Monday September 11, 2006 GridWorld Kicks Off in Washington D.C.
IDG, the Open Grid Forum (OGF) and GlobusWORLD today kicked off GridWorld in Washington D.C. Event highlights include conference tracks and group sessions detailing the commercial benefits of grid computing, keynotes from industry leaders, numerous networking opportunities and a showcase of the leading companies in the industry. This year's conference theme is "Achieving Agility, Efficiency and Innovation in the Enterprise." Full StorySun is participating in GridWorld in a big way with events like the Gridathon. Posted by Rich Brueckner [HPC Events] ( September 11, 2006 04:00 AM ) Permalink
Sunday September 10, 2006 Sun Seeking More ISV Involvement in Sun Grid
Sun Microsystems Inc. announced plans to provide ISVs and developers new opportunities to engage and leverage the benefits of the Sun Grid Compute Utility. Sun is creating new connection points for ISVs to offer applications and reach customers who need access to compute resources without having to make capital investments in IT infrastructure. Sun is also further enabling developers to build applications for utility computing environments. Full Story Posted by Rich Brueckner [HPC Article of the Day] ( September 10, 2006 05:00 AM ) Permalink
Saturday September 09, 2006 Competitive Council Releases Studies at HPC Conference
The Council on Competitiveness (CoC) convened a pre-eminent group of national business and technology leaders who are calling for more aggressive use of supercomputers. Two new reports released Thursday during the group's annual High Performance Computing Users Conference highlighted the competitive edge generated when industry can access supercomputing resources at universities sponsored by the federal government. The industry participants called these resources "national treasures" in their efforts to gain global competitive advantage. Full Story Posted by Rich Brueckner [HPC Article of the Day] ( September 09, 2006 05:00 AM ) Permalink
Friday September 08, 2006 Energy costs force server rethink
Vuunet explains why new server designs reflect a growing need for IT managers to conserve power in the datatcenter:"The changing nature of datacentres and soaring power costs have forced hardware makers to re-examine server design. Designers of microprocessors have been particularly active as experts state that the CPU is responsible for half or more of the total power consumed by low-end servers." Full Story
For more information on Sun's efforts to reduce server power consumption, check out our site on Eco-Responsibility. Posted by Rich Brueckner [HPC Article of the Day] ( September 08, 2006 05:00 AM ) Permalink
AMD taps into Sun Grid Utility
Information week has a story on how AMD is using the Sun Grid Utility:Although AMD has its own large internal grid, it turned to Sun for additional capacity to "tape-out" new designs. "Bottom line was they could see that the performance of the Sun Grid was as good or better than what they had internally, and they could get up and running very quickly," MacRunnels says. An inherent advantage for AMD was that much of the Sun Grid is built on Sun servers that use AMD Opteron processors. Posted by Rich Brueckner [HPC Article of the Day] ( September 08, 2006 04:00 AM ) Permalink
Thursday September 07, 2006 Sun customers are invited to register now for the EDU Consortium meeting in Tampa, which takes place just prior to the SC2006 conference on November 11-12. Registration Site Posted by Rich Brueckner [HPC Events] ( September 07, 2006 05:00 AM ) Permalink
Wednesday September 06, 2006 Sun Gridathon to Rock Gridworld
Don't Miss the Sun Grid GRIDATHON - Free of Charge for GridWorld 2006 Attendees!During the GridWorld '06 conference in Washington, DC, Nov 11-13, Sun Microsystems will run an interactive hands-on technical seminar that provides GridWorld attendees with valuable insight into grid technology related issues and challenges. This technical seminar, staffed by engineers and architects from the Sun Grid team, will review the Sun Grid Compute Utility architecture and summarize the requirements for deployment. This is an opportunity to have an in-depth discussion on issues such as how to port, architect, and deploy applications to a grid environment. Bring your applications; Time will be reserved to discuss topics ranging from parallelizing your applications, deploying an application to a utility environment, to porting to the Solaris 10x64 Operating System. Full Story Posted by Rich Brueckner [HPC Events] ( September 06, 2006 05:00 AM ) Permalink
Tuesday September 05, 2006 Hybrid Petaflops Cluster to Follow Sun's Lead
IBM is reportedly following Sun's lead in hybrid supercomputers to build the world's first Petaflops cluster for Los Alamos National Laboratory:"The Roadrunner system, along with the Protein Explorer and the seventh-fastest supercomputer, Tokyo Institute of Technology's Tsubame system built by Sun Microsystems, illustrate a new trend in supercomputing: combining general-purpose processors with special-purpose accelerator chips." Full Story Posted by Rich Brueckner [HPC Article of the Day] ( September 05, 2006 07:37 PM ) Permalink
"Mississippians are already working hard, so we have to increase productivity by helping our people work smarter," he said prior to a 10 a.m. ribbon-cutting. "Almost all of that is dependent on computational capacity." Full Story Posted by Rich Brueckner [HPC Article of the Day] ( September 05, 2006 05:00 AM ) Permalink
Monday September 04, 2006 AMD: CPU core control key to power efficiency
AMD's quad-core architecture won't be released until mid-2007, but the company is already discussing some features of the new Opterons and Athlons. Power consumption will remain a center piece of AMD's product strategy: Clock speed control of the individual cores will allow the chips to remain in the same power envelope as their dual-core predecessors. Full Story Posted by Rich Brueckner [HPC Article of the Day] ( September 04, 2006 05:00 AM ) Permalink
Sunday September 03, 2006 Energy costs bring retooled computers
Boston.com takes a look at how the power crunch is affecting data centers:"During the last Internet boom, hardly anybody thought about how much electricity a computer uses. But in the past few years, the energy cost of running large data centers has become one of the industry's hottest topics." Full Story
For more information on Sun's efforts to reduce server power consumption, check out our site on Eco-Responsibility. Posted by Rich Brueckner [HPC Article of the Day] ( September 03, 2006 05:00 AM ) Permalink
Saturday September 02, 2006 ClearSpeed Breaks GFLOP per Watt Barrier
ClearSpeed, a producer coprocessor acceleration technology and Sun partner in HPC deals including Tokyo Tech, today announced Linpack benchmark results that set new standards for energy efficient computation for high performance computing (HPC) clusters.ClearSpeed Advance accelerator boards rated at only 25 Watts power consumption per board added 28.5 GigaFLOPS (GFLOPS) each to a cluster of Hewlett Packard Proliant DL380 G5 servers running the high performance Linpack benchmark. With two Advance accelerator boards in each of the four servers, the cluster performance was increased to over 364 GFLOPS while adding only 200 Watts to the overall power levels. Without ClearSpeed acceleration, the four node cluster delivered 136 GFLOPS from its 8 Intel(R) Xeon(R) 5160 (Woodcrest) dual core processors while consuming 1,940 Watts of power. A similarly configured single node delivered 90 GFLOPS compared with 34 GFLOPS for the non-accelerated system.
The ClearSpeed accelerated cluster completed the Linpack benchmark run in just 18.4 minutes while using only 40% of the energy required by the non-accelerated cluster which took 48.4 minutes to finish. Full Story Posted by Rich Brueckner [HPC Article of the Day] ( September 02, 2006 05:00 AM ) Permalink
Friday September 01, 2006 Using HPC to Study Atoms Linked To Black Holes
The Ohio State Supercomputing Center has been long-time Sun Center of Excellence. Now, Supercomputing Online has a story on how Ohio State astronomers are using HPC to study atoms linked to black holes:"Super-hot atoms in space hold the key to an astronomical mystery, and an Ohio State University astronomer is leading an effort to study those atoms here on Earth. Anil Pradhan, professor of astronomy, and his team have used supercomputers to perform the most precise energy calculations ever made for these atoms and their properties. As a result, astronomers -- in particular, those hunting black holes -- will have a better idea of what they are looking at when they examine faraway space matter using X-ray telescopes. The results appear in the September issue of the Journal of Physics B: Atomic, Molecular and Optical Physics. And while the paper's subject matter is highly technical, it tells a story that weaves together atomic physics, Einstein's theory of relativity, cutting-edge astronomical observations, and some of the world's fastest supercomputers." Full Story Posted by Rich Brueckner [HPC Article of the Day] ( September 01, 2006 05:00 AM ) Permalink
