Thursday August 31, 2006 "Grid computing is the latest to join the bandwagon of managed services. It's a good way of avoiding an expensive infrastructure investment." Full Story Posted by Rich Brueckner [HPC Article of the Day] ( August 31, 2006 05:00 AM ) Permalink
Wednesday August 30, 2006 "As part of the collaboration, Sun said it will seamlessly connect its on-demand Sun Grid compute utility to the public Media Grid network so Media Grid service requests and jobs can be handled by Sun Grid, increasing the quality of service and overall performance of the Media Grid network." Full Story Posted by Rich Brueckner [HPC Article of the Day] ( August 30, 2006 05:00 AM ) Permalink
Tuesday August 29, 2006 NVIDIA Graphics Boost Latest Sun Ultra 40 Workstations
NVIDIA Corporation, the worldwide leader in programmable graphics processor technologies, today announced an array of NVIDIA Quadro FX graphics are now available in the high-performance 64-bit Sun Ultra 40 workstations. Prominent in the film and broadcast, digital content creation, oil and gas, geosciences, mechanical computer-aided design (CAD) and medical imaging industries, Sun Ultra 40 workstations deliver record-setting performance in many industry benchmarks and offer ultra-fast processing for large, complex datasets. Full Story Posted by Rich Brueckner [HPC Article of the Day] ( August 29, 2006 05:00 AM ) Permalink
Monday August 28, 2006
Sunday August 27, 2006 Financial Services: High pressure, high performance
Techworld looks at how the financial services industry depend on HPC to optimize the almighty buck:"Financial services companies of all stripes pour money into performance. Today, with high-speed grid and clustering architectures, not to mention utility-based computing services from IBM, Sun, and others, money spent on HPC (high-performance computing) goes further than ever before." Full Story Posted by Rich Brueckner [HPC Article of the Day] ( August 27, 2006 05:00 AM ) Permalink
Saturday August 26, 2006 The Search For a New HPC Language
HPC Wire editor Michael Feldman looks at the holy grail search for a new HPC language:"The languages being developed for HPCS go beyond just an abstraction for MPI. They are designed to incorporate many different kinds of parallelism and should be able to scale from small commodity clusters to petascale supercomputers. The new languages are also being designed to support higher levels of programmability, performance, robustness and portability." Full Story Posted by Rich Brueckner [HPC Article of the Day] ( August 26, 2006 07:00 AM ) Permalink
Friday August 25, 2006 Altera Launches HPC University Program
FPGA maker Altera Corporation has announced the development of a new university program to support academic research into high performance computing. AMD, Sun Microsystems and XtremeData are participating in the program that will donate $1 million in workstations and development software to universities. Using the workstations, participating universities will be able to research and drive the adoption of FPGA co-processing for high performance computing applications such as medical imaging, data analytics, text searches, network security, bioinformatics and energy. Full Story Posted by Rich Brueckner [HPC Article of the Day] ( August 25, 2006 07:57 AM ) Permalink
Thursday August 24, 2006 AMD aims for 40 percent of server market
Sun has been enjoying tremendous success with its X64 servers based on AMD Opteron. Today, a senior executive at AMD, the world's No. 2 maker of computer processors, said the company hopes to have 40 percent of the global server market by unit shipments by 2009."There's no reason why AMD can't achieve 40 percent," Commercial Business Vice President Marty Seyer told reporters on the sidelines of the launch of an R&D center here.
The global server market is expected to grow 11 percent a year on average to US$62 billion, or 11.8 million unit shipments, in 2010, according to IDC's latest figures. That compared with a US$55 billion market with 7 million unit shipments in 2005, the research firm said. Full Story Posted by Rich Brueckner [HPC Article of the Day] ( August 24, 2006 07:56 AM ) Permalink
Wednesday August 23, 2006 TIGR Unplugs HP, Switches to Sun for Genome Assembly
The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR), one of the most prestigious genome research centers in the United States, has hauled out its long-serving HP Alpha servers and switched to a new architecture from Sun Microsystems.TIGR has selected Sun Microsystems to replace 15 HP Alpha servers and consolidate IT operations onto Sun Fire x64 servers to power its complex genomic assembler for molecular research. Through a combination of Sun services and innovative technologies, TIGR has created a powerful yet cost-effective HPC environment. The new system provides critical reliability, reduces energy consumption by more than 70 percent and dramatically reduces purchasing and operating costs, allowing the Institute to complete intricate research projects and to publish results on genomic findings in the fields of energy, agriculture, etc. to an eagerly-awaiting public on time and on budget. Full Story Posted by Rich Brueckner [HPC Article of the Day] ( August 23, 2006 02:05 PM ) Permalink
* Linking data centers to share facilities for high-end applications such as those in the Teragrid
* Capturing unused cycles on PCs for compute-intensive projects like SETI@home
* Renting processing power as Sun is doing with the Sun Grid Compute Utility
Full Story Posted by Rich Brueckner [HPC Article of the Day] ( August 23, 2006 06:27 AM ) Permalink
Tuesday August 22, 2006 Study: Blade Acceptance Grows Dramatically
TheInfoPro, an independent research network, has released Wave 3 of its Server Study. According to over 130 in-depth interviews with leading server professionals conducted by TheInfoPro, blade servers are finally gaining acceptance in enterprise computing. Over 85 percent of users now report that blade servers are "valuable" or "critical" to their long-term server plans. Full StoryThis is great news for the team behind the recently-announced Sun Blade 8000 modular servers. Check out this Sun Blade Video with Sun's Andy Bechtolsheim and John Gage. Posted by Rich Brueckner [Videos] ( August 22, 2006 09:35 AM ) Permalink
Memory power consumption: Rev F kicks Woodcrest
Illuminata takes a look at the new AMD Opteron Rev F chips that Sun recently announced in their all-new X64 systems. While the Rev F paves the way for quad-core, it is important for HPC folks to note that the DDR2 memory in Rev F systems uses less power than the FB-DIMMs used on Woodcrest systems. Net effect? Intel Xeon servers are still as power-hungry as ever!"Rev F also introduces a new generation of memory, DDR2, which bumps up performance relative to the ubiquitous DDR. It also introduces a variety of reliability enhancements, such as on-die termination and off-chip driver calibration for improved signal integrity. DDR is yet another little brawl that AMD has going on the side with Intel, which has been aggressively pushing FB-DIMM. (A discussion of DDR2 vs. FB-DIMM is out of scope here, but essentially FB-DIMM theoretically provides for greater memory capacity, but at least for the near term, carries some cost and power penalties.)" Full Story Posted by Rich Brueckner [HPC Article of the Day] ( August 22, 2006 08:00 AM ) Permalink
Monday August 21, 2006 The Media Grid is a computational grid platform that provides digital media delivery and processing services for a new generation of networked applications. Built using Internet and Web standards, the Media Grid combines Quality of Service (QoS) and broadcast features with distributed parallel processing capabilities. Together these features create a unique software development platform designed specifically for networked applications that produce and consume massive quantities of digital media.
"As for Sun's involvement, it will be serving the roles of both service provider and technical resource, as the company is offering part of its Sun Grid as a resource, and will be 'intimately involved' in standards activity. Aisling MacRunnels, Sun's senior director of utility computing, said its partnership with the Media Grid is based on natural synergy -- especially seeing as how the standards-based, multi-tenant model being sought for the Media Grid is currently being done with the Sun Grid. Standards development is really a key element to the partnership, though."
"We're a huge supporter of standards," said MacRunnels. "We believe, especially in this area, it is critical that we align standards as we drive to grid-based utilities." Full Story Posted by Rich Brueckner [HPC Article of the Day] ( August 21, 2006 09:28 AM ) Permalink
More SC2006 news items to add:
* Registration is now open for Sun's popular EDU Consortium customer event that takes place November 11-12 just prior to the show.
* HPC has published an interview with SC2006 Conference Chair Barbara Horner-Miller from ARSC. As described in Marc Hamilton's blog, ARSC is one of the first of the large HPC customer wins using the Sun Fire x2200 M2 server. Posted by Rich Brueckner [HPC Article of the Day] ( August 21, 2006 04:01 AM ) Permalink
Sunday August 20, 2006 Sun outpaces market with new systems
Moneycontrol.com has a story about Sun's recently announced AMD Opteron and SPARC systems:"As our recent revenue growth helps illustrate, Sun's server business has never been stronger," said John Fowler, Sun's executive vice president, Systems Group. "Today we add new systems and additional firepower to our existing line, building on the success of our industry-standard x64 and CoolThreads servers and leveraging the world-record performance, reliability and virtualization capabilities of the Solaris OS. With systems that scale from multi-core and multi-threaded 2- to 72-ways, a broad range of pricing and capabilities and support for multiple operating systems, Sun's rock-solid portfolio serves every aspect of computing." Full Story Posted by Rich Brueckner [HPC Article of the Day] ( August 20, 2006 05:00 AM ) Permalink
Saturday August 19, 2006 HPC Users Conference to be "Watershed Event"
This week's HPC Wire includes an interview with Council on Competitiveness President Deborah Wince-Smith. The Council's annual HPC Users Conference promises to be a watershed event this year (September 7, 2006), as they leverage three years of in-depth research on the HPC requirements of business. Full Story Posted by Rich Brueckner [HPC Article of the Day] ( August 19, 2006 05:00 AM ) Permalink
Friday August 18, 2006 ZFS - the future of file systems?
Techworld.com takes a look at Sun's advanced, open-source ZFS file system:"It is available in Sun's Solaris 10 and has been made open source. The advantages of ZFS look so great that its use may well spread to other UNIX distributions and even, possibly and eventually, to Windows." Full Story Posted by Rich Brueckner [HPC Article of the Day] ( August 18, 2006 07:04 AM ) Permalink
Thursday August 17, 2006 AMD Announces Tape-out of Quad-core Opteron
In addition to launching its Next-Generation AMD Opteron processors this week, AMD also announced the completion of the design, or tape-out, of its native Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors. Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors represent another concrete example of the benefits from AMD’s overarching strategy to introduce new technologies with minimal customer disruption for maximum value. AMD plans to deliver to customers in mid-2007 native Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors that incorporate four processor cores on a single die of silicon. Full Story Posted by Rich Brueckner [HPC Article of the Day] ( August 17, 2006 08:00 AM ) Permalink
Wednesday August 16, 2006 Inquirer: Sun Usually Beats HP and Dell on Price
The Inquirer seems duly impressed with the pricing and performance of Sun's new X64 systems:"Basically the new computers are a nice bump on the old, nothing that will redefine the space, just solid boxes at a low cost. It is interesting to see that Sun is now the low-price PC provider out there, usually beating out HP and Dell on similar configs. Oh, how times have changed. The other x86 machines in the Sun range are all set for a similar facelift later in the quarter. So, if you are interested, keep an eye peeled for that." Full Story Posted by Rich Brueckner [HPC Article of the Day] ( August 16, 2006 02:12 PM ) Permalink
New Sun X64 World-record Benchmarks
Adding to over 100 world records established by Sun's x64 systems to date, the new Sun Fire X2100 M2 server and Sun Fire X2200 M2 servers, powered by the Next-Generation AMD Opteron processors with Direct Connect Architecture, offer better performance and energy efficiency than similar Intel processor-based servers:The Sun Fire X2200 M2 server is the highest performing and most energy-efficient 4-way server with 38% better performance and 15% lower power consumption than systems based on the Intel Xeon 5160 processor, such as the HP DL360 G5 and Dell PowerEdge 1950(5).
The Sun Fire X2100 M2 server has established multiple world record benchmarks using the AMD Opteron 1000 Series processor, which surpasses the performance of Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800 CPU. The Sun Fire X2100 M2 server provides at least 52% higher performance than the HP DL320 G4, Dell PowerEdge 850 and IBM xServer 306m(6).
Not to be outdone, the new Sun Ultra 20 M2 workstation delivers top floating-point performance on the SPEC CPU2000 benchmark suite. Our benchmark expert BM Seer takes a closer look at how this machine kicks the butt of the latest Woodcrest boxes.
The complete list of 100+ record-breaking performance results achieved by Sun's x64 platforms can be found here. Posted by Rich Brueckner [HPC Article of the Day] ( August 16, 2006 08:39 AM ) Permalink
Tuesday August 15, 2006 New Sun X64 Servers "Tailor-made" for HPC
Sun announced a set of new products today, but the HPC jewel in the set has to be the new Sun Fire X2200 M2 server -- reportedly the highest performing and most energy efficient 4-way Opteron server available. With up to twice the memory capacity and network connectivity of its predecessor, this is one screaming performer for building cost-effective clusters. Full Story Posted by Rich Brueckner [HPC Article of the Day] ( August 15, 2006 04:26 PM ) PermalinkOpen source Java code promised for October
According to vuunet, Sun Microsystems plans to publish the first open source Java code by October this year:"Laurie Tolson, vice president of developer programmes and products at Sun, said at a company event that the first components include Java C and the Hotspot VM. The remainder of the code will be open sourced by the end of 2007." Full Story
Ed note: Ok, so this story is not really HPC, but I just wanted to scoop Mary, Mary ;-) Posted by Rich Brueckner [HPC Article of the Day] ( August 15, 2006 10:56 AM ) Permalink
Sun's Technology for Energy Efficiency
Sustainable Industries magazine has an article by Sun's David Douglas, VP of Eco-Responsibility:"Since November, Sun, along with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and other environmental and information technology leaders, have focused on how eco-responsibility can minimize harm to the planet while maximizing business benefit. One of the early goals of the group was to establish an industry-standard metric for comparing the energy efficiency of servers in a data center. Think of it as the sticker on a server at a vendor showroom which gives an EPA-approved measurement of the expected energy usage of the system. Having such a standard allows data center managers to make educated purchasing decisions, and it provides a basis on which to build other forms of accreditation, such as the Energy Star program." Full Story Posted by Rich Brueckner [HPC Article of the Day] ( August 15, 2006 12:00 AM ) Permalink
Monday August 14, 2006 The Trouble with Floating-point
When it comes to unlocking the secrets of the universe, what if the TOP500 systems are all getting the math wrong? The Register has a story on the trouble computers have rounding floating-point numbers correctly. Full StoryPerhaps Intervals are the real answer, as Sun people like Bill Walster propose:
"Intervals have the potential to change the rules of the computing game," says Walster. "The new rules are: 'All your floating-point speed doesn't count any more. It's just not relevant. The only speed that matters is interval speed." Posted by Rich Brueckner [HPC Article of the Day] ( August 14, 2006 11:23 AM ) Permalink
AMD Announces Software Industry Support for New Opterons
AMD has announced broad software industry support for its upcoming next-generation AMD Opteron processor family, which provides the ISV and open source software development communities with hardware support for the development of the next evolution of business-class enterprise applications."As our server business continues to grow each year and we move toward greater than 30 percent market share, the software development community is seizing the opportunity to support and grow with AMD," said Marty Seyer, senior vice president, Commercial Segment, AMD. Full Story Posted by Rich Brueckner [HPC Article of the Day] ( August 14, 2006 12:00 AM ) Permalink
