Sunday October 08, 2006 Sun Gets 400 Teraflops Supercomputing Deal with Galaxy Servers
ITJungle has a story on the Sun's big HPC win at TACC:"Sun Microsystems got its start as a Unix workstation company that sold a lot of workstations and then servers to academic and research institutions that needed a lot of computational capability. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Sun's Sparc platform lost its competitive edge, and while Solaris was still popular for scientific computing, Linux had really come on strong. Then, Sun adopted Opterons and took Solaris open source. And now, the tide seems to be turning a little."
"Sun announced last week that its Sun Fire "Galaxy" platforms will be at the heart of a 400 teraflops, $59 million supercomputer cluster that will reside at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TAAC) at the University of Texas at Austin and that will eventually plug into the TeraGrid distributed computing facility that is being funded by the U.S. government's National Science Foundation. Arizona State University and Cornell University also have a hand in building and using the resulting machine." Full Story Posted by Rich Brueckner [HPC Article of the Day] ( October 08, 2006 05:00 AM ) Permalink
Saturday October 07, 2006 Schwartz: Sun Brings Cheap Revolution to HPC
Sun CEO and fellow-blogger Jonathan Schwartz takes up the bully pulpit for HPC this week:"First, the "cheap revolution" is winning out in high performance computing - Sun won because we could supply general purpose infrastructure and open source software, which in combination allows TACC to decommission their legacy proprietary Intel systems, and avoid having to use a customized solution. As I discussed here, general purpose systems and operating platforms have emerged as fast enough to displace proprietary and specialized systems. On a performance per watt basis (which is one of the metrics used to measure system efficiency), the numbers are staggeringly in favor of Sun's new wave of open innovation (which is why PG&E offers rebates for Sun's systems in California)." Full Story Posted by Rich Brueckner [HPC Article of the Day] ( October 07, 2006 05:00 AM ) Permalink
Friday October 06, 2006 "A significant portion of that energy is used to compute floating point operations -- the heart of high performance technical computing -- using relatively inefficient general-purpose processors. Thus the recent interest in floating point acceleration from ClearSpeed coprocessors, graphics processing units (GPUs) and the Cell processors. While much attention has been focused on the latter two in recent months, ClearSpeed is seen by some as the dark horse in the race to better floating point performance. According to Stephen McKinnon, ClearSpeed's new COO, the company is uniquely focused on coprocessor floating point acceleration for the HPC marketplace and believes it has the roadmap to keep it ahead of potential rivals for the foreseeable future." Full Story Posted by Rich Brueckner [HPC Article of the Day] ( October 06, 2006 05:00 AM ) Permalink
Thursday October 05, 2006 "In my job at a (large) investment bank I am constantly being pushed to use grid technology. I have many problems with this (not least that our data center is at best 100 Mb/s and our software is actually more data than computation heavy). A typical batch job takes 10-30 minutes consisting of around 10,000 trades. I would far rather spend the time and money on multi-core machines and optimizing the software than on the latest fad technology. I am interested to hear from other people in a similar position and, in particular, why or why not they chose grid software over improving the existing code to leverage better processor technology, and which grid software they chose to use and why. Or, conversely, why they chose not to use grid software." Full Story Posted by Rich Brueckner [HPC Article of the Day] ( October 05, 2006 09:00 AM ) Permalink
Wednesday October 04, 2006 SC06 Advance Registration Deadline is Oct 15
With the SC2006 conference less than two months away, there are two compelling reasons to register now for the Technical Program and Tutorials, and to reserve a hotel room.The first reason is that Advance Registration closes Sunday, October 15 – after that the fees for the Technical Program registration and Tutorials will go up significantly. Conference Registration.
The second reason to act now is that hotel rooms are going fast. To qualify for the guaranteed conference rate, hotel reservations must be made by Friday, October 6. SC2006 hotel details are online.
Sun employees: please check the internal HPC Watercooler at blogs.sfbay/HPC for more info. Posted by Rich Brueckner [HPC Events] ( October 04, 2006 05:00 AM ) Permalink
Tuesday October 03, 2006 Grid Applications Shine at EGEE
Users in more than 150 virtual organizations, from fields as diverse as biomedicine, earth sciences and high-energy physics, are now using the distributed computing infrastructure of the Enabling Grids for E-sciencE (EGEE) project, which shows the wide adoption and versatility of this new technology. This was announced at the EGEE'06 conference in Geneva, Switzerland, along with prizes for the two best demonstrations of applications on the grid shown at the conference. Full Story Posted by Rich Brueckner [HPC Article of the Day] ( October 03, 2006 05:00 AM ) Permalink
Monday October 02, 2006 NVIDIA Quadro Plex Visual Computer Now Shipping
NVIDIA Corporation has announced that the Quadro Plex 1000, the world's first dedicated visual computing system (VCS) delivering a quantum leap in visual computing, is now shipping in volume and available directly from the NVIDIA store at the Company Web Site or authorized partners."Since the unveiling in early August, the NVIDIA Quadro Plex VCS has received industry praise and attention, with major installations at automotive, geosciences, advanced research, and design companies worldwide. Authorized partners including Sun Microsystems will be offering NVIDIA Quadro Plex to customers." Full Story Posted by Rich Brueckner [HPC Article of the Day] ( October 02, 2006 05:00 AM ) Permalink
Sunday October 01, 2006 Creating an Architecture for Streaming Data
Henry Newman is back with a primer on how to architect for high performance data streaming:"High-performance streaming is much harder to develop an architecture for since the requirements are much greater. The data rates needed for streaming I/O can exceed 30 MB/sec, and multiple streams are active simultaneously. Shared file systems are often used, which require even more complex architectural analysis since multiple systems are accessing the storage system. A number of shared file systems were actually developed in the late 1990s specifically for editing streaming video. Full Story Posted by Rich Brueckner [HPC Article of the Day] ( October 01, 2006 05:00 AM ) Permalink
