy elephant, now has a group of suppliers behind it. The tech giants are collectively aiming to develop the popular big data beast with a 1,000 node cluster – dubbed the Analytics Workbench – as a laboratory.
EMC's Greenplum, Intel, Mellanox Technologies, Micron, …
Microsoft's FDS data-sorter crushes Hadoop
Techies at Microsoft Research, the big brain arm of the software goliath, have taken the crown in the sorting benchmark world. The researchers are thinking about how to implement new sorting algorithms in the Bing search engine to give Microsoft a leg up on the MapReduce algorithms that underpin Google's search engine and other …
Big Bang secrets hidden in hundreds of petabytes of tape
The NCSA Blue Waters petascale supercomputer is getting massive amounts of Spectra Logic tape library storage.
It will start with four 17-frame Spectra T-Finity tape libraries for near-line data archive needs in the first year. Two more will be installed the following year. This means a raw capacity of 328PB and read/write …
Will Nvidia 'n' pals pwn future gaming?
HPC blog With the introduction of VGX and the announcement of Nvidia's GeForce Grid offering, Nvidia and their partners are taking square aim at one of the biggest market opportunities around: gaming. Video games are big business.
For example, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 totted up more than a billion in sales after only 16 days on the …
IBM parks parallel file system on Big Data's lawn
The IT universe is seeing a massive collision taking place as the worlds of high-performance computing, big data and warehousing intermingle. IBM is pushing its General Parallel File System (GPFS) further to broaden its footprint in this space, with the 3.5 release adding big data and async replication features as well as …
NVIDIA VGX VDI: New tech? Or rehashed hash?
HPC blog My article about NVIDIA’s new VGX virtualised GPU being a potential holy grail for task- and power-user desktop virtualisation inspired reader comments that are well worth addressing. They also brought out a few details that I didn’t cover in the article. First, let’s address a few of the specific comments.
From reader …
Core Wars: Inside Intel's power struggle with NVIDIA
GPU Technology Conference Intel and NVIDIA are battling for the hearts and minds of developers in massively parallel computing.
Intel has been saying for years that concurrency rather than clock speed is the future of high performance computing, yet it has been slow to provide the mass of low-power, high-efficiency CPU cores needed to take full advantage …
Inside Nvidia's GK110 monster GPU
At the tail end of the GPU Technology Conference in San Jose this week, graphics chip juggernaut and compute wannabe Nvidia divulged the salient characteristics of the high-end "Kepler2" GK110 GPU chips that are going to be the foundation of the two largest supercomputers in the world and that are no doubt going to make their …
Hybrid computing just like FLESH-EATING bacteria
HPC blog Hybrid computing (using CPUs plus GPUs to accelerate processing speed/throughput) and necrotizing faciitis (a flesh-eating bacterial* infection) have more in common than is typically thought. Both exhibit high growth rates, and both are incredibly difficult to stop once they get started.
This story is perhaps best told via …
Mutant number-crunchers win cluster popularity contest
HPC blog Hybrid computing has come a very long way in a relatively short period of time. My first exposure to hybrids came at SC08 in the lovely city of Austin, Texas. Earlier that year, the Roadrunner system at Los Alamos National Lab had achieved two milestones: 1) It was the first system to break through the petabyte barrier; and 2) …
Nvidia drops veil on game-changing might of VGX
HPC blog What’s a “holy crap” moment? For me, it’s when I see or hear (or do) something that has far-reaching and previously unforeseen consequences. I’ve had at least two of these moments (so far) at the GTC 2012 conference. The first was when Jen-Hsun Huang, in his keynote presentation, tossed up a slide about Kepler and this new thing …
Nvidia shows off superjuiced Kepler GPU
HPC blog There were quite a few surprises in today’s GTC12 keynote by NVIDIA CEO and co-founder Jen-Hsun Huang.
If NVIDIA were just introducing a new and faster rev of its latest GPU processor, one that brings three times the performance without breaking the bank on energy usage, that would be a solid win, and in line with expectations. …
Real-time drone videos get GPU-tastic
HPC blog Here at the GPU Technology Conference (GTC 2012), you see a lot of things that you didn’t think were quite possible yet. Case in point: cleaning up surveillance video.
The standard scene in “24” or any spy thriller is of agents poring over some grainy, choppy, barely-lit video that’s so bad you can’t tell whether it’s four …
Nvidia's Kepler pushes parallelism up to eleven
GTC 2012 When Nvidia did a preview of its next-generation "Kepler" GPU chips back in March, the company's top brass said that they were saving some of the goodies in the Kepler design for the big event at Nvidia's GPU Technical Conference in San Jose, which runs this week. And true to its word, the Kepler GPUs do have some goodies that …
Nvidia launches Nsight CUDA dev tools into Eclipse
GTC 2012 Nvidia kicked off its GPU Technical Conference today by launching an updated version of its Nsight development platform that wraps around the CUDA compiler set and now interfaces with Eclipse-based integrated development environments.
Nvidia also unwrapped updated versions of the Nsight tools that plug into Microsoft's Visual …
Overclockers to fight for global supremacy
Overclocking enthusiasts around the world spent the weekend topping up their coolant tanks and tuning their rigs with unusual fervour, as they prepared to go into battle in the annual Chimp Challenge.
The competition sees overclocking and hardware enthusiast communities assemble special teams, each of which aim to do as much …
GTC 2012: Not your average vendo-loveathon
HPC blog One of my very favorite industry events is coming up next week: the NVIDIA-organised GPU Technology Conference, aka GTC 2012. I’ve been in the tech industry for almost 20 years; roughly half that time was spent working for The Man in vendor firms, and the other half at my own boutique industry analyst firm. Not surprisingly, I’ …
New SGI CEO builds firewall around unprofitable sales
SGI tapped a new CEO, Jorge Titinger, back at the end of February to get the company back on an even keel, and in the wake of SGI's reporting its financial results for its third quarter of fiscal 2012, Titinger conceded that he has his work cut out for him because SGI, like many other server makers from time to time, has been …
Biz prof disses Big Data as a fetish for info hoarders
HPC blog When it comes to Big Data, I’m as geeked out as the next guy – if not a little more so. For the last three years or so, I’ve been telling anyone who will listen (and plenty of people who won’t) that Big Data and enterprise analytics are the "next big thing" both in business and computing. Today, it’s widely accepted that Big …
