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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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]

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

Saratov State University Developing Curriculum on Sun HPC Software

Grid Dynamics, the global leader in scaling mission-critical systems, today announced it is working with Sun Microsystems and Saratov State University (SSU), to develop a new course of study in high-performance computing (HPC) at SSU, which is one of Russia’s oldest and most respected universities. Full Story

Benchmark: Sun Ultra 27 Single Frame Buffer SPECviewperf 10 Results

Yes, Sun still makes high performance workstations. The BestPerf blog describes how a Sun Ultra 27 workstation configured with an nVidia FX5800 graphics card delivered outstanding performance running the SPECviewperf® 10 benchmark. Full Story

Sun Benchmarks Reverse Time Migration

Just in time for SEG comes news of Sun's outstanding performance on Reverse Time Migration:

"A Sun Blade 6048 Modular System with 12 Sun Blade X6275 server modules were clustered together with QDR InfiniBand and using a Lustre File System with QDR InfiniBand to show performance improvements over an NFS file system for reading in Velocity, Epsilon, and Delta Slices and imaging 800 samples of various various grid sizes using the Reverse Time Migration. Full Story

and

"A prominent Seismic Processing algorithm, Reverse Time Migration with Optimal Checkpointing, in SMP "THREADS" Mode, was testing using a Sun Fire X4270 server configured with four high performance 15K SAS hard disk drives (HDDs) and a Sun Storage F5100 Flash Array. This benchmark compares I/O devices for checkpointing wave state information while processing a production seismic migration. Full Story

New Software Could Smooth HPC Speed Bumps

With all the buzz on GPUs these days, programming these devices remains a big issue:

"Now, this is changing as AMD, NVIDIA and their customers (primarily computer- and game system–makers) throw their support behind a standard way of writing software called the Open Computing Language (OpenCL), which works across both GPU brands. A longer-term goal behind OpenCL is to create a common programming interface that will even let software writers create applications that run both GPUs and CPUs with few modifications, cutting the time and effort required to harness supercomputing power for scientific endeavors." Full Story

Sun and Voltaire Accelerate Clemson Computational Center

This Desktop Engineering article describes the HPC cluster at CU-CMS. Sun Microsystems delivered and installed a 35 teraflop system based on 43 Sun Blade 6000 Modular Systems, Sun Fire servers and Sun StorageTek systems.

"To help attract leading companies from the automotive industry as well as other industries such as energy, aviation, and aerospace, Clemson University selected Voltaire’s scaleout computing fabric solutions as the interconnect for the high-performance computing (HPC) system operated by the Clemson University Computational Center for Mobility Systems (CU-CCMS). The system enables the university to provide simulation test research to automotive and transportation companies that need to reduce overall design cycle times to develop better products faster and at a lower cost. Full Story

HPC Customers Weigh in on Sun Storage F5100 Flash Array

HPC Wire cites some glowing customer quotes from Sun HPC customers on the performance of the Sun Storage F5100 Flash Array. Don Thorp, Operations Manager at SDSC had this to say:

"San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) has been evaluating the F5100 Flash Storage array as a high performance SamQFS metadata target, which sits at the core of our archiving services and hosts well over one hundred million files. Performance improvement of 2.5 to four times was demonstrated for file creation and metadata scans, such as listing and backups. Further testing will be done using the Sun Storage F5100 as a Lustre metadata target, high speed storage pool in Lustre 2.0 for user checkpoint data, Oracle database storage device and out-of-core storage device on an HPC cluster." Full Story

Vote: HPC Community Leadership Awards

Democracy reigns in the HPC community. Here is your chance to recognize the leaders that drive high performance computing:

insideHPC’s HPC Community Leadership Awards. The award recognizes the people and organizations who have persevered through technology, budget or organizational challenges to place innovative HPC solutions in the hands of users in business, engineering, technology, and science.

Not to be left out, the HPCwire Reader's Choice Awards allow the HPC community to recognize some of the most outstanding organizations and individuals in the industry. This year, two new categories were added: "Best Use of HPC in the Cloud" and "Best Application of Green Computing in HPC" in recognition of the tremendous amount of innovation happening in the industry. The Readers' Choice Awards are determined by a poll of HPCwire readers, and the Editors' Choice Awards are determined by a panel of recognized HPC luminaries and contributing editors from industry. All winners will be announced at the SC09 in Portland, Oregon. Vote Here

Sun Rocks HPC Benchmarks

Sun just rolled out an impressive set of HPC Benchmarks:

Oct 13, 2009 Halliburton ProMAX Oil & Gas Appl on Sun 6048/X6275 Cluster and Oracle Database
Oct 13, 2009 MCAE ABAQUS faster on Sun F5100 and Sun X4270 - Single Node World Record
Oct 12, 2009 MCAE ANSYS faster on Sun F5100 and Sun X4270
Oct 12, 2009 MCAE MCS/NASTRAN faster on Sun F5100 and Fire X4270
Oct 13, 2009 CP2K Life Sciences, Ab-initio Chem - Sun C48 with Sun Blade X6275 - QDR InfiniBand
Oct 09, 2009 X6275 Cluster Demonstrates Performance and Scalability on WRF 2.5km CONUS Dataset

Sun Blades: Outstanding Performance on WRF Weather Code

Sun continues to set new performance levels with Intel Nehalem processors. The BestPerf Blog presents exciting results for the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) code running on twelve Sun Blade X6275 server modules, housed in the Sun Blade 6048 chassis, using the 2.5 km CONUS benchmark dataset.

* The Sun Blade X6275 cluster was able to achieve 373 GFLOP/s on the CONUS 2.5-KM Dataset.
* The results demonstrate an 91% speedup efficiency, or 11x speedup, from 1 to 12 blades.
* The current results results were run with turbo on.

Read the Full Story.

Sneak Preview Video: Featured Speakers at SC09

Here's a recap of featured speakers at SC09:

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 17TH

Opening Address: The Rise of the 3D Internet: Advancements in Collaborative and Immersive Sciences

Speaker: Justin Rattner, Intel Corporation
Time: 08:30AM - 10:00AM
Room: PB253-254-257-258

WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 18TH

Plenary Speaker: Systems Medicine, Transformational Technologies and the Emergence of Predictive, Personalized, Preventive and Participatory (P4) Medicine

Speaker: Leroy Hood, Institute for Systems Biology
Time: 08:30AM - 9:15AM
Room: PB253-254-257-258

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 19TH

Keynote Address:Building Solutions: Energy, Climate and Computing for a Changing World

Speaker: Former U.S. Vice President, Al Gore
Time: 08:30AM - 10:00AM
Room: PB253-254-257-258

Get the Full Story.

New Details on Al Gore Keynote at SC09

The SC09 folks have announced the title of Al Gore's Keynote Presentation for Thursday, November 19th. The SC09 Keynote will be titled, "Building Solutions - Energy, Climate and Computing for a Changing World."

Gore will deliver the keynote presentation on Thursday, November 19th for the anticipated crowd of 11,000 attendees made up of leading computational scientists, researchers, and supercomputing experts from around the globe, many of whom work on HPC platforms and supercomputers researching life-changing issues such as disease understanding, drug discovery, renewable energy, and global climate change. Full Story

Interview with Intel CTO Justin Rattner

Inside HPC has a nice piece on Justin Rattner of Intel, keynote speaker for the opening address at SC09 in November:

“When I started out with this idea in 1984, Cray and vector supercomputing was dominant,” Rattner says. “In 1984 or 1985 I gave a talk on the idea that very large ensembles of microprocessors would eventually replace complicated vector processors in supercomputers. I think 9 out of 10 people in the audience thought I had lost my mind.” Full Story

Dude is not getting a Dell

Contrary to what you might be reading elsewhere, Sun customers are a loyal bunch. Case in point: Karl Katzke blogs on why he is sticking with Sun hardware:

"Simply put, the Sun option was the fastest, most scalable option. The hardware is put together well, with the same sort of build quality you’ve come to expect from HP… far superior to Dell or IBM. And the management and tuning options are awesome." Full Story

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