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

Latest Sun HPC News Published

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Register Now: Sun HPC Consortium - Portland, Nov. 14-15

Save the dates: November 14-15 for the upcoming Sun HPC Consortium to be held in Portland, Oregon for Sun's customers and partners. This special Sun HPC customer event is taking place just before the SC09 Conference. For further information, please see the registration site.

Sun HPC Consortium participants represent a broad range of computing applications and environments. The meeting format is designed to give participants the opportunity to present HPC developments, discuss applications and needs with their peers, and to hear and provide feedback on Sun's engineering plans.

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.

Hurry! Early Bird Registration rate (20% discount) is valid only until October 23rd. Registration site.

Get HPC for Dummies

Do all those high performance acronyms get you confused? Download your copy of this special edition eBook from Sun and AMD today! Get the book

Bechtolsheim: 10 Gig Ethernet going mainstream

The Register interviews Andy Bechtolsheim and discovers that he is bullish on 10Gig Ethernet:

"What has Bechtolsheim fired up about 10GE is that it is starting to go mainstream. Even with the generic networking business expected to see an annual revenue decline on the order of 20 per cent in 2009, according to Bechtolsheim, the number of 10GE ports attached to servers are expected to grow from about 400,000 in 2008 (against new server shipments of around 8 million globally). Bechtolsheim predicts that the number will more than double each year over the three years so that by 2011, over 4 million 10GE server ports will ship in that year and, if you do the math, with about 7.5 million 10GE server ports installed by 2011. About 2 per cent of all servers in the installed base had 10GE ports in 2008, which will rise to about 5 per cent this year, hit maybe 10 per cent in 2010 and to about 25 per cent or more in 2011.

"It is easier to forecast 10GE ports than revenues," says Bechtolsheim. "This is one of the few areas in IT with predictable growth." Full Story

September Sun HPC Newsletter

The September edition of the Sun HPC Newsletter is out. Don't miss an issue--Subscribe today!

Sun Rolls Out Business Ready HPC

Sun's industry solutions are optimized for maximum application performance, efficiency, and scale with reliability built-in. With Sun Business Ready HPC, you can shorten your product development cycles, enable you to make better decisions, faster. The result? You can boost your ROI and gain major competitive advantage. Full Story

New whitepaper: Storage for Cloud Computing

Sun's Mark Carlson and Gary Mazzaferro have written a new whitepaper on Storage for Cloud Computing. To learn more about SNIA's Cloud Data Management Interface (CDMI) standard, and how it works with Cloud Computing standards such as the OGF Open Cloud Computing Interface (OCCI) please download the whitepaper.

Java Fast Sockets for HPC

Does Java have what it takes as a programming environment for HPC? Inside HPC points us to this paper on Java Fast Sockets:

"This paper presents Java Fast Sockets (JFS), an optimized Java socket implementation on clusters for high performance computing. Current socket libraries do not efficiently support high-speed cluster interconnects and impose substantial communication overhead. JFS overcomes these performance constraints by: (1) enabling high-speed communication on cluster networks such as Scalable Coherent Interface (SCI), Myrinet and Gigabit Ethernet; (2) avoiding the need of primitive data type array serialization; (3) reducing buffering and unnecessary copies; and (4) reimplementing the protocol for boosting shared memory (intra-node) communication. Its interoperability and user and application transparency allow for immediate applicability on a wide range of parallel and distributed target applications. A performance evaluation conducted on a dual-core cluster has shown experimental evidence of throughput increase on SCI, Myrinet, Gigabit Ethernet and shared memory communication. It has also been analyzed the impact of this improvement on the overall application performance of representative parallel codes." Full Story

Sun HPC Newsletter for August

The August edition of the Sun HPC Newsletter is out. Don't miss an issue--Subscribe today!

Hedge Funds And HPC

As we approach the annual High Performance on Wall Street event, this excerpt from Business Knowledge for IT in Hedge Funds sheds some light on how HPC is used in the financial sector:

"Currently, there is intensive competition among hedge funds and with other financial markets for a slice of the credit derivatives market. To achieve this, a great deal of consideration should be given to scalability across business processes, which may provide a competitive edge. HPC is a veritable technology that is an enabler for scalability and faster pricing of existing and new types of exotic derivatives." Full Story

Posted by Rich Brueckner [HPC Article of the Day] ( August 30, 2009 05:00 AM ) Permalink | Comments [0]

Iowa State Replaces IBM with Sun HPC

Iowa State University has replaced their IBM Blue Gene/L system with "Cystorm," a Sun HPC Cluster with 3200 processor cores:

""Cystorm is going to be very good for data-intensive research projects," Aluru said. "The capabilities of Cystorm will help Iowa State researchers do new, pioneering research in their fields." Full Story

Posted by Rich Brueckner [HPC Article of the Day] ( August 25, 2009 05:00 AM ) Permalink | Comments [0]

Comparing MPI and OpenMP

Douglas Eadline writes in Cluster Connection that the hardware environment may determine the best parallel programming tool to use:

"Another method to express parallelism is OpenMP. Unlike MPI, OpenMP is not an API, but an extension to a compiler. To use OpenMP, the programmer adds “pragmas” (comments) to the program that are used as hints by the compiler. The resulting program uses operating system threads to run in parallel. Operating system threads can be thought of as separate subroutines running at the same time that share the same memory space. In addition to the fact that “MP” is in both the names of these methods, there is often some confusion about how each of these parallel paradigms works and where/when they should be applied. This article will explain the differences and provide a better understanding of these two powerful technologies." Full Story

Announcing the Sun HPC Community Wiki

Sun has launched a new HPC Community Wiki. The collaborative site features the latest news, blogs, forums, user polls, and other activities happening around high performance computing at Sun Microsystems.

"The Sun HPC community is very active with in-person meetings like the Sun HPC Consortium, SC09, and the upcoming HPC Workshop in Germany," said Rich Brueckner, Sun's HPC Community Manager. "What the Wiki gives us is a place to share information and collaborate during the rest of the year."

Posted by Rich Brueckner [HPC Article of the Day] ( August 12, 2009 05:00 AM ) Permalink | Comments [0]

Sun July HPC Newsletter

The Sun HPC Newsletter for July is out. Don't miss an issue--subscribe today!

SC09 July Newsletter

The latest SC09 newsletter is out with these headlines:

* SC09 Education Program Deadlines Approaching
* Student Volunteer Applications Due August 31
* Exhibitor Forum Submission Deadline July 17
* Broader Engagement Travel Offer to End August 3
* Sustainability Technology Thrust on Data Centers
* Doctoral Showcase Submissions Due July 27
* HPC Ph.D. Fellowship Deadline is July 27
* SC09 Exhibits: Where HPC Industry Meets
* Call for Xnet Submissions
* Submissions for SC09 Bandwidth Challenge Due July 27
* Storage Challenge Finalizes Submissions on July 27

Full Story. Don't miss an issue--Subscribe today!

HPCVL: Adapting environments through hybrid, clustered architectures

In Scientific Computing magazine, Ken Edgecombe of HPCVL writes on Meeting Research Needs in a Changing HPC Landscape:

"As business pressures rise, high performance computing has continued to transition into the mainstream and is fast emerging as an attractive means for organizations to do more with less. Businesses are becoming increasingly reliant on technology innovation to deliver both customer and shareholder value, while academic research organizations are under equally severe pressure to fuel the latest and greatest applications that will, over time, impact the way the world operates. Research institutions and businesses alike must work to dissolve the barriers that have traditionally slowed time-to-market and to ensure the correct tools and infrastructure are in place to achieve maximum business results." Full Story

Sultan Qaboos University gets HPC from Sun

Dr. Muataz Al-Barwani and the Sultan Qaboos University in Muscat have deployed Sun's High Performance Computers (HPC) to run their Physics applications:

Adds Dr. Al-Barwani, "Many factors contributed to our choice of vendor, including a specification that met our needs, total cost of ownership and more importantly; the high level of support for the product. Sun met all these requirements and the offering was the best in terms of overall performance it was going to provide. It exceeded what any other vendors had offered."

As part of Phase I of the project Sun deployed a Sun Blade 6000 HPC Blade Cluster. The cluster is configured using Intel Xeon processors, low latency and high throughput DDR InfiniBand fabric. The workload resources are managed by the Sun Grid Engine resource manager. The system includes SUN HPC cluster tools, Sun Studio 12 Compilers and other development tools. Full Story

New Whitepaper: Building Systems for Business-Critical Workloads

Learn about the complete end-to-end HPC architecture that is designed to grow from a single rack up to tera- and peta-scale deployments. This paper provides details on how Sun, a leader in HPC computing, can deliver complete HPC clusters that meet the needs of small- and mid-sized organizations. Full Story

New Whitepaper: Accelerating Data-Intensive HPC Workflows

This paper provides a guide to open storage solutions for data-intensive HPC environments, this paper gives you an update on trends and challenges in delivering the necessary I/O throughput for high-performance computing (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 including Flash Technology, Network Storage, Parallel Storage, and Archive Storage. Full Story

New Blog Follows Sun Constellation System

The Watercooler welcomes the new Sun Constellation System blog to our ranks. This new blog has a mission to update the HPC community on news about the high end HPC solution from Sun, the Sun Constellation System. As an intro visit the Sun Constellation System web site.

Sun HPC Newsletter for June

The latest Sun HPC Newsletter is out. Don't miss an issue--Subscribe today!

Interview with Andy Bechtolsheim

The publication "Spektrum der Wissenschaft” (the German sister publication of Scientific American) sits down with Sun co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim to talk about all things HPC:

"There have been very few major breakthroughs in mathematics and theory in the last twenty-five years that affected the field of computer science. All the new advances that we have seen were really based on better engineering." Full Story