Callidus ISV goes on-demand with Sun Grid

Among the reasons often cited for enterprises not adopting Grid computing is a lack of Grid-enabled applications coming from the ISV community. However, this is not the case with Callidus, whose TrueComp software has for years been providing a Grid-enabled application to companies requiring the utmost performance from their Enterprise Incentive Management (EIM) solution. Full Story

AMD Announces CPU-GPU Fusion

Phil Hester, AMD senior vice president and CTO, says the company's new Fusion architecture is the pathway to the future:

"In this increasingly diverse x86 computing environment, simply adding more CPU cores to a baseline architecture will not be enough. As x86 scales from palmtops to petaflops, modular processor designs leveraging both CPU and GPU compute capabilities will be essential in meeting the requirements of computing in 2008 and beyond." Full Story

HPC Gets Virtual

HPC Wire takes a look at the move to virtualization in the HPC space:

"Virtualization is entering the HPC world. Editor Michael Feldman talks about three vendors who are trying to rewrite the HPC cluster model with hardware than can be dynamically reconfigured to match changing workloads. Full Story

OpenFabrics Developer Summit at SC2006

The OpenFabrics Alliance (OFA) announced that it is staging and will provide support for both 10 and 20Gb/s InfiniBand and 10Gb/s Ethernet networks for the high-performance SCinet initiative at SC06, the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking and Analysis. SCinet networks will operate for the entirety of SC06, which is scheduled for November 11-17 at the Tampa Convention Center. Full Story

To see the OpenFabrics connection in action, check out the Open MPI demo at the Sun booth #605.

SCInet plans massive bandwidth for SC2006

When SC2006, the premier international conference of high performance computing, networking, storage and analysis convenes Nov. 11-17 in the Tampa Convention Center, the center will be one of the best-connected sites on the planet. And, as a service for future conventions, much of the state-of-the-art networking infrastructure installed in the center will remain in place.

Every year, a team of volunteers works for more than a year to design, build and manage the SC conference network known as SCinet. For SC06, the SCinet team will be bringing in ten 10-gigabits-per-second (Gbps) network connections to the convention center. The combined network capability will be about 20,000 times that of the fastest residential Internet service provided by cable TV and telephone companies. Full Story

For a preview of the exciting innovations in the Sun exhibit, check out our SC2006 booth preview.

Reducing Complexity with Grid

ITWales interviews Trudy Norris Grey, Sun President & Managing Director, UK & Ireland, on the benefits of Grid Computing:

"In short, Sun's Grid Computing offering helps businesses reduce complexity, better utilize their overbuilt infrastructures, and optimise their IT resources." Full Story

Importance of Being Multi-Core

GridToday sits down with AMD on the need for multi-core processors in today's IT environments:

"On the broader subject of the relationship between processors and Grid/virtualized environments, Lewis gave me a nice background. Essentially, she said, "The processor provides the underlying functionality for a lot of what happens on the system." Today's Grid environments are increasingly CPU- and memory-intensive, she noted, and the latest generation of processors is definitely addressing these issues. With multi-core chips, embedded memory and hardware hooks for virtualization, processors are being designed to maximize Grid and virtualized environments." Full Story

Special Preview: Sun Exhibit at SC2006

Come see Sun Microsystems at SC2006!

Innovation Matters: Let us show you how.
Sun Microsystems, booth #605 at SC2006, Nov 13-16

On November 13-16, IEEE/ACM will host SC2006, the world's largest convention on high performance computing. Sun Microsystems will have a 50x50 exhibit showcasing the latest HPC technologies including x64 clusters featuring AMD Opteron, Advanced visualization, Open MPI, HPC Storage, and Solaris.

This year, Sun will feature demonstrations by Tokyo Tech with partner demos from EnginFrame, eXludus, NVIDIA, Open iT, Qlogic, ProE, Synopsis, and Wolfram Research.

Advanced Visualization: Come See the Future for Yourself!

As a special feature, the Department of Computer Science at the University of Houston will be featuring a set of futuristic visualizations technologies in the Sun Booth:

Imagine if non-invasive imaging technologies could be combined with computational resources to simultaneously collect an array of health information from a patient, analyzing and giving results in real time!

We present a hybrid hardware/software system designed to acquire, analyze, integrate, securely store, and visualize large volumes of data obtained from a human subject in real time. Our computerized sensors are respectively providing thermal imaging, EEG and multimodalities video.

Special Show Offers:

FREE EXHIBIT PASSES:
Exhibit passes are available from Sun for November 14-16. To obtain exhibit passes, please send your name and email address to: hpc-news@sun.com

Trade-Up from SGI and Save up to 15%
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Trade-in your old SGI servers and workstations for new Sun X64 products and save up to 15%.
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TeraFLOPS To Go
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Need 1 to 100 teraflops of high performance computing power? Need to build a large-scale computing solution that provides up to 100 teraflops worth of peak compute power? Try this simple tool for specifying a system. Select the performance you need and Sun will build, test, and deliver the system for you, saving you a significant amount of cost, time, and effort.
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Sun Ultra 25, Sun Ultra 40 Workstations Offered at Discount
Migrate to x64 Systems at a Lower Cost
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Sun has generous trade-in allowances on old non-Sun
workstations available for its Sun Ultra x64 workstation
product line that address the needs of a variety of users,
whether the application involves MCAD/MCAE, visual simulation
or rendering. Sun's desktop product line has the solutions
users need, whatever the task.
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Win a Thumper Server: Enter Sun's 'Thump This' Contest
Winner Receives a Sun Fire X4500 Server
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Got any ideas about how you might use the "Thumper," Sun's
new Sun FireTM X4500 server? Why not submit those bright
ideas to see whether they might win one of these servers
for you in the Sun "Thump This" contest.
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***********************************************************************************
Special Customer Event: Sun HPC Consortium "Pathway to Petaflops"

Sun HPC Consortium USA, 2006
Palm Harbor, Florida
November 11-13, 2006

The Sun HPC Consortium Tampa 2006 (November 11-13, 2006) is
being held in conjunction with SC2006 at the Westin Innisbrook
Golf Resort in Palm Harbor, Florida.

Please Register Today:

***********************************************************************************

For more information on high performance computing from Sun, please visit our HPC product page.

AMD Increased Q3 Sales 32 Percent

AMD increased sales once again in their third quarter, further evidence that Sun placed the right bet on x64:

"Third quarter sales increased nine percent from the prior quarter, and 32 percent year-over-year, due to strong demand for all AMD processor brands," said Robert J. Rivet, AMD's chief financial officer. "Microprocessor unit shipments grew 18 percent sequentially as customers continued leveraging AMD's open platform approach. Demand for AMD Turion 64 mobile processors was especially strong, resulting in record mobile processor sales and unit shipments coupled with increased average selling prices (ASPs). Record AMD Opteron processor sales resulted from continued adoption of dual core processors, record unit shipments and improved ASPs." Full Story

AMD 4x4 details surface

According to Slashdot, AMD recently revealed a few more details of their upcoming quad-core platform architecture called 4X4. With CPU bundles affectionately dubbed 'Quad Father,' AMD is taking advantage of the inherent benefits of their HyperTransport interconnect technology to directly connect a pair of dual Athlon 64 desktop chips together with system memory. Details here show a dual socket motherboard that support a whopping 12 SATA connections, four X16 PCI Express slots (x16,x8,x16,x8 configuration) and few other bells and whistles. Supposedly Quad Father kits will come with matched CPUs from 2.6GHz up to 3GHz. Full Story

Expect a warmer, wetter world this century

Recent episodes of deadly heat in the United States and Europe, long dry spells across the U.S. West, and heavy bursts of rain and snow across much of North America and Eurasia hint at longer-term changes to come, according to a new study based on several of the world's most advanced climate models. Much of the world will face an enhanced risk of heat waves, intense precipitation, and other weather extremes, conclude scientists from the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), Texas Tech University, and Australia's Bureau of Meteorology Research Centre. Full Story

The HPC Winnebago

SearchDataCenter.com has an amusing take on the new Sun Black Box thingy:

Sun Microsystems Inc. is literally rolling out a new data center design model during an event at its corporate campus today. Executives introduced a prototype for a prefabricated data center, complete with servers, networking equipment and chilled water cooling. The product, dubbed Project Black Box, is housed in a standard metal shipping container -- 20 feet long, eight feet wide and eight feet tall. A fully loaded system can house about 250 single unit rack servers. Full Story

SC2006 October Newsletter

SC2006 has release their October newsletter in preparation for the world's largest HPC conference in Tampa, Florida on November 13-16.

Note that FREE exhibit passes are available from Sun Microsystems for November 14-16.

Prior to SC2006, the Sun HPC Consortium customer event will take place in Palm Harbor, Florida on November 11-13, 2006. Registration is now open.

Revised server energy efficiency standard due by year's end

Data center industry leaders, along with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), hope to have a revised version of the server energy efficiency standard ready by the end of the year.

The group released a draft protocol last month and opened up the discussion for comments. Andrew Fanara, leader of the EPA Energy Star product development team, said the group will be accepting comments into late October. Full Story

For more on Sun's innovative technologies for saving energy in the datacenter, check out our site on Eco-responsibility.

Sun HPC News Quarterly

Check out the latest edition of Sun HPC News Quarterly:

ISSUE HIGHLIGHTS

Feature Stories:

* TSUBAME Cluster Sets Record as First Accelerated Cluster in Top500
* OpenSolaris to Find its Way into Google?
* Sun Brings The Cheap Revolution to Supercomputing,
by Sun CEO, Jonathan Schwartz
* IDC Reports Growth in Sun Disk Storage and Tape Storage
* New Study Underscores Growing Importance Of Energy-Efficient Solutions

*****************************************************************
* FREE HPC Technology Workshop:
Southfield, Michigan, October 25, 2006
*****************************************************************

HPC News

* TACC Receives $59 Million NSF Award For Sun Supercomputer
* TIGR Unplugs HP, Switches to Sun for Genome Assembly
* Sun HPC Customer on CBS News (Video clip)
* Sun, Fujitsu promise Sparc speed surge
* The Case for Grid Computing
* New Sun Fire x2200 M2 server "Tailor Made" for HPC

Price Reductions and Promotions

* Trade-Up from SGI and Save up to 15%
* TeraFLOPS To Go
* Sun Ultra 25, Sun Ultra 40 Workstations Offered at Discount
* Win a Thumper Server: Enter Sun's 'Thump This' Contest

Events

* FREE HPC Technology Workshop:
Southfield, Michigan, October 25, 2006

* Supercomputing 06 - SC06; Tampa, Florida; November 11-17, 2006
FREE exhibit passes available.

* Sun HPC Consortium USA, 2006; Tampa, Florida; November 11-13, 2006

Subscribe to Sun HPC News Quarterly today!

The Information Factories

Wired.com has an interesting arcticle on the pending Petascale computing requirements of the information business:

"The desktop is dead. Welcome to the Internet cloud, where massive facilities across the globe will store all the data you'll ever use. George Gilder on the dawning of the petabyte age." Full Story

Sun Server Snapshot is a Prettier Picture

ServerWatch takes a look at Sun's strengthening position in the market:

"Sun is certainly having a good year. Recent numbers from both IDC and Gartner confirm the company appears to be back on track. According to IDC, Sun gained almost a two percent leap in overall server market share in the second quarter of 2006 compared with the same quarter last year. That gives the vendor at 12.9 percent total server market share and makes it the top Unix server vendor." Full Story

Study: Energy-Efficiency Critical to Business

Harris Interactive has released a new study that further validates the growing importance of incorporating energy-efficient products into today's business solutions. In surprising results which measured decisions made over the past six months, while executives recognize energy-efficiency in the datacenter as a buying priority, a majority of survey respondents admit they are not aware of how much their company is spending on energy costs or the amount of green house gas (GHG) emissions they are releasing into the environment.

According to the study which queried 197 executives director level and above in top U.S. companies with annual revenue at $1 billion or more:

76% of respondents noted that energy-efficient products have increased as buying priority, with 23% of that total noting they have increased significantly.

63% of executives are unaware of how much they are spending on energy or GHG emissions. Of those involved in data center purchases, 38% are unaware of these two factors.

61% of respondents say a utility rebate would make them more likely to purchase energy efficient products. Full Story

Sun HPC Customer on CBS News Tonight

Dr. David Agus of Cedars-Sinai and his proteomics/supercomputer research will be featured this evening (Oct. 12) on CBS Evening News. The piece is part of a two-part series (part one is tonight) hosted by Katie Couric called “Cancer Revolution.” The producer spent a lot of time at Cedars-Sinai and we expect in-depth coverage of the supercomputer system. Video Link

Free Seminar: Innovations in Super Computing, Oct 25, Southfield, MI

Date: Wednesday, October 25, 2006

Time: 8:00 a.m. - 12:00 p.m.

(Breakfast is included)

Location: Westin Southfield

1500 Town Center

Southfield, MI 48075

(248) 827-4000

Event Registration

Price performance is the name of the game in High Performance Computing (HPC). Join Sun Microsystems and CSC for a technology workshop to learn more about options for MCAE and MCAD that address cost/performance options across the entire HPC stack. As the premier expert in HPC, CSC architects, installs, and manages some of the top ranked SC500 labs in the world. Together, Sun and CSC bring a clear approach that gives you a performance advantage in your HPC environments. Event Registration

Agenda

Trends in Large HPC Cluster - Lesson learned for MCAE

· Fat Node Performance

· Consolidated Balanced Systems

· Storage Options

· Upgrade in Place

HPC Stack Cost Opportunities

· Software Stack

· System Management

· Storage

HPC Stack Performance Opportunities

· Interconnect Options

· New Fat Node Options

· Storage Posted by Rich Brueckner [HPC Events] ( October 12, 2006 09:25 AM ) Permalink

NewEnergy Consolidates with Sun x64

"Our data center is 17 degrees cooler and our UPS uptime is now extended over 30 percent," says Neal Tisdale, vice president of software development. "We avoided having to buy a new AC and UPS, saving over $180,000." Full Story Posted by Rich Brueckner [HPC Article of the Day] ( October 12, 2006 05:00 AM ) Permalink

ClusterTools 7 Early Access (EA) release now available

The ClusterTools 7 Early Access (EA) release is now available for download. CT7 EA is software is a set of MPI libraries and tools for launching parallel MPI jobs. CT7 EA includes support for IB networks via a uDAPL Byte-Transfer Layer (BTL) and support for launching jobs with N1 Grid Engine (N1GE). CT7 EA is the first Sun release based on the Open MPI open source software. More information about Open MPI can be found at the Open MPI project site. Posted by Rich Brueckner [HPC Article of the Day] ( October 11, 2006 08:23 AM ) Permalink

Sun, Fujitsu promise Sparc speed surge

Both processors, Sun's eight-core Niagara 2 and Fujitsu's dual-core Sparc64 VI, run Sun's Solaris operating system. However, they are aimed at different markets. Niagara 2 is for lower-end servers running Java or Web server software, while the Sparc64 VI works in higher-end servers with numerous processors that can handle tasks such as working with massive databases.

Company representatives speaking at the Fall Processor Forum here promised significant gains over the chips' predecessors--the first Niagara (now called UltraSparc T1) and the single-core Sparc64 V. Full Story Posted by Rich Brueckner [HPC Article of the Day] ( October 11, 2006 05:00 AM ) Permalink

TSUBAME: First Accelerated Cluster in the Top500

The Tokyo Institute of Technology (Tokyo Tech) achieved its original goal of dominantly and decisively becoming the number 1 supercomputing infrastructure in Asia in June 2006. Displacing the previous leader (the 36 TFLOPS Earth Simulator) with its 38 TFLOPS result and number 7 position in the June Top500, Tokyo Tech has now revealed the true potential of its visionary architecture for TSUBAME. The new result positions Tokyo Tech at number 5 in the world according to results published on October 3 by Jack Dongarra of the University of Tennessee, who maintains the Top500 ranking. Full Story Posted by Rich Brueckner [HPC Article of the Day] ( October 10, 2006 05:00 AM ) Permalink

Register Now: Sun HPC Consortium

Sun customers are invited to attend the Sun HPC Consortium Tampa 2006. The Consortium is being held November 11-13 in conjunction with SC2006 at the Westin Innisbrook Golf Resort in Palm Harbor, Florida. This year, the agenda will feature keynotes from Sun's Marc Tremblay, Chief Architect and David Yen, Executive VP of Storage.

The Sun High Performance Computing Consortium (SHPCC) is an independent, volunteer-organized, international group of member organizations that own or use Sun computer systems with emphasis on high-performance, technical computing, and visualization.

SHPCC's mission is to provide the high performance computing community with leadership and provide a forum for information exchange to enable the development and effective use of Sun computational tools in achieving the business and research objectives of member organizations.

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.

Confidential Information:

The SHPCC agenda will include Sun-confidential information and all attendees must sign a Confidential information Disclosure Agreement or have an existing Agreement on file with your local Sun sales office.

Please Register today. Posted by Rich Brueckner [HPC Events] ( October 09, 2006 05:00 AM ) Permalink