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The Xeon 5100 is Intel’s (belated) response to AMD’s Opteron. This processor comes from the Woodcrest line and is based on the Core microarchitecture. This is a 64-bit x86 that features multiple cores (initially two), low voltage requirements (available at 40 watts), and virtualization technology. The new Xeon also handles up to 64 GB of memory with a transfer rate …

A “quant” is a quantitative financial analyst, also known as a computational financial analyst or a financial engineer. Unlike traditional analysts, quants rely on a heavy amount of mathematics to spot investment opportunities, such as arbitrage in the derivatives market.

A derivative is a financial instrument tied to an underlying asset, an example being stock options that give the holder the …

MPI may be the de facto standard for communication, but it is not the only library. While MPI attempts to be broad in scope, its message semantics are actually quite limited. Some developers have had to create their own communication libraries for special cases.

For example, the ARMCI library can perform one-sided communication of non-contiguous data, similar to the POSIX …

While many customers will prefer professional integrators, some smaller groups will contend with computing components directly from the manufacturer. And while blades are rising in popularity, there are still plenty of independent 1U providers. Below follows an overview of the major 1U producers; note that this list does not cover motherboard-only suppliers.

Supermicro traditionally sells a variety of Intel-based systems, …

For most customers, a cluster built from 1U’s or blades will be sufficient. However, for the really large computing systems (particularly for technical computing customers), the cost to maintain a cluster may outweigh any savings from using commodity components. For these customers, a handful of vendors supply real supercomputers.

Perhaps the most famous supercomputer company is Cray, which has gone …