Earlier HPC
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 …
Behold the TPC-DS, a new weapon in the global Big Data war
There isn’t anything inherently evil about industry standard benchmarks, just as there isn’t anything inherently evil about guns. You know the saying: “Guns don’t kill people – people kill people.” (What about bullets? No, they’re not inherently evil either.)
But in the hands of motivated vendors, benchmarks are weapons to be …
CPU and RAM hogs overstaying their welcome? Here's a fix
HPC Blog Multicore processors drive everything these days from the biggest HPC cluster to the lowliest tablet – even smartphones. While parallel programming has come quite a way, there are still many apps that aren’t well-behaved at all.
They’re the worst kind of guests – acting like they own the whole damned house while paying …
Nvidia: What would you do with a petaflops super?
Nvidia is being a tease, but your good idea could land you with a Telsa GPU coprocessor based on the future "Kepler" GPU chip.
Ahead of its GPU Technical Conference, which runs from May 13 through 17 in San Jose, the graphics chip and math motor maker has announced a competition called "What Would You Do With A Petaflops …
Zunicore adds GPUs to clouds
Zunicore, the cloudy infrastructure division of Peer 1 Hosting, is going ceepie-geepie hybrid and making its cloud suitable for parallel supercomputing workloads that are goosed by GPU coprocessors.
The GPU-assisted cloud capacity is in beta testing now and will be opened up to commercial customers in July, a spokesperson at …
MIT boffins play BUILDING-SIZED Tetris
HPC blog This is one of those stories that just makes me grin and giggle (not a simpering, girlish giggle, but a strong, manly giggle). In their latest display of technical hackery, MIT students built a Tetris game that uses an entire building as the game board.
Kevin Fogarty has the story with video here, or you can watch it embedded …
Cray revenues spike on XE6, XK6 super sales
If you were wondering why Cray has sold off its supercomputer interconnect to chip giant Intel for $140m, a close look at the company's first quarter financial results will give you a clue.
In the quarter ended in March, Cray's sales were up like a rocket as a number of large supercomputer deals, some of which had slipped from …
Intel to use Cray IP to score boffo DARPA dosh
HPC blog In a bold and unexpected move, Intel bought out rights to Cray’s networking and interconnect technology a couple of days ago for $140 million in cold, hard cash. Like our pal TPM said in his comprehensive story, it was quite a surprise to HPC industry watchers. I hadn’t heard speculation about Cray looking to sell any assets. In …
Intel came a-knockin' for Cray super interconnects
The news that supercomputer maker Cray was selling off its interconnect hardware business to chip giant Intel was a bit of a shocker yesterday, and the top brass at Cray got on the horn with Wall Street bright and early this morning to explain the deal a bit more.
First of all, Peter Ungaro, president and CEO at Cray, confirmed …
Super Micro grows despite Xeon E5 delay, disk shortages
Motherboard and system maker Super Micro has been anticipating the bump in revenues from Intel's "Sandy Bridge" family of Xeon E5 chips and their related "Romley" server designs for nearly a year, and finally the Romley romp has begun.
In the company's third quarter of fiscal 2012 ended in March, revenues rose by 2.5 per cent, …
Intel reels in Cray's supercomputer interconnect biz
Intel really is taking networking and system interconnects very seriously, and is buying the interconnect hardware business from massively parallel supercomputer maker Cray for $140m.
The move is something of a surprise to us outside of Cray, Intel, and the government supercomputer labs that pay the bills at the supercomputer …
Dell fuels up Precision workstations with Xeon E5s
Intel has got its Xeon E5 processors out the door for boxes with one or two sockets and is getting ready to start the "Ivy Bridge" generation of desktop processors, and so it's no surprise Dell is revamping its Precision workstation lineup.
The direct vendor is keeping momentum going in this fast-growing segment of the desktop …
Mellanox rides the Xeon E5 wave
Switch and server adapter card maker Mellanox Technologies is surfing on two upgrade waves: Its own shift to faster InfiniBand and Ethernet products and Intel's launch of the Xeon E5-2600 processors, which came out in early March.
In the first quarter of 2012 ended in March, Mellanox posted revenues of $88.7m, up 61.2 per cent …
Cray taps Microsoft parallel guru as CTO
Supercomputer maker Cray has been looking around for a new CTO since last August, and has now decided that the best candidate for the job was right there at the company, and has chosen William Blake for the role.
No, not the English poet and painter, but the former general manager of the Parallel Computing Group at Microsoft, …
Cycle fires up 50,000-core HPC cluster on Amazon EC2
Cycle Computing is at it again, pushing the envelope on setting up HPC clusters that ride atop Amazon's EC2 compute clusters. This time, Cycle Computing has been tapped by protein simulation software-maker Schrödinger and drug-hunter Nimbus Discovery, which is in hot pursuit of drugs to cure Non-Hodgkin's lymphoma and obesity. …
CSIRO orders 2,144 core, 174,720 GPU upgrade
The CSIRO has announced an upgrade to its GPU cluster to a hefty 134 nodes powered by 268 Intel E5-2650 processors and 390 NVidia Tesla 2050 GPU cards.
The 2,144 CPU core, 174,720 GPU core thumper will, according to the science agency’s head of Computation and Simulation Sciences Dr John Taylor, deliver up to 120 Teraflops of …
SoftLayer tailors HPC clouds with GPU lining
Hosting and cloud computing service provider SoftLayer is getting into the modern hybrid supercomputer racket with the launch of GPU-enhanced server instances.
SoftLayer, which is based in Dallas, was founded in 2005 and merged with hosting rival The Planet before being bought up by GI Partners, in 2010. GI Partners is a private …
United Nations gifts NORTH KOREA with tech worth $50k
HPC blog The UN’s World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) is looking to gift the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (the bad Korea) with a little over $50k worth of hardware and peripherals, plus some training, with the goal of modernising North Korea’s patent and trademark applications.
Really? That’s what’s highest on North …
Fujitsu wins another big super deal in Japan
Japanese IT conglomerate Fujitsu has been pushing hard to peddle its Sparc and x86 supercomputer clusters to take on IBM, Cray, Silicon Graphics, and others, and not surprisingly Fujitsu it has scored some big deals in the home country. The company just took down a big hybrid Sparc-x86 cluster deal at Kyushu University, which is …
Blighty's new top supercomputer bagged by software boffins
The UK government is buying an IBM Blue Gene/Q supercomputer and iDataplex [PDF] servers, with DDN storage, to use in its Daresbury laboratory. The lab is used for developing software for next-generation supercomputers, presumably the exascale thingies needed for chewing through Really Big Data.
The funding and authorisation …
Nvidia: No magic compilers for HPC coprocessors
Steve Scott, the former CTO at supercomputer maker Cray, joined Nvidia last summer as CTO for the chip maker's Tesla GPU coprocessor division, and the idea was to shake things up a bit and not only sell more Tesla units, but to shape expectations in supercomputing as we strive to reach exascale capacities.
And so, in his first …
Fujitsu fires up first petaflopper PrimeHPC FX10
IT conglomerate Fujitsu has fired up the first installation of its PrimeHPC FX10 massively parallel Sparc-based supercomputer, a machine called Oakleaf-FX that weighs in at 1.13 petaflops of peak raw performance.
The University of Tokyo's Super Computing Division/Information Technology Center is the home of the Oakleaf-FX super …
Big Blue to handle SKA's Big Data about Big Bang
Big Blue has been given the ultimate big data gig - collecting and analysing data all the way back to the universe's early history, thanks to a brief from the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy (ASTRON) and a €32.9m cheque from the Dutch government. ASTRON and IBM will collaborate on a computer capable of ingesting the …
Panasas kingpin: What's the solid state state of play?
Interview What can NAND flash do now for high-performance computing (HPC) storage and how will it evolve? Garth Gibson, the co-founder and chief technology officer for Panasas, the (HPC) storage provider, has definite views on it. Here's a snapshot of them.
El Reg: How can solid state technology benefit HPC in general?
Garth Gibson: The …
That latest student craze sweeping China: Supercomputing wars
HPC blog In a Wall Street Journal article last Friday, a bit of light was shone on China’s entry into the upper echelon of supercomputing nations over the past few years. In 2007 China had only 10 systems on the Top500 list. But like TV’s George Jefferson adding dry cleaning stores, China has been movin’ on up - it now has 74 of the top …
Arista juices switch with x86 server, FPGA, atomic clock
Upstart switch-maker Arista Networks, founded by serial entrepreneur Andy Bechtolsheim, is at it again, mashing up new kinds of iron to tackle problems in the data center. This time, Arista is bundling an atomic clock, a baby x86 server, flash memory, and field programmable gate arrays into its Ethernet switches to create what …
AMD plots an end run round Intel with SeaMicro's 'Freedom'
Analysis As last week was winding down, Advanced Micro Devices took control of upstart server maker SeaMicro, and guess what? AMD is still not getting into the box building business, even if it does support SeaMicro's customers for the foreseeable future out of necessity.
Further: Even if AMD doesn't have aspirations to build boxes, the …
Nvidia shows off first 'Kepler' GPUs
Updated Graphics chip and PC and server processor wannabe Nvidia is lifting the skirt a bit on its next-generation "Kepler" graphics processing units today as it starts talking about the feeds and speeds of its new GeForce graphics cards for desktop and notebook PCs.
As Nvidia co-founder and CEO Jen-Hsun Huang explained when he outed …
The Facebook job test: Now interviewers want your logins
HPC blog When I wrote this blog about how a recent research study correlated social network behavior with employee success, I speculated that we’d soon see employers trying to circumvent Facebook’s privacy policies in order to get a good look at your Facebook pages.
Well, it turns out that some employers aren’t happy with just seeing the …
Supercomputers sold like hotcakes in 2011
Sales of supercomputers last year were a bit better than the prognosticators at IDC expected, with sales up across all types of systems by 8.4 per cent to $10.3bn. IDC's earlier projections had called for sales to jump by 7.2 per cent from the $9.5bn level set in 2010.
According to IDC's definition, any high-performance …
Humans best crossword-puzzling computer
Officially, humans are the only ones who can enter the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, which was held in Brooklyn, New York over the weekend. But this time artificial intelligence expert Matt Ginsberg of On Time Systems has put his Dr Fill crossword solver to the test. As the results show, you don't have to throw out your …
Fujitsu's King K thrashes Top 500 rivals
Fujitsu's K computer has confirmed its place as emperor of the Top 500 supercomputer list with an incredible 10.51 petaflops.
The K computer – RIKEN, a Japanese government science and technology research institute, after the Japanese word for 1016, "Kei" – was conceived in 2006. Detailed design took place from 2007 to 2009, when …
Encyclopaedia Britannica - Ah, the memories
HPC blog Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc has announced that after 250 years, it’s throwing in the towel on print editions and moving to all-digital delivery of alphabetised facts and figures.
Encyclopaedia Britannica was a touchstone of my youth. You couldn’t go to a state fair or school event without seeing someone seated at a table next …
HPC battle royale: Exotic models vs Frankenstein monsters
HPC blog My article comparing supercomputer performance and price/performance to common computers generated quite a few comments. For those who didn’t see the initial story, the Fujitsu K computer is a 10 petaflop monster that’s currently the fastest computer in the world. It’s roughly 4x faster than the second place Tianhe-1A Chinese …
IDC: Big data biz worth $16.9 BILLION by 2015
How big is the big data business? That depends on how you dice and slice it.
The box-counters at IDC have cooked up a very precise and formal definition of big data that will keep everything from being thrown into the big data pot. To some ways of thinking, big data is just the new ERP for a webby world, and to others it is just …
The challenges of hot rocks and big data
Of all the alternative energy proposals suggested for Australia, geothermal is probably the least-understood in the public mind.
Australia’s problem is this: most places that adopt geothermal power do so because the heat is right there at the surface. Australia’s “hot rocks”, on the other hand, are a long way underground. To …
ANZ bid for super telescope down to the wire
The West Australian government has refused to give up on its ambitions to host the world’s largest radio telescope, the the Square Kilometre Array, despite a scientific panel’s reported recommendation that the bid go to the rival South African consortium.
The €1.5 billion construction project is slated to start as early as 2016 …
The Facebook test: Why social Big Data is important
HPC blog A study published by the Journal of Applied Social Psychology says that analysing applicant social network pages is a good predictor of how well the newbie might (or might not) fit into your organization.
They’re not talking about the obvious stuff, like status updates about looting stuff from work or faking exotic illnesses in …
NOAA picks IBM for supercomputer storm chasing
Updated The server executives at Big Blue are probably breathing a bit easier now that the company managed to survive a competitive bidding process on a monster supercomputer contract at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the climate modeling arm of the US Department of Commerce. As a result, IBM has the potential to …
SUPERCOMPUTER vs your computer in bang-for-buck battle
HPC blog A couple of weeks ago I posted a blog here (Exascale by 2018: Crazy...or possible?) that looked at how long it took the industry to hit noteworthy HPC milestones. Chatter in the comments section (aside from the guy who assailed me for a typo, and for not explicitly calling out ‘per second’ denotations) discussed what these …
IBM's Watson gets a job on Wall Street
IBM has signed a deal with banking group Citi to use the data-analyzing abilities of the Watson supercomputer to help deal with its customers.
Citi will try out Watson – which beat off human competition to win the US quiz show Jeopardy! last year – in a variety of roles. These could include building customer profiles based on …
