insideHPC.com

Apparently announced at SC’06 in Tampa, though I missed it. The Green 500 focuses on raising awareness of the power our supercomputers drain from the planet (and the carbon they return in exchange).

Given that I’m now installing computers that draw in excess of 1.5MW, a raised awareness of power consumption is probably a good thing. They’re just getting started, …

On December 19 Cray completed a public offering of stock that netted it $81.3 million in new cash.

This is an important move for the company as it provides a cash cushion to carry them through the very cyclic HPC market’s ups and downs and can prevent the need for the company to extend itself on credit.

This news follows less than …

via HPC Anwers

Chris at HPC Answers has an interesting post addressing the question “Are GPUs the next wave in HPC?“

As much as I’d prefer to see someone like ClearSpeed succeed over GPU-based general-purpose computing, I’ve seen enough in this industry to understand commoditization, volume, and market penetration. I believe a more likely scenario is that

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via the Top500 blog

The guys at Top500.org are cracking open all that historical data they have and starting to spin some cool lists. Back in October they put together a list of the top 25 supercomputer sites of all time (where by “all time” they mean “since 1993″).

The ranking is determined using the

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via Sun’s HPC Watercooler

Sun has been in and out and in the visualization business for years, but they’ve never come out of the shadows: first SGI’s, then the commodity GPU. They are now promoting a new thrust around vis that includes a strong distributed component and endpoint display independence:

As previewed at the recent SC2006

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via the Top500 blog

The Top500.org blog has set up a Google map showing where the Top 100 largest supercomputers on the list are housed. Interesting to note that they are nearly all above the equator.

Map is out of date, however, as it doesn’t show the XT3 at the ERDC MSRC (currently #26).

Update: the map isn’t actually …

HPCwire has an article summarizing the year in HPC. It’s interesting to see all the year’s major events right next to each other.

Some highlights:

Intel rebounds against AMD with a brand new processor microarchitecture. The Xeons finally achieve performance parity (and then some) against the current crop of Opterons.
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After a six month delay, DARPA makes its HPCS Phase

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I’m starting InsideHPC as a blog that captures news and events in the world of HPC as a resource for supercomputing professionals.

The idea is not to compete with sites like HPCwire or Supercomputing Online, but to supplement them. If you want in depth, long form feature coverage then those are the sites for you.

What I’m …

Have you ever been in a position where you needed to run an MPI application a few times, but not enough times to justify buying your own cluster? Do you have access to a few PCs, but can’t or don’t want to install any software such as Condor on them? Then maybe you could use Parallel Knoppix.

Parallel Knoppix is …

Terracotta is an open source distributed shared object facility for Java, which allows multithreaded applications to run on clusters with minimal changes. It works with existing application servers and other web platforms, which makes distributing application loads across multiple nodes (JVMs) straightforward. It performs thread synchronization and even thread migration transparently for the user.

In addition to the runtime facilities, …

CPUShare is a grid computing initiative that pays its participants for providing idle processing time. Unlike BOINC, the provider is selling his time rather than donating it. While there is no word on the actual revenue a seller could reasonably expect to earn, anyone considering this program should consider the cost of electricity for running the software before picturing …