SGI reports Q4 results; posts loss
SGI reported its Q4 and Fiscal 2007 financial performance yesterday. A Reuters analysis shows that the company lost $36.9M in the quarter just ended, an increase of over $16M from its Q4 2006 lost of $20.4M.
But there is some good new; the company grew its core product sales by 27% in 2007, and 4th quarter GAAP revenue was up over 3rd quarter.
The company actually made …
IBM nanotech discoveries in Science today
IBM has recently made two discoveries in the small that will help push nanotechnology forward. The first is a report of improved ability to measure the magnetic anisotropy of an atom. This is important because it relates to a single atom’s ability to store information.
With further work it may be possible to build structures consisting of small clusters of atoms, or even individual atoms, that could reliably store
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AMD announces ISA extensions for HPC
AMD announced today they’re adding new instruction set extensions designed to improve performance in HPC, multimedia, and security apps.
The extensions, called SSE5, evolve the Streaming SIMD Extensions introduced originally in 1999. Although AMD is making the specification available starting today to foster a dialogue with developers, they won’t appear in product until AMD’s Bulldozer core is available in 2009. (Really? Bulldozer?)
The Register dug into …
IBM intro news cell blade
IBM has announced the QS21 cell-based blade, replacing the QS20. The QS21 offers several improvements over the 20. According to coverage at eWeek
In addition to including two Cell processors, each running at 3.2GHz, IBM has increased the system memory from 1GB to 2GB per processor. The new blade system also supports dual Gigabit Ethernet ports, and customers also have the option of dual-port 4X InfiniBand fabrics
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AMD improves hardware virtualization support
Story on the wires this morning about AMD’s partnership with VMware to improve support for migration of virtual machines between different versions of AMD processors.
AMD-V Extended Migration provides the necessary support for virtualization software to mask the differences between CPU generations, facilitating the safe live migration of virtual machines between servers running different generations of AMD processors. This includes existing single-core and dual-core processors and all future AMD processor revisions, including the upcoming “Barcelona”
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This little Penryn goes to market
Hmmm…not sure about that headline.
The DailyTech is reporting details from Intel’s latest roadmap showing three Penryn-based Xeons with a 1600 MHz front-side bus.
The three new 1600 MHz front-side bus processors are available in dual-core and quad-core models. Quad-core Xeon E5472 and E5462 are the first quad-core models to receive the 1600 MHz front-side bus treatment.
…Intel has one 1600 MHz dual-core Penryn based Xeon processor ready for launch – the E5272. The Xeon E5272 features
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The 411: Woven Systems
Networking startup Woven Systems has been getting increasing attention over the past several months in our community. HPCwire included them in their half-year retrospective on HPC, and their adaptive routing experiment with Sandia and Chelsio has also gotten a lot of attention.
I spent some time with them yesterday getting a product overview. I intend to write a longer summary of …
PSC super supports research to improve tornado prediction
HPC vendor Cray announced today researchers using PSC’s XT gear are developing new techniques for severe weather prediction
Researchers from the University of Oklahoma’s Center for Analysis and Prediction of Storms (CAPS) and the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) employed an innovative combination of high resolution and controlled manipulation of numerical model parameters and starting conditions to develop strategies that will allow forecasters to better anticipate the formation of severe storms and the supercells
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Detailed analysis on what Intel’s CSI may look like
You’ve no doubt heard of Intel’s Common System Interface by now. This is Intel’s shot at moving its own architectures away from the frontside bus in the way that AMD did with HyperTransport.
The Reg is reporting the work of analyst David Kanter at Real World Technologies who has dug through patents and interviewed engineers to put together a detailed report on what he thinks CSI will look like. We won’t get to hear Intel’s …
Coming soon to Omaha: 9,200 core dual boot cluster
This news is several weeks old, but I didn’t see it until ClusterMonkey picked it up yesterday. The Monkey is reporting that the University of Nebraska at Omaha is building a new supercomputer.
The machine is reported to have 1,151 Dell servers with dual-socket Barcelonas for a total of over 9,200 cores. And here’s an interesting bit:
This system is by far the largest Dell/AMD cluster to date and it is slated to be the first
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