Monthly Archives: February 2007

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 the Linux kernel means that for the first time Linux system administrators can easily deploy

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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 Efficient Data Centers
The Green Grid provides a framework for improving the efficiency of both new

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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 needs of specific industries and developing marketing relationships that will help its partners support 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. 28, introduced in the 109th Congress) in that it doesn’t attempt to authorize specific agency

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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 in the high-performance computing market.

You can read more at SC Online or on …

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 a single supercomputer equipped with 20TB of shared memory and 440TB of usable disk space.

This …

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 1 at its Web site.

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 to 600 atoms and approx. 5,000 electrons, representing a realistic system. A single calculation of

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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 centre gave us three times the performance for only four per cent more space utilised.”

So, …

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 group’s board of directors will include AMD, APC, Dell, HP, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Rackable Systems,

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