Saturday October 31, 2009 Video: Sun Solutions for Government, Education, and Research
Michael Schulman presents on Sun HPC solutions for Government, Education, and Research.
Posted by Rich Brueckner [Videos] ( October 31, 2009 05:00 AM ) Permalink | Comments [0]
Thursday October 29, 2009 Video: F5100 Flash Array at Oracle Open World
Paul Riethmuller shows us the new Sun Storage F5100 Flash Array at Oracle Open World 2009.
Posted by Rich Brueckner [Videos] ( October 29, 2009 05:00 AM ) Permalink | Comments [0]
Wednesday October 28, 2009 Optimizing Simulations with Intel Flash and Oracle and MSC Software
Larry Mcintosh and Dale Layfield demonstrate the performance advantages of SSDs at Oracle Open World.
Posted by Rich Brueckner [Video of the Week] ( October 28, 2009 05:00 AM ) Permalink | Comments [0]
Tuesday October 27, 2009 New whitepaper: Tuning Parallel Code on Solaris - Lessons Learned from HPC
Most computers today are equipped with multicore processors and manufacturers are increasing core and thread counts, as the most cost effective and energy efficient route to increased processing throughput. However, tuning parallel applications brings with it complex challenges that can only be overcome with increasingly advanced tools and techniques.
The set of tools needed to achieve this goal was expanded continuously in each successive version of the Solaris OS, culminating in Solaris 10 and OpenSolaris with DTrace — arguably the most advanced observability tool available today in any operating environment. Learn by example about the tools available in Solaris and how they can be applied to determine where problems lie with parallel code and then how to figure them out. Download PDF
Posted by Rich Brueckner [Hot Documents] ( October 27, 2009 12:00 AM ) Permalink | Comments [0]
Monday October 26, 2009 Sun Benchmarks Reverse Time Migration
Just in time for SEG comes news of Sun's outstanding performance on Reverse Time Migration:
"A Sun Blade 6048 Modular System with 12 Sun Blade X6275 server modules were clustered together with QDR InfiniBand and using a Lustre File System with QDR InfiniBand to show performance improvements over an NFS file system for reading in Velocity, Epsilon, and Delta Slices and imaging 800 samples of various various grid sizes using the Reverse Time Migration. Full StoryPosted by Rich Brueckner [HPC Article of the Day] ( October 26, 2009 03:03 PM ) Permalink | Comments [0]and
"A prominent Seismic Processing algorithm, Reverse Time Migration with Optimal Checkpointing, in SMP "THREADS" Mode, was testing using a Sun Fire X4270 server configured with four high performance 15K SAS hard disk drives (HDDs) and a Sun Storage F5100 Flash Array. This benchmark compares I/O devices for checkpointing wave state information while processing a production seismic migration. Full Story
Video: Sun Solutions for Computational Chemisty
Michael Brown presents an overview of Sun HPC Solutions for Computational Chemisty.
Posted by Rich Brueckner [Videos] ( October 26, 2009 05:00 AM ) Permalink | Comments [0]
Sunday October 25, 2009 Video: Ansys for Engineering Simulation
Barbara Hutchings describes how Ansys parallel performance provides faster turnaround time and the ability to run bigger, more detailed models. Download the Sun Blueprint: Sun Business Ready HPC for ANSYS FLUENT.
Posted by Rich Brueckner [Videos] ( October 25, 2009 05:00 AM ) Permalink | Comments [0]
Saturday October 24, 2009 Video: Active Archive Solution for Life Sciences Research
Mark Leggott, University Librarian for the University of PEI, presents on the System Architecture for Sun's Active Archive Solution for Life Sciences Research.
Posted by Rich Brueckner [HPC Storage] ( October 24, 2009 05:00 AM ) Permalink | Comments [0]
Friday October 23, 2009 
The web team has just posted a preview of Sun Sessions at SC09:
- Hear CTO's discuss Flash Technology in a Panel session on Friday, Nov. 20
- Learn how to Solve the HPC I/O bottleneck at the Exhibitor's Forum
- Share the secrets of data integrity at the Birds of a Feather Session
- Learn about Jülich Research on Petaflops Architectures Project
Participate in the Sun HPC Consortium: Early Bird Rates end today!
Posted by Rich Brueckner [Sun HPC Events] ( October 23, 2009 05:00 AM ) Permalink | Comments [0]
Wednesday October 21, 2009 Josh Simons blogs on the Fortress programming language for HPC. With Fortress, programmer/scientists express their algorithms in a mathematical notation that is much closer to their domain of expertise than the syntax of the typical programming language.
Tuesday October 20, 2009 New Software Could Smooth HPC Speed Bumps
With all the buzz on GPUs these days, programming these devices remains a big issue:
"Now, this is changing as AMD, NVIDIA and their customers (primarily computer- and game system–makers) throw their support behind a standard way of writing software called the Open Computing Language (OpenCL), which works across both GPU brands. A longer-term goal behind OpenCL is to create a common programming interface that will even let software writers create applications that run both GPUs and CPUs with few modifications, cutting the time and effort required to harness supercomputing power for scientific endeavors." Full Story
Posted by Rich Brueckner [HPC Article of the Day] ( October 20, 2009 05:00 AM ) Permalink | Comments [0]
Monday October 19, 2009 Sun and Voltaire Accelerate Clemson Computational Center
This Desktop Engineering article describes the HPC cluster at CU-CMS. Sun Microsystems delivered and installed a 35 teraflop system based on 43 Sun Blade 6000 Modular Systems, Sun Fire servers and Sun StorageTek systems.
"To help attract leading companies from the automotive industry as well as other industries such as energy, aviation, and aerospace, Clemson University selected Voltaire’s scaleout computing fabric solutions as the interconnect for the high-performance computing (HPC) system operated by the Clemson University Computational Center for Mobility Systems (CU-CCMS). The system enables the university to provide simulation test research to automotive and transportation companies that need to reduce overall design cycle times to develop better products faster and at a lower cost. Full StoryPosted by Rich Brueckner [HPC Article of the Day] ( October 19, 2009 05:00 AM ) Permalink | Comments [0]
Sunday October 18, 2009 HPC Customers Weigh in on Sun Storage F5100 Flash Array
HPC Wire cites some glowing customer quotes from Sun HPC customers on the performance of the Sun Storage F5100 Flash Array. Don Thorp, Operations Manager at SDSC had this to say:
"San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) has been evaluating the F5100 Flash Storage array as a high performance SamQFS metadata target, which sits at the core of our archiving services and hosts well over one hundred million files. Performance improvement of 2.5 to four times was demonstrated for file creation and metadata scans, such as listing and backups. Further testing will be done using the Sun Storage F5100 as a Lustre metadata target, high speed storage pool in Lustre 2.0 for user checkpoint data, Oracle database storage device and out-of-core storage device on an HPC cluster." Full StoryPosted by Rich Brueckner [HPC Article of the Day] ( October 18, 2009 05:00 AM ) Permalink | Comments [1]
Saturday October 17, 2009 Vote: HPC Community Leadership Awards
Democracy reigns in the HPC community. Here is your chance to recognize the leaders that drive high performance computing:
insideHPC’s HPC Community Leadership Awards. The award recognizes the people and organizations who have persevered through technology, budget or organizational challenges to place innovative HPC solutions in the hands of users in business, engineering, technology, and science.
Not to be left out, the HPCwire Reader's Choice Awards allow the HPC community to recognize some of the most outstanding organizations and individuals in the industry. This year, two new categories were added: "Best Use of HPC in the Cloud" and "Best Application of Green Computing in HPC" in recognition of the tremendous amount of innovation happening in the industry. The Readers' Choice Awards are determined by a poll of HPCwire readers, and the Editors' Choice Awards are determined by a panel of recognized HPC luminaries and contributing editors from industry. All winners will be announced at the SC09 in Portland, Oregon. Vote Here
Posted by Rich Brueckner [HPC Article of the Day] ( October 17, 2009 05:00 AM ) Permalink | Comments [0]
Friday October 16, 2009 Sun just rolled out an impressive set of HPC Benchmarks:
Oct 13, 2009 Halliburton ProMAX Oil & Gas Appl on Sun 6048/X6275 Cluster and Oracle Database
Oct 13, 2009 MCAE ABAQUS faster on Sun F5100 and Sun X4270 - Single Node World Record
Oct 12, 2009 MCAE ANSYS faster on Sun F5100 and Sun X4270
Oct 12, 2009 MCAE MCS/NASTRAN faster on Sun F5100 and Fire X4270
Oct 13, 2009 CP2K Life Sciences, Ab-initio Chem - Sun C48 with Sun Blade X6275 - QDR InfiniBand
Oct 09, 2009 X6275 Cluster Demonstrates Performance and Scalability on WRF 2.5km CONUS Dataset
Thursday October 15, 2009 Agenda Published: Sun HPC Consortium Portland, Nov 14-15
The Sun HPC Consortium has just published their agenda for the meeting in Portland on November 14-15. The customer meeting will take place at the Portland Hilton just prior to SC09.
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.
Hurry! Early Bird rates end October 23. Registration Site.
Posted by Rich Brueckner [HPC Events] ( October 15, 2009 01:36 PM ) Permalink | Comments [0]New Whitepaper: HPC Profiling with Sun Studio Performance Tools
Abstract: In this paper, we describe how to use the Sun Studio Performance Tools to understand the nature and causes of application performance problems. We first explore CPU and memory performance problems for single-threaded applications, giving some simple examples. Then, we discuss multi-threaded performance issues, such as locking and false-sharing of cache lines, in each case showing how the tools can help. We go on to describe OpenMP applications and the support for them in the performance tools. Then we discuss MPI applications, and the techniques used to profile them. Finally, we present our conclusions. Download PDF
Posted by Rich Brueckner [Hot Documents] ( October 15, 2009 05:00 AM ) Permalink | Comments [0]
Wednesday October 14, 2009 New Blueprint: Accelerating Databases Sun Storage F5100 Flash Array
This new blueprint article shows how to apply the Sun Storage F5100 Flash Array as storage for database indexes in order to accelerate application performance. Full Story
Posted by Rich Brueckner [Hot Documents] ( October 14, 2009 05:00 AM ) Permalink | Comments [0]
Tuesday October 13, 2009 Video: Swarm - Distributed Computation in the Cloud
Swarm: Distributed Computation in the Cloud from Ian Clarke on Vimeo.
Swarm is a framework allowing the creation of web applications which can scale transparently through a novel portable continuation-based approach. Swarm embodies the maxim "move the computation, not the data".
Posted by Rich Brueckner [About this Site] ( October 13, 2009 05:00 AM ) Permalink | Comments [0]
Monday October 12, 2009 Video: Sun F5100 Flash Array - The 10X Difference
Announced recently at Oracle Open World, the Sun Storage F5100 Flash Array is a 1.8 TByte high performance high density solid state flash array delivering over 1.6M IOPS (4K IO) and 12.8GB/sec throughput (1M reads).
The F5100 Flash Array is designed to accelerate IO-intensive applications, such as databases, at a fraction of the power, space, and cost of traditional hard disk drives. Check out the amazing benchmarks at the BestPerf blog.
Posted by Rich Brueckner [Video of the Week] ( October 12, 2009 07:21 AM ) Permalink | Comments [0]Sun Blades: Outstanding Performance on WRF Weather Code
Sun continues to set new performance levels with Intel Nehalem processors. The BestPerf Blog presents exciting results for the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) code running on twelve Sun Blade X6275 server modules, housed in the Sun Blade 6048 chassis, using the 2.5 km CONUS benchmark dataset.
* The Sun Blade X6275 cluster was able to achieve 373 GFLOP/s on the CONUS 2.5-KM Dataset.
* The results demonstrate an 91% speedup efficiency, or 11x speedup, from 1 to 12 blades.
* The current results results were run with turbo on.
Read the Full Story.
Posted by Rich Brueckner [HPC Article of the Day] ( October 12, 2009 05:00 AM ) Permalink | Comments [0]
Sunday October 11, 2009 Sneak Preview Video: Featured Speakers at SC09
Here's a recap of featured speakers at SC09:
TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 17TH
Opening Address: The Rise of the 3D Internet: Advancements in Collaborative and Immersive Sciences
Speaker: Justin Rattner, Intel Corporation
Time: 08:30AM - 10:00AM
Room: PB253-254-257-258
WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 18TH
Plenary Speaker: Systems Medicine, Transformational Technologies and the Emergence of Predictive, Personalized, Preventive and Participatory (P4) Medicine
Speaker: Leroy Hood, Institute for Systems Biology
Time: 08:30AM - 9:15AM
Room: PB253-254-257-258
THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 19TH
Keynote Address:Building Solutions: Energy, Climate and Computing for a Changing World
Speaker: Former U.S. Vice President, Al Gore
Time: 08:30AM - 10:00AM
Room: PB253-254-257-258
Get the Full Story.
Posted by Rich Brueckner [HPC Article of the Day] ( October 11, 2009 05:00 AM ) Permalink | Comments [0]
Saturday October 10, 2009 New Details on Al Gore Keynote at SC09
The SC09 folks have announced the title of Al Gore's Keynote Presentation for Thursday, November 19th. The SC09 Keynote will be titled, "Building Solutions - Energy, Climate and Computing for a Changing World."
Gore will deliver the keynote presentation on Thursday, November 19th for the anticipated crowd of 11,000 attendees made up of leading computational scientists, researchers, and supercomputing experts from around the globe, many of whom work on HPC platforms and supercomputers researching life-changing issues such as disease understanding, drug discovery, renewable energy, and global climate change. Full Story
Posted by Rich Brueckner [HPC Article of the Day] ( October 10, 2009 05:00 AM ) Permalink | Comments [0]
Friday October 09, 2009 Interview with Intel CTO Justin Rattner
Inside HPC has a nice piece on Justin Rattner of Intel, keynote speaker for the opening address at SC09 in November:
“When I started out with this idea in 1984, Cray and vector supercomputing was dominant,” Rattner says. “In 1984 or 1985 I gave a talk on the idea that very large ensembles of microprocessors would eventually replace complicated vector processors in supercomputers. I think 9 out of 10 people in the audience thought I had lost my mind.” Full StoryPosted by Rich Brueckner [HPC Article of the Day] ( October 09, 2009 05:00 AM ) Permalink | Comments [0]
Thursday October 08, 2009 Compiling Lustre from sources with OFED
Atul's Blog provides a nice recipe for compiling Lustre from source code with OFED:
"Many times I have been asked about how to build Lustre from sources. Though the Lustre Manual covers it, some details like selecting OFED distribution are missing." Full StoryPosted by Rich Brueckner [HPC Software] ( October 08, 2009 05:00 AM ) Permalink | Comments [0]
