Interactive Tour: Sun-Powered CLUMEQ Supersilo Datacenter

When supercomputing consortium CLUMEQ designed its high-performance computing (HPC) system in Quebec, it was able to house it in the silo of a former particle accelerator on the Université Laval campus. The structure's 3-level cylindrical floor plan was ideal for cooling the 56 standard-size racks, and enabled the university to retain a treasured landmark. Launch Interactive Tour

Video: High Performance Data Management Panel Discussion

This panel discussion on High Performance Data Management was recorded by Deirdre Straughan at the Sun HPC Consortium 2009 in Portland.

End users:
James Pepin – Chief Technology Officer Clemson University
Stephen Monk – Sandia National Laboratory

Sun Microsystems:
Harriet Coverston – Distinguished Engineer, Sun Microsystems, Inc.
Peter Bojanic – Director Lustre Group, Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Session moderated by Sean Cochrane.

Video: SC09 Flash Storage Panel

Recorded 11/20/09 at SC09, this Panel discussion entitled "Flash Technology in HPC: Let the Revolution Begin" was moderated by Bob Murphy, Sun Microsystems. Download for iPod

Abstract: With an exponential growth spurt of peak GFLOPs available to HPC system designers and users imminent, the CPU performance I/O gap will reach increasingly gaping proportions. To bridge this gap, Flash is suddenly being deployed in HPC as a revolutionary technology that delivers faster time to solution for HPC applications at significantly lower costs and lower power consumption than traditional disk based approaches. This panel, consisting of experts representing all points of the Flash technology spectrum, will examine how Flash can be deployed and the effect it will have on HPC workloads.

* Bob Murpy slides: "Flash Technology in HPC: Let the Revolution Begin"

* Paresh Pattani slides: "Intel SSD Performance on HPC Applications"

* David Flynn slides: "Fusion-io Solid State in HPC"

* Larry Mcintosh and Dale Layfield slides: "Sun’s Flash Solutions for
optimizing MSC.Software’s Simulation Products"
For more information, check out this Sun Blueprint: Sun Business Ready HPC for MD Nastran.

* Jan Silverman slides: "Spansion EcoRAM NAM Network Attached Memory"

New Blueprint: Solving HPC I/O Bottleneck - Sun Lustre Storage System

This Sun BluePrints article is an updated version of an article by the same title originally published in April 2009. Specifically, this article contains updated performance results for the High Availability Object Storage Server (HA OSS) module used in the Lustre file system implementation. This new HA OSS module uses two Sun FireTM X4270 servers, each with two quad-core Intel Xeon 5500 series (Nehalem) processors and each configured with 24 GB RAM; Quad Data Rate (QDR) InfiniBand; and Lustre 1.8 file system software. Full Story

Lustre-Powered Hyperion Project is Reader's Choice

Last week the Lustre-Powered Hyperion Project received a coveted HPC Wire Readers Choice Award. The NNSA's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory teamed with Sun and nine other vendors to build and support a large-scale Linux cluster test bed to explore high performance computing technologies. Full Story

Video: Time-lapse of Sun Powered Red Sky Installation

Red Sky, Sandia's Sun Constellation Supercomputer is now the 10th fastest supercomputer on the Top500 list, with a sustained performance of 429.9 TFlops. As the fastest Nehalem-based system on the planet, Red Sky uses Sun's new 5600 Cooling Door System to achieve new levels of energy efficiency for a system of this size. By Sandia's own calculations, besides energy efficiency, the cooling door system saves over 5 million gallons a year of water compared to traditional air-cooled systems.

Al Gore entertains the supercomputer troops

The Register has posted a review of Al Gore's SC09 keynote:

"Gore wandered all over the place in discussing sustainability and the climate issues - you can watch An Inconvenient Truth and get more data than he gave out today. But he kept returning to the theme that it is up to the supercomputing scientists of the world to bridge the gap between the understanding of the issues of climate change that scientists have and the very tough infrastructure changes we need to make as citizens, as expressed through politics. Full Story

Video: SC09 windfall for Portland

Sun co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim makes a quick appearance in this video story from SC09.

SC10 will be in New Orleans, so check out their new site. Full Story

New Blueprint: Sun Business Ready HPC for Altair RADIOSS

This Sun BluePrints article provides an overview of running RADIOSS in a high-performance clustered environment on Sun systems. Sample performance data and suggestions for designing and configuring optimal solutions for a variety of workload sizes are presented. Download blueprint

Sun Shows Off World's Fastest Storage at SC09

This week at SC09, Sun announced new products and technologies that extend its HPC leadership, maximize application performance and throughput, and provide superior building blocks for HPC systems. In addition, Sun is announcing new HPC customers, world-record performance and Top 500 List results that demonstrate its relentless system innovation. Sun tripled its number of entries since the June 2009 list with a total of 15 deployments providing more than 2 PetaFLOPS (PFLOPS). Full Story

Video: Sun Powered CLUMEQ Silo is Super Efficient HPC

When supercomputing consortium CLUMEQ designed its high-performance computing (HPC) system in Quebec, it was able to house it in the silo of a former particle accelerator on the Université Laval campus. The structure's 3-level cylindrical floor plan was ideal for cooling the 56 standard-size racks, and enabled the university to retain a treasured landmark. Full Story

SC09 Live Twitter Stream

Social Media has already taken off at SC09!

Purdue University has developed a new Twitter analytics tool called need4feed.com that does an amazing job of aggregating all the #SC09 tweets into one place. Check it out at need4feed.com

Podcast: The Register Interviews Wilf Pinfold, SC09 Conference Chair

As part of an overview of the HPC market, Dan Olds at the Register interviews Wilf Pinfold, SC09 Conference Chair. Read the Full Story or listen to the MP3.

Sun Rocks the TOP500

The latest Top500 list was published today and three of the top five supercomputers based on Intel Nehalem CPUs were Sun Constellation Systems.

Sandia National Labs Red Sky supercomputer becomes a new system on the Top 10, entering the list at number 10 and edging out last June's number 10 entry the Juelich Juropa supercomputer which moves to 13th position on the Top500. KISTI's Tachyonll supercomputer enters the Top500 list at position 14. Quite amazing for its staying power on the Top500 and testimony to the TACC's Ranger supercomputer, which first appeared on the Top500 list in June 2008 at position 5 finds itself at postion 9 on the current Top500 list. Full Story.

Video: High Performance Life Sciences

Michael Brown explains how Sun Open Storage and Open Network Systems Computing are bringing new levels of performance, functionality and cost effectiveness for the Life Sciences market.

Video: Sun Solutions for Bioinformatics

In this video, Michael Brown explains how Sun Open Storage and Open Network Systems Computing are bringing new levels of performance, functionality and cost effectiveness for Bioinformatics.

Sun and UCSD Release the Sun Studio Roll for Rocks 5.2

Sun Studio is now available as a Rocks roll for both Linux and Solaris at http://www.rocksclusters.org.

Sun Studio joins both Sun HPC ClusterTools and Sun Grid Engine, existing rolls that have been available for some time, at: http://www.rocksclusters.org. By making Sun Studio available, Sun is providing the broad Rocks user base with an extremely powerful set of compilers and tools, freely available. The addition of Studio rounds out Sun's position as a key provider of core elements of the Rocks HPC stack with our highly respected workload management, compilers/tools, and MPI offerings. Full Story.

Video: Operational Experience with Sun HPC System in Automotive

In this video, James Leylek, Executive Director of Clemson's CU-CCMS center presents at the Sun HPC Consortium in Hamburg. Recorded June 21, 2009.

Teaser for Sun HPC Consortium Portland, Nov 14-15

Marc Hamilton blogs on some pending highlights for the Sun HPC Consortium this weekend:

"What cuts costs of moving to 10GbE by up to 78% and requires only 1/6 the number of cables? Customers who have registered for the SC09 Sun HPC Consortium this weekend in Portland will be among the first to find out." Full Story

There's still time to register--Sign up for the Sun HPC Consortium today!

TACC Ranger Supercomputer Surpasses 1.1 Million Jobs

The Sun-powered Ranger supercomputer, one of the most powerful systems in the world for open science research, has run about 1.1 million jobs in under two years. When it entered full production on Feb. 4, 2008, this first-of-its-kind system marked the beginning of the Petascale Era in high-performance computing (HPC) where systems now approach a thousand trillion operations per second and manage a thousand trillion bytes of data.

"Ranger has already enabled hundreds of research projects and thousands of users to do very large-scale computational science in diverse domains," said Jay Boisseau, director of the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC). "We're very proud of the tremendous impact it has had on open science, and the impact is growing as it matures and more researcher applications are optimized to use its tremendous capabilities." Full Story

Posted by Rich Brueckner [HPC Article of the Day] ( November 11, 2009 10:54 AM ) Permalink | Comments [0]

Video: Sun Solutions for Optimizing MD Nastran Performance

In this video, Dale Layfield describes performance tuning recommendations and guidelines to allow an IT administrator or experienced MD Nastran user to configure both MD Nastran and the hardware platform for optimum performance. For more information, check out this Sun Blueprint: Sun Business Ready HPC for MD Nastran.

Whitepaper: Accelerating Performance for Data-Intensive HPC Workflows

A new whitepaper provides a guide to open storage solutions for data-intensive HPC environments and gives you an update on trends and challenges in delivering the necessary I/O throughput for HPC applications.

You'll also learn about why open storage solutions are important to HPC and how Sun is utilizing open storage technologies to benefit HPC customers:

* Flash Technology
* Network Storage
* Parallel Storage
* Archive Storage

Sun provides a wide range of cost-effective options for HPC storage performance, helping customers improve throughput for HPC applications while reducing costs. Download whitepaper

Andy Bechtolsheim to Keynote Sun HPC Consortium Portland, Nov 14-15

Sun co-founder and Chief Architect Andy Bechtolsheim will keynote the Sun HPC Consortium in Portland on November 15.

This year, the Consortium has a terrific lineup of hot HPC topics including: Power and Cooling, Cluster Storage, HPC Virtualization, Data Management, Flash Performance, and HPC Interconnects.

Who should attend: All Sun scientific, engineering, or research computing customers or anyone interested in high-performance computing on Sun technologies. Each meeting is designed to address a wide range of interests from application developers to CIOs and VPs of Research. Registration Site.

SC09 Newsletter

The latest SC09 newsletter is out with these headlines:

* SC Your Way Serves as a One-Stop Resource for Attendees
* How do I get to the Oregon Convention Center?
* Details Available for the Al Gore Keynote on Thursday, November 19
* Participate in the Sustainable Conference Experiment
* SCinet - the Most Powerful Network in the World at Your Fingertips
* Experience a Sold-Out Exhibition Floor This Year
* What's the Weather?

While you're at SC09 in Portland, be sure to check out these Sun events:

• Hear CTO's discuss Flash Technology in a Panel session on Friday, Nov. 20
  
• Learn how to Solve the HPC I/O bottleneck at the Exhibitor's Forum
  
• Share the secrets of data integrity at the Birds of a Feather Session
  
• Learn about Jülich Research on Petaflops Architectures Project
  

• Participate in the Sun HPC Consortium November 14-15.

  Posted by Rich Brueckner [HPC Article of the Day] ( November 09, 2009 05:00 AM ) Permalink | Comments [0]

Coming to SC09? Help us Tweet it Up!

Attending SC09? Help us Tweet Up the show! John West over at Inside HPC has the details:

"A bunch of you attending SC09 this year will have netbooks/cellphones/laptops/cranial implants that allow you to Twitter in real time. I hope you’ll take advantage of the opportunity to give others at the show — and those that cannot attend — insights into what you are learning and experiencing throughout the week. See a really cool technology, or even a company that’s bound to fail? Tweet it!

To make sure that everyone’s comments are easy to follow, the SC09 conference is encouraging the use of the #sc09 hashtag. As we often do for large events in the community, insideHPC will be including the stream for the #sc09 hashtag right on the website, so you won’t have to go far to learn what everyone at the show is up to."

Sound complicated? It's not really. Just add these five characters: #sc09 to your SC09 twitter entries and InsideHPC aggregate it all in one place. Full Story