YouTube: New Sun x64 Systems with Quad-Core Processors

This video showcases the new Sun Fire X4140, Sun Fire X4240, Sun Fire X4440 servers powered by Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors. Sun Fire servers deliver market-leading energy-efficiency, density, and scalability.

Announcing Grid Engine 6.2 Beta Binaries

Grid Engine 6.2 Beta courtesy binaries are now ready for download.

Grid Engine 6.2, which has undergone significant changes in qmaster to significantly improve its scalability in challenging environments, adds powerful features to the core system, introduces multi cluster support for the Accounting and Reporting Console (ARCo) and comes with a new module extending the scope of Grid Engine to a new domain of use cases: the Service Domain Manager (SDM), aka. project Hedeby allows to dynamically (re-)assign computational resources on demand.

What's new in Grid Engine 6.2

Service Domain Manager
New in Grid Engine "core" and Accounting and Reporting Console (ARCo)
Moving Grid Engine documentation set to http://wikis.sun.com

The courtesy binaries are available at:

http://gridengine.sunsource.net/project/gridengine/downloads/62/download.html

Photo gallery: Lustre User Group 2008

A photo gallery has been posted from the recent Lustre User Group meeting. Videos and slides from the meeting are also available from Lustre.org.

The Lustre File System is also available for a free download.

AMD Redraws Server Processor Roadmap

Michael Feldman of HPC Wire has this story about recent changes to the AMD processor roadmap:

"Further out, AMD has a chance to catch Intel with the third generation Opteron processors. Two new offerings, the six-core "Sao Paolo" and the twelve-core "Magny Cours," will be developed for a new platform -- what the company's calling Socket G43. Taking a cue from Intel's multipackaging approach, the twelve-core Magny Cours is actually two six-core chips jammed into the same socket." Full Story

If you haven't been to the HPC Wire site lately, you should check out their new design. The watercooler has even made their blogroll!

This Week on the Sun HPC Community Portal

This Week on the Sun HPC Community Portal

Videos:
* FlexRex: New Cartoon on the HPC Portal
* Peter Bojanic presents a Lustre Community Update at the Lustre User Group
* Makia Minich presents on the Giraffe HPC Stack

Blogs:
* HPC User Forum: Josh Simons at the Operating System Panel
* New Facebook Community on Sun HPC

Events:
* Open Source Grid & Cluster Conference, Oakland, CA, May 12-16
* Design Automation Conference, Los Angeles, CA, June 8-13
* Sun HPC Consortium, Dresden, Germany, June 15-17
* International Supercomputing Conference ISC08, Dresden, Germany, June 17-20

ISC'08 Newsletter

The latest newsletter from the International Supercomputing Conference ISC'08 is out with these headlines:

- Cluster Session Overview
- After-Hours Social Events
- Hurry Up and Save: Online Advance Registration Ends May 19

There is still time to register for Early-bird rates for the Sun HPC Consortium, which will take place June 15-17 in Dresden just prior to ISC. Registration site

AMD Expands Charter for OpenSolaris and Sun xVM

AMD announced that its Operating System Research Center (OSRC) has expanded its focus to include optimization and tuning advancements for Sun Microsystems’ OpenSolaris Operating System and Sun xVM Virtualization family of products. This extends AMD’s commitment to work together with technology software partners to ensure that their OS and virtualization software layers are optimized to leverage AMD processor-based platforms’ features. By expanding research and development on the OpenSolaris Operating System, the ORSC expects to help drive increased Solaris OS performance for business customers as well as feature enhancements on AMD Opteron processor-based systems.

“Sun and AMD share a long history of technology collaboration. This next step at the OSRC represents an even deeper commitment on the part of both companies to ensure that our respective technologies work in concert to deliver customers the highest performance possible on our systems,” said Earl Stahl, vice president, Software Development, AMD. “We know that Solaris is a key enterprise-class OS for mission critical applications while the xVM family of products addresses desktop and server virtualization for the enterprise and data center with high availability, scalability, performance and management. AMD is a strong supporter of open source and will be a contributing member of the OpenSolaris community.” Full Story

FlexRex: New Cartoon on HPC Portal

Our work-from-home hero stars in a new cartoon in support of the Sun HPC Community Portal. Watch as his four friends use the Portal and the Lustre File System to bolster Homeland Security. Full Story

This short film premiered at the recent Lustre User Group in Sonoma, California. For more presentation videos from the LUG, check out Lustre.org.

Cloud Computing on NPR

The term "Cloud Computing" reached a milestone this week as it was featured on NPR's Morning Edition:

"Every Monday, the 'Morning Edition' has a technology theme. The Cloud Computing segment was high level and aimed primarily at a non-tech audience. I always find it hard to answer the question ‘what is Cloud Computing?’ as there are so many different definitions. Regardless, it was a great chance to talk about an exciting technology and highlight the need for a real security conversation between the providers and people interested in IT security - the primary reason why I created cloudsecurity.org." Full Story

Data Centers Becoming Biggest Polluters

The world’s data centers are projected to surpass the airline industry as a greenhouse gas polluter by 2020, according to a new study by McKinsey & Co.

"The report also lists 10 “game-changing improvements” intended to double data center efficiency, ranging from using virtualization software to integrated control of cooling units. “It clearly makes more sense to become more efficient than to build another $100 million data center,” said Kenneth Brill, executive director of the Uptime Institute." Full Story

For more information on Sun's efforts to Green the datacenter, check out our site on Eco-responsibility.

White Paper: Best Practices for Architecting a Lustre-Based Storage Environment

In this white paper by Data Direct Networks, you'll learn best practices for architecting a Lustre-based storage environment. While many approaches can be taken to building up a Lustre environment, it is important to be aware of the trade-offs associated with various design decisions. Full Story

NVIDIA shaking up parallel programming world

NVIDIA’s CUDA system, originally developed for their graphics cores, are finding migratory uses into other massively parallel computing applications:

"The argument there is that while it’s not as efficient as it could be with specialized custom programming, anyone can use the toolset to make it happen. In fact, many programmers even think of the parallel processing engine as a type of “black box”. You send it data, it computes it however it does it, and on the far side comes the good, computed data." Full Story

Open source in grid computing: past, present and future

It is not long now until the first Open Source Grid and Cluster Conference, to be held in Oakland, California from 13-15 May 2008. This upcoming event has Grid luminary Ian Foster thinking about the role of open source in grid and cluster computing, in the past, present, and future.

"Overall, it’s an exciting time for open source grid and cluster computing. Much of this progress will be presented at the Open Source Grid and Cluster Conference. If you want to learn about what software exists, find out what people are doing with that software, and engage in discussions about what comes next, you should attend! If you do, I look forward to seeing you there." Full Story

OpenSolaris HPC Community

Many thanks to the InsideHPC blog for bringing us this story:

"The folks over at the OpenSolaris community have dedicated a community focus group to high performance computing. The community is designed to spark interest and exchange notes on utilizing the OpenSolaris platform for high performance computing. The community page lists four main purposes:

.: Provide a home for the OpenSolaris HPC distro

.: Highlight existing features and future enhancements relevant for high-performance computing

.: Provide a forum to discuss issues and possible solutions to problems faced by HPC developers

.: Provide pointers to pertinent resources and tools currently available.

The community page provides a list of participating development groups, including GridEngine, Xen, ZFS, pNFS, SAM-QFS, OpenMPI and Lustre. Thanks to Dan Templeton for raising this on the SGE mailing list." Full Story

Video: Open Storage for HPC

In this video, Sun's Matthew Baier and Chris Wood discuss Open Storage and how it will change the face of high performance computing.

Utility Computing Great for Startups

Now that Utility Computing is coming of age, it turns out that entrepreneurial firms are the best customers, and that may drive a new class of innovative companies to market:

"It turns out the sweet spot is startup firms. Many business ideas never get off the ground because entrepreneurs can’t raise the $100,000 or more needed for capital investment in computers." Full Story

Sun pushes its green IT agenda

Energy efficiency and utility computing are important to Sun in terms of sales due to the new European targets, but also because of the growing importance placed on environmental issues by customers, says Richard Barrington, UK head of sustainability and public policy.

"So if we're looking at doubling power consumption in the next 10 years in the UK, it means Sun has to deliver 40 percent more energy-efficiency savings. But if we provide the best environmental technology, it will be delivered by the truckload, and being able to drive energy efficiency is a good start," Barrington says. Full Story

Sun CEO: HPC Is Here to Stay

At the recent Web 2.0 Expo, Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz said HPC is alive and well, noting that he sells Sun gear to newer Web 2.0 companies that ask for large multiprocessor systems to scale their businesses.

Schwartz also cast aside the idea that companies just want several one-way "pizza box" servers.

"All horizontal scale, ultimately, scales vertically," he said.

To that end, Schwartz said that while the perception is that Internet-focused companies use those one-socket servers, their average node is a four-way platform, which carries a lot of computing power when running Sun’s eight-core UltraSPARC T1 and T2 chips.

"To me, that looks like a 32-way computer. And by the way, when you sit down and talk to folks at companies like Facebook, they start talking to you about high-performance computing to interpolate and interrogate the social graph, and they all of a sudden need terabit switching,” he said. “So I think we're seeing a very interesting shift from how do we simply serve the Web to how do we run analytics against it." Full Story

Sun Talks MCAE in China

Michael Schulman from Sun Microsystems gave a keynote presentation on Sun Infrastructure Solutions for MCAE at the recent Pera Global conference in Shanghai, China.

From left to right - Stephen Perrenod (Sun Microsystems), Wang Hua Qian (Pera Global), Michael Schulman (Sun Microsystems), Liu Zhao (MDCL Frontline), George Lan (Sun Microsystems). Here's a link to our friends at the MDCL-FRONTLINE group.

Why aren't more companies doing HPC?

Two new studies by the Council of Competitiveness examine why more companies aren't embracing HPC technology:

"There's a real opportunity to make modeling and simulation a national best practice. I think that's something we have to start thinking about as a country." -- Suzy Tichenor, Vice President, Council on Competitiveness Full Story

HPC Innovation in the Era of 'Good Enough'

According to this story by John E. West, the HPC market wants leading-edge innovation but remains unwilling to pay for it's development:

"There are two forces working against robust R&D in HPC. First, investment in research for high end computation has remained lackluster even while industry groups and a series of blue ribbon government panels have repeatedly identified the need for increased funding and coordination. Without external funding for computation-centric R&D, vendors in HPC have been left to fund innovation on business margins alone."

I think John makes a good point here; the HPC market has an excellent track record of putting innovative companies out of business. Full Story

This Week on HPC Community Portal

Here's what you might have missed this week on the Sun HPC Community Portal:

Videos and Podcasts:
Radio HPC Podcast #2: AMD Fires Up and New Sun Storage and Archive Solution
Video: Rock's Transactional Memory (51:49)
Video: Project Fortress at Sun Labs (38:43)

Blogs:
Sun Rolls Out Storage & Archive Solution for HPC
New OpenSolaris Project: Visualization for HPC
HPC User Forum: Josh Simons at the Interconnect Panel
Darryl Gove: Solaris Application Programming in Second life
Free Download of Lustre File System

Events:
Open Source Grid & Cluster Conference, Oakland, May 12-16
Sun HPC Consortium, Dresden, June 15-17

Scientists Use Ranger to Explore Sub-Atomic Physics

HPC Wire brings us this story by TACC's Aaron Dubrow:

"Physics has led us deeper and deeper into the heart of matter in a quest to determine what the universe is made of. It's a real-world question that drives particle physicist Robert Sugar to dig in his heels and break out the big guns -- supercomputers like Ranger at the Texas Advanced Computing Center -- to help solve the numerical equations at the root of fundamental physics." Full Story

Video: Project Fortress at Sun Labs

In this video, Eric Allen and Guy Steele present on Project Fortress.

Video: Transactional Memory on Rock

In this video from the recent Sun Labs Open House, Mark Moir discusses Rock's transactional memory and how to exploit It.