Bitwrangler

The treadmill continues

NASA Goddard has released a draft of an RFP.  Another plea for petaflops for picobucks. Sharpen your pencils, run your benchmarks and sell the future.  Here we go!

 

Posted at 12:06PM Feb 29, 2008 in Sun  |  Comments[0]

Maybe they can research water polution clean up efforts

Repeat after me.  WOOOOOOOO  PIG SOUIE!  The University of Arkansas (AKA the Pig People) have a new supercomputer courtesy of Dell.  As a transplanted Okie, who graduated from a rival college back in the days of the Missouri Valley Conference I offer a hearty congratulations to the wearers of the orange pig and two suggestions for possible research:  1) Can you figure out what makes a NCAA Football fan put an orange pig on their head?  And 2) How about searching for clean up techniques to take care of the chicken poop pollution from Arkansas chicken farms that Gov. Clinton allowed to flow into Oklahoma through the Illinois river (A condition that continues to this day.)?

 

Posted at 09:44AM Feb 20, 2008 in Sun  |  Comments[0]

Never Underestimate Ethernet

Woven systems announced HPL benchmark results on par with DDR IB.  While I'll be the first to argue, with all due respect to top500.org,  that all the world is not about HPL, I am convinced that one should never count the ethernet world out when it comes to price/performance metrics.  I've been saying for a while that when they get 10Gbit ethernet NICs down to $30 a copy and 10 Gbit ethernet port costs down then they will give IB a serious run for the HPC network of choice (in volume).  At the high end of the top500 there will always be special interconnects, but for the bottom 400,000 clusters, ethernet will be just fine thank you.  You can find more about the Woven announcement here.

Posted at 09:34AM Feb 20, 2008 in Sun  |  Comments[0]

Sun Blades Come of Age!

According to this report Sun's blade portfolio has come of age and is finding significant success with our customers.  I know from the HPC environment, we are seeing a significant amount of interest in 6048 platforms, and I knew we were pushing blade solutions in a lot of environments, but the success of it all takes my by surprise.  Bravo systems group, Andy, John and company!  Bravo!

 

Posted at 07:28AM Feb 20, 2008 in Sun  |  Comments[0]

HPCMP DOD Mod TI-08 has been awarded

News has started to trickle out today here and here that Cray was awarded 4 out of 5 of the DOD Modernization TI-08 systems.  I've heard that the 5th system is IBM, but I have not confirmed it yet.  Good luck to Cray on delivery, in this industry, we all know that delivery to HPCMP can make a good deal a Pyrrhic victory faster than you can possibly imagine.

 

Posted at 03:18PM Feb 19, 2008 in Sun  |  Comments[1]

So something did happen to LNXI

Well, John West was correct about something happening to LNXI this week.  We have officially lost one competitor at the expense of making another stronger.  I received an e-mail from IDC this evening outlining the SGI acquisition of LNXI.  The SGI press release can be found here.

Posted at 06:03PM Feb 14, 2008 in Sun  |  Comments[0]

HPC Pay Sites

John West reported here that the new system at the State of New Mexico is intended to (at least in part) pay for itself with commercial customers.  This is in tune with what I've heard about directives from DOE headquarters about their supercomputer centers.  This sort of thing has certainly worked in the past (with varying levels of success) at NSF supercomputer centers, but I wonder if it will really take off at a commercial level that is capable of sustaining systems and infrastructure at this level.  

Posted at 06:20AM Feb 14, 2008 in Sun  |  Comments[0]

Return of STK?

According to breaking news at HPCWire a new high performance storage company is once again rising from Denver.  Just looking at the heavy hitters listed as investors and advisors:
 

• Jesse Aweida, Aweida Venture Partners, founder and former president / CEO of StorageTek.
  
• Tom Porter, formerly CTO, Seagate and IBM storage executive.
  
• Gary Gentry, SVP Maxtor, Seagate.
  
• Dick Blaschke, an IBM and EMC veteran.

And the founding execs:

• president and CEO Dan McCormick, formerly an executive with Xiotech and Seagate;
  
• Jonathan Hall, founder, and also formerly an executive with Xiotech and Seagate;
  
• executive vice president Steve Visconti, formerly with Cisco Systems, Airespace and Ascend; 
  
• COO Perry Nelson, formerly with New Global Telecom, Avolent/Solant and American Management Systems.
  

This could be an interesting up and comer for the HPC/Streaming storage environment.  The big question I have for anyone in this industry is how do you plan to manage the life cycle of the data that are on your storage devices?  It is getting huge and manually un-manageable.  You can't keep everything forever, so what do you propose that a customer do with the data explosion that is upon us because of HPC performance increases and sensor proliferation?

Posted at 08:23AM Feb 13, 2008 in Sun  |  Comments[1]

One less competitor???

According to John West, LNXI may be no more.  I know they have been looking for partnerships for quite some time.  It will be interesting to see how this plays out.  

Posted at 08:08AM Feb 13, 2008 in Sun  |  Comments[0]

HPC is indeed everywhere

It appears that Blue Gene and the IBM researchers are looking to apply HPC scale resources to the problems of hosting the web here.  This might be an interesting re-incarnation of the Big Friggin' Web Tone Switch that Scott discussed during the Boom.  Stay tuned...

Posted at 08:04AM Feb 13, 2008 in Sun  |  Comments[0]

Let the Bifurcation begin

In this piece Intel announces that the Nehalem processor will integrate new functionality into the individual socket in 2008.  This possibility has been on my radar for the last few years.  How many cores on a desktop does the average user need anyway?  One should never under-estimate the amount of power Winders can require, but 8 has always seemed like overkill to me for the average browsing, spreadsheet, word processing, presentation oriented user.  

In the announcement they talk about coming out with several flavors of this generation of processor for key market segments.  So, if you add graphics capabilities and an on chip memory controller to a quad core socket then you have a pretty respectable desktop that uses less power and fits into a compact space.  It also opens the door for a more performance oriented version that fits the HPC market.  At that point, economies of scale that have been enjoyed by the X86/X64 crowd are at least a little harder to come by and it *MIGHT* open the door for SPARC and POWER to become more competitive and it just *MIGHT* stop the margin blood bath that tends to cause HPC oriented companies to go out of business.

Stay tuned, 2008 should be interesting...

 

Posted at 10:06AM Apr 02, 2007 in Sun  |  Comments[0]

More Validation / NASA

Further validation came in the de-brief with NASA.  They stated (among other things) that they like the stability and production quality of "proprietary interconnects, operating systems and filesystems."  Sort of flies in the face of the whole "Open is Good" movement in the world today.  When you stop to think about the mission critical nature of portions of the NASA mission (something like failed computation results in dead people) then you understand their desire for bullet proof above all else.  Stay tuned...

 

Posted at 09:40AM Mar 20, 2007 in Sun  |  Comments[0]

NASA Ames

I heard late last evening that the NASA Ames opportunity to replace the Columbia machine went to IBM and the incumbent SGI.  This is not a big surprise given the architecture of the incumbent machines.  Currently, SGI and IBM have the only very large scale SMP nodes on the market.  IMO, this represents the least risk to the application codes at Ames.  While I'm disappointed in the outcome, I definitely see the technical reasons to go the way they did.  

Congratulations to one of my former Sun colleagues who is now an HPC leader at IBM (and was in charge of the bid).  I'm sure we will cross swords again.

 

Posted at 05:55AM Mar 10, 2007 in Sun  |  Comments[0]

Petaflop by October 2008? Hmmm

In the current issue of HPCWire here,  Dr. Raymond Orbach (Under Secretary for Science and Council on Competitiveness) says that we should see a Petaflop machine at Oakridge by the end of next Government Fiscal Year.  That will certainly make things interesting in this market since these large scale systems keep pushing the $/Tflop # towards the basement and significantly increase the overall complexity of the architecture.  I for one will be interested in seeing how things unfold with these new large scale systems in the top 10 list.  The only thing that I believe is certain here is we will find out things about the management characteristics that no-one has thought about at this point.  The other bit of interesting fallout from these systems will of course be the increased scientific knowledge gained from meaningful simulation.  That piece of the puzzle will of course come in the period after the system finds its stable state... Stay tuned.

Posted at 09:06PM Feb 09, 2007 in Sun  |  Comments[0]

Visualization and Graphics Resource

During a a customer visit yesterday, I was introduced to this resource for visualization and graphics (www.vizworld.com).  It looks like a pretty interesting and useful resource for graphics types.  In the HPC world, we seem to get so wrapped up in the macho flops game that we forget about all of the contributing components of a true HPC solution.  Like scratch storage, cache storage, long term storage and networking, visualization is certainly part of the stack.

Posted at 04:56AM Jan 31, 2007 in Sun  |  Comments[0]