Sunday May 31, 2009 
As reported on Marc Hamilton's blog, NASA is using Lustre as part of their cloud computing platform:
"NEBULA uses the LUSTRE clustering file system (an open-source project maintained by SUN) to provide highly-scalable storage in the hundreds and thousands of terabytes. This is deployed on a cluster of 64-bit storage nodes, allowing nearly-unlimited individual file size, and connected to a dedicated 10GigE network. Never before has such research-grade computing been available in a web application platform." Full Story
To learn more, check out this whitepaper on how the Lustre Storage System eliminates HPC performance bottlenecks.
Posted by Rich Brueckner [HPC Article of the Day] ( May 31, 2009 05:00 AM ) Permalink | Comments [0]
Saturday May 30, 2009 
The latest Sun HPC Newsletter is out. Don't miss an issue--subscribe today!
Posted by Rich Brueckner [HPC Article of the Day] ( May 30, 2009 05:00 AM ) Permalink | Comments [0]
Friday May 29, 2009 Our favorite storage pundit Henry Newman writes that storage costs aren't just about the price of the hardware or software; they're about operating and maintenance costs — and the cost of lost or corrupt data:
"When I am trying to help customers understand the technology tradeoffs, the first thing I do is to try to understand what their requirements are. Usually I get a glazed look or get told to just solve the problem, and sometimes I'm told that the requirement is for storage that's as cheap as possible. Very few people actually understand their requirements, and even fewer know how to apply them." Full Story
Sun Open Storage combines open-source software with industry-standard hardware, enabling you to reduce your reliance on high-priced systems and save up to 90% on storage costs. To learn more, check out this whitepaper: "Guide to Accelerating Performance and Reducing Cost in HPC with Open Storage."
Posted by Rich Brueckner [HPC Storage] ( May 29, 2009 05:00 AM ) Permalink | Comments [0]
Thursday May 28, 2009 Sun HPC Consortium Hamburg: Early Bird Rates End Today!
Early-bird registration rates end May 28 for the Sun HPC Consortium. The meeting will take place in Hamburg, Germany on June 21-22, just prior to ISC'09. Sun co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim will once again be keynoting the event.
Who should attend: All Sun scientific, engineering, or research computing customers or anyone interested in high-performance computing on Sun technologies. Each meeting is designed to address a wide range of interests from application developers to CIOs and VPs of Research. Register today!
Posted by Rich Brueckner [HPC Events] ( May 28, 2009 01:04 PM ) Permalink | Comments [0]JUROPA: Powered by Sun HPC with QDR InfiniBand
Marc Hamilton blogs that the Jülich web site has been updated with a nice shot of the Sun Constellation System. They also have details on the technical configuration.
JUROPA supercomputer. Note the rack with blue optical cables going to three Sun QDR datacenter switches.
Here is a good view of three of the six Sun Magnum QDR switches at Jülich. Each switch has 648 QDR IB ports exposed as 216 CXP 12x connectors.
The computer in figures
Name: JUROPA (Jülich Research on Petaflop Architectures)
Computing power: 207 teraflop/s
Processor nodes: 2208 with two processors each
Processor type: Intel Xeon X5570 (Nehalem-EP) quad-core, 2.93 GHz
Main memory: 52 terabyte
Wednesday May 27, 2009 Infiniband, a technology that offers the promise of lower latency for high speed computing applications is making inroads according to analyst reports and the Infiniband Trade Association (IBTA).
"Ethernet just can't scale efficiently -- this is really becoming important with Intel Nehalem, as some supercomputer sites were waiting on Nehalem," IBTA spokesperson Brian Sparks told InternetNews.com. "Lots of people deploying Nehalem in HPC clusters are using 40 Gbps with Infiniband to connect and that speed has been available for almost a year now." Full StoryPosted by Rich Brueckner [HPC Article of the Day] ( May 27, 2009 05:00 AM ) Permalink | Comments [0]
Tuesday May 26, 2009 20 Percent Off Sun Servers: HPC Offer of the Week
Sun Fire x64 servers with AMD Opteron processors are built for today's datacenters. Packing exceptional performance into a compact design, these workhorse systems deliver the scalability to meet the computational demands of while minimizing consumption of power and space. Find out for yourself what they can do for your datacenter — and for a limited time, enjoy a 20 percent discount. Take your pick of Sun Fire X4140, X4240, and X4440 servers, with greater performance, memory, internal storage, and networking connectivity than competing systems. Offer valid through 2009-07-14. Full Story
Posted by Rich Brueckner [HPC Offer of the Week] ( May 26, 2009 08:08 AM ) Permalink | Comments [0]
Monday May 25, 2009 Artificial intelligence is back in fashion, which raises the questions: Will computer intelligence surpass our own, and how quickly? Full Story
Posted by Rich Brueckner [About this Site] ( May 25, 2009 05:00 AM ) Permalink | Comments [0]
Sunday May 24, 2009 HPC: Secret Weapon of Business
This Forbes story describes how HPC is being used as the secret weapon of American business:
"Today, savvy businesses are doing modeling and simulation with HPC and finding that they can avoid investing significant capital in creating prototype products to test (the old "build and bust" way of designing new products), and run highly advanced simulations instead. This lets them develop products in significantly less time, get to market much faster, trim their research budgets and design cycles and create the most efficient production processes possible." Full StoryPosted by Rich Brueckner [HPC Article of the Day] ( May 24, 2009 05:00 AM ) Permalink | Comments [0]
Saturday May 23, 2009 HPC has been a catalyst for advanced research in India and its adoption is rising across verticals:
"Karthik Ramarao, Director Technology, Systems, Sun Microsystems, opined, “HPC started out as a cluster-of-workstations solution. However, today it has evolved into a business where customers are looking at dedicated resources, which are able to churn out high compute performance. HPC has been prevalent largely in the education and research and development space but what we have seen in the last couple of years is that HPC is there in pharmaceuticals, medical, healthcare, BFSI and engineering.” Full Story Posted by Rich Brueckner [HPC Article of the Day] ( May 23, 2009 08:44 AM ) Permalink | Comments [0]
Friday May 22, 2009 The SC09 conference has released their latest newsletter with these headlines:
* Al Gore to Keynote Annual Supercomputing Conference
* Nominations Sought for Cray, Fernbach, and First-Ever Kennedy Award
* Sustainability Plays Role in Data Center Challenge
* SC09 Student Job Fair Open to Exhibitor Participation
* SC09 Exhibits Continues to Show HPC Industry Strengths
* Submissions Are Open for the SC09 Storage Challenge
* SCinet Call for Circuits Approaching May 29
* Call for Xnet Submissions
If you have colleagues who would like to subscribe to this monthly newsletter, they should send an email from
the address they want subscribed, with 'subscribe' in the subject line, to:
sc-newsletter-request@group.supercomputing.org
Thursday May 21, 2009 Develop in the Cloud with Project Kenai
Want to start developing in the cloud? Project Kenai is the onramp for Sun's developer "cloud" efforts. Having gone live back in September of 2008, it now exceeds over 7,000 members and surpassed 500 publicly hosted open source projects.
Project Kenai currently offer an integrated suite of productivity services for developers to host their open source code or connect with peers of like mind, and will be enable additional cloud services and collaboration features very soon. Today, every project started at Kenai.com gets the following:
- Evolving integration with NetBeans
- (5) Source Code repositories (Subversion, Mercurial, and Git in any combination of 5)
- (2) Issue Tracking systems (Jira or Bugzilla)
- (1) Wiki
- (5) Forums
- (5) Mailing Lists
- (1) Download facility for documents
Anyone can join by going to http://kenai.com. And if parties are ready to start hosting a project, they simply need to send an invitation request with a description of their project to: kenai-admin@sun.com.
Posted by Rich Brueckner [Cloud Computing] ( May 21, 2009 05:00 AM ) Permalink | Comments [0]
Tuesday May 19, 2009 Video: Monitoring I/O Performance on Lustre - LUG 2009
In this video, Andrew Uselton, NERSC, presents on monitoring I/O Performance on Lustre. Recorded at the Lustre User Group 2009 in Sausalito. Download for iPod
More LUG presentations are available at Lustre.org. You can also download a whitepaper on how the Lustre Storage System eliminates HPC performance bottlenecks.
Posted by Rich Brueckner [Videos] ( May 19, 2009 05:00 AM ) Permalink | Comments [0]
Monday May 18, 2009
The latest Sun HPC Newsletter is out. Don't miss an issue, subscribe today!
Posted by Rich Brueckner [HPC Article of the Day] ( May 18, 2009 05:00 AM ) Permalink | Comments [0]
Sunday May 17, 2009 Video: Lustre in a WAN Environment - LUG 2009
In this video, James Hofmann and Dardo Kleiner, Naval Research Laboratory, and David McMillen, System Fabric Works present on using Lustre in a WAN Environment. Recorded at the Lustre User Group 2009 in Sausalito. Download for iPod
More LUG presentations are available at Lustre.org. You can also download a whitepaper on how the Lustre Storage System eliminates HPC performance bottlenecks.
Posted by Rich Brueckner [Videos] ( May 17, 2009 05:00 AM ) Permalink | Comments [0]
Saturday May 16, 2009 
The latest ISC Conference Newsletter has been published with these topics:
· ISC registration hits new record
· Clever move - early bird registration
· BoF sessions scheduled
· Posters selected
· Changes in schedule, HPC and Oil Exploration und GPUSession
· Media sponsors on ISC‘09
· Hamburg tip for attendees
Hurry! ISC early-bird registration rates end on May 25. Registration site.
If you're coming to Hamburg, be sure to attend the Sun HPC Consortium, where early-bird registration rates end May 21. The meeting will take place in Hamburg, Germany on June 21-22, just prior to ISC'09. Sun co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim will once again be keynoting the event.
Posted by Rich Brueckner [HPC Events] ( May 16, 2009 05:00 AM ) Permalink | Comments [0]
Friday May 15, 2009 Clemson Presents CAE Productivity e-Seminar, May 20
Boost your CAE productivity, and break-away from the pack
Join Clemson University as they present their groundbreaking engineering simulations research at their Computational Center for Mobility Systems.
eSeminar: May 20, 2009 at 10am PT
Dr. James Leylek, Executive Director, will discuss several Clemson projects that reduced development costs while speeding up time to market for manufacturers looking for new ways to get to the next level in their product development process. Hear about the state of the art, fully integrated HPC environment at CU-CCMS, created in collaboration with Sun Microsystems, Voltaire and Ansys. Find out how this unique partnership has led to innovative methods that address automotive, aerospace and energy industry business problems.
Participate in this eSeminar and ask questions of the experts on May 20th, 2009 at 10am PT. Register today.
Posted by Rich Brueckner [HPC Events] ( May 15, 2009 05:00 AM ) Permalink | Comments [0]
Thursday May 14, 2009 The State of Open Source Storage
Drew Robb looks at the state of Open Source Storage, including recent inroads in HPC:
"Greg Schulz, senior analyst and founder of StorageIO Group, is more upbeat about the state of open source storage offerings."There is a wide variety of open source storage solutions and applications from different sources, ranging from volume managers, iSCSI and NAS stacks, file systems, clustered file systems, object-based storage solutions, dedupe and compression, among others, not to mention all of the propriety or commercial solutions that may leverage open source technology embedded into turnkey solutions and products," said Schulz. "Of traditional server and storage vendors, Sun is probably the most notable and vocal around open source storage, along with many smaller startup vendors." Full Story
For more information on Sun's Open Storage offerings, you can download this whitepaper on Revolutionizing the Storage Status Quo.
Posted by Rich Brueckner [HPC Storage] ( May 14, 2009 05:00 AM ) Permalink | Comments [0]
Wednesday May 13, 2009 Video: Lustre on the Teragrid - LUG 2009
In this video, Stephen Simms, Indiana University, presents on Lustre on the Teragrid. Recorded at the Lustre User Group 2009 in Sausalito. Download for iPod.
More LUG presentations are available at Lustre.org. You can also download a whitepaper on how the Lustre Storage System eliminates HPC performance bottlenecks.
Posted by Rich Brueckner [Videos] ( May 13, 2009 05:00 AM ) Permalink | Comments [0]
Tuesday May 12, 2009 Hurry! Early-bird rates for Sun HPC Consortium Hamburg end May 21
Early-bird registration rates end May 21 for the Sun HPC Consortium. The meeting will take place in Hamburg, Germany on June 21-22, just prior to ISC'09. Sun co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim will once again be keynoting the event.
Who should attend: All Sun scientific, engineering, or research computing customers or anyone interested in high-performance computing on Sun technologies. Each meeting is designed to address a wide range of intrests from application developers to CIOs and VPs of Research. Register today!
Posted by Rich Brueckner [HPC Events] ( May 12, 2009 05:00 AM ) Permalink | Comments [0]
Monday May 11, 2009 Video: Open Fabrics Update - LUG 2009
In this video, Bill Boas, OpenFabrics Alliance, presents an OpenFabrics update. Recorded at the Lustre User Group 2009 in Sausalito. Download for iPod.
More LUG presentations are available at Lustre.org. You can also download a whitepaper on how the Lustre Storage System eliminates HPC performance bottlenecks.
Posted by Rich Brueckner [Videos] ( May 11, 2009 05:00 AM ) Permalink | Comments [0]
Sunday May 10, 2009 Video: Lustre at Harvard - LUG 2009
In this video, Teresa Kaltz presents on Lustre at Harvard University. Recorded at the Lustre User Group 2009 in Sausalito. Download for iPod.
More LUG presentations are available at Lustre.org. You can also download a whitepaper on how the Lustre Storage System eliminates HPC performance bottlenecks.
Posted by Rich Brueckner [HPC Article of the Day] ( May 10, 2009 05:00 AM ) Permalink | Comments [0]
Saturday May 09, 2009 Video: Lustre on Hyperion at LLNL - LUG 2009
In this video, Marc Stearman presents on Lustre on the Hyperion system at LLNL. Recorded at the Lustre User Group 2009 in Sausalito. Download for iPod.
More LUG presentations are available at Lustre.org. You can also download a whitepaper on how the Lustre Storage System eliminates HPC performance bottlenecks.
Posted by Rich Brueckner [Videos] ( May 09, 2009 12:33 PM ) Permalink | Comments [0]
Friday May 08, 2009 Video: Lustre Storage System Best Practices - LUG 2009
In this video, Joey Jablonsky presents on the Sun Lustre Storage System. Recorded at the Lustre User Group 2009 in Sausalito. Download for iPod.
More LUG presentations are available at Lustre.org. You can also download a whitepaper on how the Lustre Storage System eliminates HPC performance bottlenecks.
Posted by Rich Brueckner [Video of the Week] ( May 08, 2009 05:00 AM ) Permalink | Comments [0]
Thursday May 07, 2009 Video: Sun HPC Software, Linux Edition
In this video, Makia Minich, Lead Architect of Sun HPC software, presents at Sun's HPC Consortium in Austin, Texas, November 2008.
Posted by Rich Brueckner [Cloud Computing] ( May 07, 2009 05:00 AM ) Permalink | Comments [0]
