insideHPC.com

QLogic announced today that the first iSCSI HBA functionality has been accepted into the upstream Linux kernel:

Developed by the Linux community, the upstream Linux kernel is the central core of popular Linux packages including Debian, Red Hat, SuSE, Slackware and Yellowdog. The company’s collaboration with the Linux community and the acceptance of the QLogic SANblade® 4000 Series functionality into

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As promised earlier this week, the Green Grid is trying to kick things up a notch following the addition of M$oft and Intel to its ranks.

It has released three whitepapers:

The Green Grid Opportunity
The Green Grid examines why it is so important to define and propagate the best energy efficiency practices in datacenter operation, construction and design.

Guidelines for Energy

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IBM is talking today about a new concerted effort to drive HPC down into the mid-range by making it easier for non-traditional HPC users to deploy small(ish) clusters. I’m strongly in favor of anything that gets more people using HPC via the million monkeys theory(1).

This is primarily a marketing push, addings SKUs of cluster configurations prebuilt to meet the …

The House Science and Technology Committee is meeting today (10 a.m. Eastern) to mark up (among others) the HPC R&D Act. This bill is the descendant of the High Performance Computing and Communications Act of 1991 which established the Networking and Information Technology Research and Development program.

From the CRA’s excellent coverage:

This version differs from the most recent attempt (H.R.

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In case you missed it, IDC’s Q406 Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker study shows HP leading the HPC vendor pack again:

In the high-performance computing market, HP was No.1 in revenue for 2006, with 33 percent market share, and surpassed industry revenue growth by nearly two times with 16.7 percent year-over-year growth.(3) This marks the fourth consecutive year of HP revenue leadership

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SGI has issued a press release today detailing a new system to be installed in one of the four Department of Defense High Performance Computing Modernization Program’s major centers:

Deployed at the Aeronautical Systems Center Major Shared Resource Center (ASC MSRC) at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, the new SGI® Altix® 4700 system packs 9,216 Intel® Itanium® 2 processor cores into

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From Supercomputing Online today:

Online advance registration for the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC ’07) opens March 1, offering attendees a reduced rate if they register by Saturday, May 26. The conference, the largest HPC event in Europe, will be held June 26-29 in Dresden under the theme “Exploring the Frontiers of Supercomputing.” A registration form will be available beginning March

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IBM announced today in a press release that they’re using a Blue Gene to understand why hafnium dioxide works so much better than other materials previously considered by the industry:

For this study, the IBM team simulated various material compositions using 50 different models of hafnium silicates, materials that form when silicon and hafnium oxides mix. These models contain up

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In a move that’s probably timed to support Monday’s announcement that Intel and M$oft are joining The Green Grid consortium, Intel was talking last week about the environmental virtues of quickly replacing old servers.

“A six year-old server takes up valuable resources that could be better used, so we have accelerated our refresh rate,” he said. “Refreshing one data

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Ashlee Vance over at The Register reported on Friday that Microsoft and Intel are joining The Green Grid, an industry consortium focused on disseminating energy-friendly best practices in large datacenters.

Green Grid officials aren’t talking on the record about these moves just yet, as they’ve sworn the press to secrecy until Monday’s announcement. But, we can reveal that the

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Bryan O’Sullivan has a detailed look into the new SDK nVidia has announced that’s aimed at making programing the GPU in their graphics cards more accessible.

How did they do? Bryan doesn’t think they’ve made it there—yet—but he does agree it’s a good first step:

This technology is a long way from anything like true accessibility, even to those already versed

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Enterprise Storage Forum posted a short but interesting article on the Cray and IBM approaches to storage issues in the DARPA HPCS program earlier this month. If you’re in to that sort of thing and can spare a minute, it’s an interesting manager-level read.

Speaking of HPC and brains, IBM and the Stockholm Brain Institute have announced a 3M USD Blue Gene, attached to a PET (positron emission tomography) scanner. The system will be installed in the Parallel Computer Centre at the Royal Institute of Technology. From coverage at SC Online:

The SBI was set up by Karolinska Institutet, the Royal Institute of

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via HPCwire

ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery, has named Frances E. Allen the recipient of the 2006 A.M. Turing Award for contributions that fundamentally improved the performance of computer programs in solving problems, and accelerated the use of high performance computing. This award marks the first time that a woman has received this honor.

The Turing Award is …

Bill McColl has an entry today that points to two papers from Google and CMU that studied the reliability of a pool of 100,000 disk drives. I’m not into re-blogging without adding value, but his entry is really interesting and already pithy. The punchline:

Two conclusions that can be drawn are that (a) high price “enterprise” drives have similar replacement rates

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