insideHPC.com

Reader Jeff Keasler emailed me today with a pointer to Tom’s Hardware Guide for great performance information on the new crop of chips. He gave me permission to post his email, so here it is (thanks, Jeff!):

John,

Tom’s hardware guide is perhaps the most unbiased source for hardware performance you can find. They do extensive benchmarking of hardware.

This was

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This isn’t news since it was published two weeks ago, but it looks like an interesting read. Wall Street and Technology has an article on the struggles big finance is having as it ramps up really large HPC efforts

Over the past few years, Wall Street has taken a brute force approach to HPC, populating data centers with thousands of

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(Believe me, I’m not proud of that one).

SeekingAlpha reports that Sun is going to start selling its chips to the world again in a new business unit headed by Sun’s current storage head and former Sparc chief.

Software and server manufacturer Sun Microsystems has announced it is relaunching its Sparc microelectronics group, which will develop chips for the network, cryptography

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Intel’s press release has a lot of glossy facts about their upcoming Penryn and Nehalem architectures. You might be interested in a read if you’re chip-inclined.

Penryn is the forthcoming family using 45nm and the new “hi-k” gates that all the kids are talking about (we talked about it too: here, here, here, and a couple other places …

From The Register yesterday:

Intel’s long, strange journey toward mimicking AMD’s processors will end in 2008 with a brand new chip architecture called “Nehalem,” the company confirmed today. Intel’s fresh chips will have up to eight cores and a number of other bits and pieces found today’s in server, desktop and notebook chips from AMD.

In case you’re wondering, the Wik …

Not a great title, but it’s late in the day.

Reader Jason Blair has pointed us to an article over at Ars Technica about IBM’s discovery that how you pack the thermal paste on to a processor can make a big difference.

The Cliff’s notes (but the whole thing is interesting if you have the time to click over and read …

…we have the “Microsoft Carnegie Mellon Center for Computational Thinking.”

From SC Online’s coverage:

Computational thinking, as developed by Jeannette M. Wing, head of Carnegie Mellon’s Computer Science Department, involves solving problems, designing systems and understanding human behavior by drawing on the concepts fundamental to computer science.

Hmm. Professor Wing is of course set to become the new head of the …

Dell has begun placing large HPC systems into a few centers around the world, like the one at 5,200 node Linux cluster at TACC, currently at #12 on The List. And they may have learned a few things from building those large clusters that they’re trying to build a market out of.

The Register is reporting on Dell’s …

Speaking of the need to push HPC down into the underpinnings of every bit of science and engineering research in this country (which I seem to do every day), The Register is talking about PeakStream

The beta version of PeakStream Workstation for Microsoft Windows serves the same function as its existing Linux counterpart. Developers can use the PeakStream software to

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Mellanox announced this week new 10 and 20 Gb/s IB adapters with 1 microsecond latency. Release here.

I pointed recently to the newest entry in the containerized computing melee: Rackable’s Concentro. My big contribution was to point out that Rackable’s is prettier.

Nicholas Carr has two posts on this. In the first he confirms that Rackable’s solution is, in fact, prettier. In the second he adds some analysis and points to two points of …

IBM scientists are presenting a prototype optical receiver chipset today at the 2007 Optical Fiber Conference. From SeekingAlpha:

It is said to be at least 8x faster at 160 gigabits of data/second, than currently available optical components. That’s fast enough to download a high definition feature-length film in one second, versus at least 30 minutes using the fastest available technology

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I’ll spare you the expansion of the acronym, but Raytheon Co. (yes, that Raytheon) is discussing details of a computer architecture that can adopt different forms depending on the application targeted for it (like an FPGA). The chip was “developed for the Department of Defense to address the large data volume of sensor systems.”

There aren’t a lot of details yet, …

Totally non-HPC related, but cool:

It is fitting that James Watson, co-discoverer of the double helix structure of DNA in 1953, should become the first person to have his genome fully sequenced.

More at BioIT World’s site.

Fuel for Sun/Rackable acquisition theorists: Sun has a datacenter in a box. Rackable just announced a datacenter in a box.

Coincidence?

[Update: more at The Register on Rackable’s offering and comparisons with Sun. I’ll say this, Rackable’s solution is prettier.]