insideHPC.com

IBM and Softek announced on Monday that IBM has acquired the 140-person data storage company for an undisclosed sum.

IBM officials say they want to integrate Softek’s data mobility technology with IBM’s expertise in storage and data services. The companies have been partners since 1996.

Storage is another murky backwater in HPC. We’ve spent all our time over the past several …

via Sun’s HPC Watercooler

Interesting pointer to an article in Gridtoday by Wolfgang Gentzsch about the state of “non-trivial” HPC grids:

A lot of the grid middleware currently promoted is really intended for research and demonstrations but needs significant effort to be made suitable for large-scale production usage.

From the “Hey, I have some of that same gear” department…

SGI issued a release today talking about the additional investment that EFILM has made in SGI gear to support the digital workflow it uses to create movie trailers for Hollywood.

To create the SGI SAN to provide high-speed storage and networking to run their new trailer business,

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OSC issued a press release yesterday announcing that they had upgraded one of their educational clusters. The system is used for both visualization and computation.

What’s interesting about the press release is that they go ahead and factor the GPUs in when talking about performance:

The updated cluster boasts 55 rack-mounted compute nodes. Each node contains a dual core AMD Athlon

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ClusterMonkey has an interesting case study that examines what kind of cluster your could build today for $2,500 versus what you could do (and what they did) 18 months ago.

It’s a little long, but an interesting study in the design tradeoffs that lead to a balanced system at any scale.

But more importantly, I’ve learned that in 18 months technology

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via Grid Blog

If you’re into this sort of thing, IBM has posted a recommended reading list for grid developers. It includes archival stuff as well as blogs (Ian Foster’s is listed, which I highly recommend).

The Register’s Ashlee Vance reports that Google takes issue with Intel’s claim that Google’s going all Xeon ga-ga. I covered the Intel side yesterday.

Ashlee actually talked to someone in the Googleplex:

“We bought a small number of chips from Intel recently, but we continue to be supplied by more than one vendor,” spokesman Barry Schnitt told us in a

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Curious about how it was that a really big technical advance was announced by two separate companies at the same time, over a weekend? Me too!

The Register has a really interesting piece on how this all happened. Basically Intel is about a year ahead of IBM, but IBM got wind of Intel’s plans to announce in late January and …

I’ve been following the Computing Research Association’s coverage of the impact of the government’s failure to pass a 2007 budget. Federal agencies other than DHS and DOD have been under a continuing resolution (a CR) this fiscal year. CR’s are a good thing in that they allow agencies to continue working without a budget, but they basically freeze budgets at …

(OK. So maybe that headline is a little puerile…)

From Supercomputing Online last Friday:

The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) today announced that State Farm, the Bloomington, Illinois-based insurer that services more than 71 million policies in the United States and Canada, is the center’s newest Private Sector Partner.

Evidently Intel’s announcement has churned up lots of interest over the weekend in the press. IBM’s also developed some new materials, but is thought to be farther behind than Intel.

From the AP:

The problem is that the silicon dioxide used for more than 40 years as an insulator inside transistors has been shaved so thin that

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Intel announced that it is producing its first 45 nm process prototypes using two new materials

Intel is the first to implement an innovative combination of new materials that drastically reduces transistor leakage and increases performance in its 45nm process technology. The company will use a new material with a property called high-k, for the transistor gate dielectric, and a

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Here’s something I didn’t know: Intel has a small server line. And according to Ashlee Vance, they’ve just scooped up a bunch of Google business from their customers competitors, IBM, Sun, Dell, and HP.

It produced a bespoke server line full of low-power, low-cost components that matched Google’s demanding specifications.

The news evidently comes from an internal blog post by Intel’s …

via Sun’s HPC Watercooler

eWeek.com covers news from a Sun marketing exec that the Rock (insideHPC.com coverage here) processor is due out sometime in 2008.

Azhari would not release specific details about Rock’s configurations, but did say the processor will include up to 16 cores per chip. The UltraSPARC T1,

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An article in The Register notes claims by AMD that its quad core Opteron, due mid-2007, is 40% faster than the Intel 5300

AMD’s ‘Barcelona’ 65nm quad-core server processors will lick Intel’s four-core Xeon 5300 series, out-performing its rival by up to 40 per cent, the chip maker claimed this week, according to a variety of websites briefed by the

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