Saturday September 30, 2006
Friday September 29, 2006 HPCVL Grows Massive HPC Facility with Sun
HPCVL, Canada's most powerful high performance secure computing facility based at Queen's University, will become even more powerful thanks to new funding from the Ontario Ministry of Research and Innovation."This grant will enable HPCVL to provide researchers with the support and high performance computing resources they need to be major players in a highly competitive global research and innovation environment," says HPCVL executive director Ken Edgecombe. "Researchers using our facilities include economists, engineers, biologists, psychologists, chemists, and physicists doing groundbreaking work that ranges from identifying properties of neutrinos, to analyzing clinical data, to modeling drug delivery mechanisms."
Sun Microsystems is a key partner in HPCVL, and as of 2006, the Queen's-based facility is the largest Sun Microsystems installation of its kind in the world. Full Story Posted by Rich Brueckner [HPC Article of the Day] ( September 29, 2006 05:00 AM ) Permalink
Thursday September 28, 2006 WOW! Sun Wins at TACC - 400 TFLOPS
TACC is partnering with Sun Microsystems to deploy a supercomputer system specifically developed to support very large science and engineering computing requirements. In its final configuration in 2007, the supercomputer will have a peak performance in excess of 400 trillion floating point operations per second (teraflops), making it one of the most powerful supercomputer systems in the world. [Read More] Posted by Rich Brueckner [HPC Article of the Day] ( September 28, 2006 04:10 PM ) PermalinkMcNealy reveals biggest challenge on the planet
At the recent AMD Global Vision Conference, Scott McNealy revealed what he sees as the biggest computing challenge on the planet. And no, he didn't say "getting windows to work" although maybe he should have. Full Story Posted by Rich Brueckner [HPC Article of the Day] ( September 28, 2006 07:23 AM ) Permalink
Wednesday September 27, 2006 "If "Grid 1.0" is principally concerned with the virtualization, aggregation and sharing of compute resources, Grid 2.0 is focused on the virtualization, aggregation and sharing of all compute, storage, network and data resources. It is both service-oriented -- uses Web services and provides access to IT as a service -- and automated." Full Story Posted by Rich Brueckner [HPC Article of the Day] ( September 27, 2006 05:00 AM ) Permalink
Tuesday September 26, 2006 "So, looking ahead at the next ten years, the new, more power-efficient, multi-core, general purpose processors that are now forming the backbone of large, parallel HPC systems will retain an important role, but they will be increasingly supported in mixed-architecture environments by special-purpose commodity and custom processors targeting, by design or coincidence, the special requirements of HPC." Full Story Posted by Rich Brueckner [HPC Article of the Day] ( September 26, 2006 05:00 AM ) Permalink
Monday September 25, 2006 Ray Kurzweil to Keynote SC2006
Ray Kurzweil, described as "the restless genius" by the Wall Street Journal, and "the ultimate thinking machine" by Forbes, will be the keynote speaker at SC06. Kurzweill was the principal developer of the first CCD flat-bed scanner, the first omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition.The title of his speech will be "The Coming Merger of Biological and Non Biological Intelligence." You can read about his talk and other coming hightlights in the SC2006 September Newsletter.
Registration is now open for Sun's HPC Consortium customer event in Palm Harbor, Floridia, which takes place November 11-12, just prior to SC2006. Posted by Rich Brueckner [HPC Article of the Day] ( September 25, 2006 08:00 AM ) Permalink
"We're approaching an era when the whole notion of general-purpose HPC systems may no longer apply." -- Horst Simon, the associate laboratory director for Computing Sciences at Berkeley Lab and the director of NERSC Full Story
"Well, 'general purpose' is a fuzzy concept, since a computer is only more general purpose or less general purpose than some other computer. But, realistically, only one or two governments could possibly afford a truly general-purpose sustained petaflops computer. The less money you have, the more likely it is that you will be stuck with a machine that isn't really very general purpose at all." -- David Probst, Faculty at Concordia University in Montreal Full Story
For more on Sun's research projects on Petascale computing, check out this story by Project Lead, Mike Vildibill. Posted by Rich Brueckner [HPC Article of the Day] ( September 25, 2006 05:00 AM ) Permalink
Sunday September 24, 2006 "Career management sounds like something you should be doing, right? Not managing your career means you are letting someone else steer the career train for you and you'll end up where they want you to be. Worse, it could mean that no one is steering and then who knows where you'll end up?" Full Story Posted by Rich Brueckner [HPC Article of the Day] ( September 24, 2006 05:00 AM ) Permalink
InfiniBand: Is This Time for Real?
The notoriously brilliant Henry Newman has written an interesting examination of InfiBand readiness for the enterprise:"IB is not for everyone yet, but it could get there, and given the big names behind it, it could get there faster than we think. Don't put IB too far in the back of your mind, since it might just turn out to have staying power." Full Story Posted by Rich Brueckner [HPC Article of the Day] ( September 24, 2006 05:00 AM ) Permalink
Saturday September 23, 2006 New Search Engine for Creative Discovery
What would you do with a cluster of Macs? HPC Wire has the story:"When you ask a supercomputer to tell a story, you might not expect a creative outcome -- or any. But a group of Virginia Tech researchers are using System X, the university's supercomputer, to test a new search program that can tell the stories of life -- the connections between gene sets, for instance, or the connections between discoveries reported in biomedical articles on the U.S. National Library of Medicine PubMed database." Full Story Posted by Rich Brueckner [HPC Article of the Day] ( September 23, 2006 09:24 AM ) Permalink
Friday September 22, 2006 Note that eXludus will demo this technology in the Sun exhibit at SC2006. Posted by Rich Brueckner [HPC Article of the Day] ( September 22, 2006 08:54 AM ) Permalink
AMD Socket Compatibility to Drive Industry Collaboration
On Thursday, AMD announced that its Torrenza Initiative is serving as a collaborative force toward achieving future processor socket compatibility in the server industry. By leveraging the advantages of AMD64 with Direct Connect Architecture and HyperTransport technology, OEMs will be able to standardize on a Torrenza Innovation Socket for many of their current and future server platforms. This game-changing approach to server design will enable OEMs to consolidate server offerings for multiple processors to potentially a single platform, reducing datacenter disruption and deployment costs for customers. Full Story Posted by Rich Brueckner [HPC Article of the Day] ( September 22, 2006 05:00 AM ) Permalink
Thursday September 21, 2006
Wednesday September 20, 2006 If you want a roadmap without a refinancing plan, now you can trade-in your HP, IBM, Dell or SGI server for Sun's newest x64 server - The Sun Blade 8000 server. Utilizing the Upgrade Advantage Program, you can get great value for your old servers when trading up to this new Sun X64 server. Full Story Posted by Rich Brueckner [HPC Article of the Day] ( September 20, 2006 05:00 AM ) Permalink
Tuesday September 19, 2006 HPC Key to Gulf Discovery for Chevron
HPC Wire has a story on how Chevron and two of its partners recently discovered a new field in Gulf of Mexico using HPC. The deepwater field could yield 3-15 billion barrels of oil, boosting U.S. reserves by up to half. Full Story Posted by Rich Brueckner [HPC Article of the Day] ( September 19, 2006 05:00 AM ) Permalink
Monday September 18, 2006 The answer would seem to be that it's already happening. At the Council on Competitiveness' annual HPC Users Conference on September 7, Wal-Mart's Nancy Stewart said that Wal-Mart uses HPC not only for ergonomics such as light control, but for shelf space determinations, store planning and resource planning: "We can't spend a dollar of investment on HPC or anything unless we can see the ROI. That's why we had to make the investment in HPC." Posted by Rich Brueckner [HPC Article of the Day] ( September 18, 2006 05:00 AM ) Permalink
Sunday September 17, 2006 Heterogeneous supercomputing is looking more and more like the next big thing in the high performance computing world. Now that IBM has thrown its hat into the ring with its hybrid Opteron-Cell Roadrunner system, it's hard to deny that heterogeneous computing is getting some serious respect. Will HPC turn away from homogeneous architectures and go hetero? Full Story
Ed note: This story includes what has to be one of the dorkiest statements of the year: "Cray is perhaps the most homo(geneous)-phobic of all the vendors." Posted by Rich Brueckner [HPC Article of the Day] ( September 17, 2006 09:00 AM ) Permalink
Saturday September 16, 2006 eXludus Launches RepliCator 2.0
eXludus Technologies Inc. has launched version 2.0 of RepliCator, the company's parallel file serving software product that has demonstrated performance improvements of up to 10 times on customers' compute clusters and grids. This week, GRIDtoday announced that eXludus's RepliCator won the 2006 Editor's Choice Award for "Most Innovative Storage Solution for a Grid Implementation." Full Story Posted by Rich Brueckner [HPC Article of the Day] ( September 16, 2006 05:00 AM ) Permalink
Friday September 15, 2006 451 Group: Energy Companies Turning to Grid for Risk Management
The 451 Group is optimistic about the use of Grids among oil and gas companies trying to make better use of resources. Full Story Posted by Rich Brueckner [HPC Article of the Day] ( September 15, 2006 05:00 AM ) Permalink
Thursday September 14, 2006 451 Group: Grid is about making money
The 451 Group thinks Grid is more about making money than saving money:"Early adopters of Grid computing have indicated that many are looking for ways to move beyond the use of grids specifically for computational tasks. They want to eliminate silos and organize IT around shared resources, simplify access to data, and provide a single, consistent view of the business for the entire enterprise. The challenge they face is essentially getting 'beyond the compute grid,' a topic we've looked at in a number of reports." Full Story Posted by Rich Brueckner [HPC Article of the Day] ( September 14, 2006 05:00 AM ) Permalink
Wednesday September 13, 2006 OSG: Running an Effective Distributed Facility
Grid Today has a story on how the Open Science Grid Consortium deals with data distribution and computation from many resources:"The Open Science Grid (OSG) Consortium is facing head-on the challenge of operating a wide-flung distributed infrastructure for multi-disciplinary research groups. The OSG facility provides access to compute and storage resources at more than fifty DOE and NSF sponsored universities and laboratories in the United States, as well as several universities internationally. These resources are locally owned and managed facilities that range from a few tens to thousands of CPUs, provide a few terabytes to petabytes of storage, and are connected through production and research networks. OSG provides the mechanisms to connect these existing sites together." Full Story Posted by Rich Brueckner [HPC Article of the Day] ( September 13, 2006 06:33 AM ) Permalink
Grid Institute Announces TotsTV
The Grid Institute, in cooperation with Sun Microsystems and Media Machines, announced the online interactive "TotsTV" channel for children and young adults. Scheduled to launch in December to benefit the U.S. Marine Corps Toys for Tots Foundation, the family-friendly online channel features high quality video (television shows and movies), music, and interactive games for children of all ages. Full Story Posted by Rich Brueckner [HPC Article of the Day] ( September 13, 2006 06:00 AM ) Permalink
Tuesday September 12, 2006 Sun Wins Grid Today Reader's Choice Award
Today at Grid World in Washington, DC, Grid Today announced that Sun Microsystems had won it's Reader's Choice Award for having the Best price/performance Grid Solution or Building Block available today.With over 2000 respondents, the Grid Today reader survey shows how Sun X64 systems with AMD Opteron are fast becoming the systems of choice for demanding grid applications. Posted by Rich Brueckner [HPC Article of the Day] ( September 12, 2006 02:52 PM ) Permalink
Sun and ISVs to Load More Apps onto Grid Utility
ITJungle notes that Sun is working with ISVs to make it easier to use the Sun Grid utility by putting up a catalog of applications:"We are moving toward the day when the workload customers are running will push the platform or the grid," says Macrunnels. "This is a compelling offering. Customers want to buy come capacity internally, and they want access to some other capacity on the grid." Full Story Posted by Rich Brueckner [HPC Article of the Day] ( September 12, 2006 05:00 AM ) Permalink
