The 411: Supermicro

Super Micro Computer, Inc. is a motherboard manufacturer that’s expanded into systems and support infrastructure for servers. Here’s the 4-1-1.

Who: Established in 1993, Super Micro Computer, Inc. (NASDAQ: SMCI) emphasizes motherboards based on Intel’s x86 architecture, plus complete server systems utilizing Intel’s Itanium, Pentium, and Xeon microprocessors, as well as AMD’s Opteron processors.

9th Annual Beowulf Bash at SC07

The details for the 9th annual Beowulf Bash were recently released on [you guessed it], the Beowulf mailing list. The event will take place in Reno, Nevada alongside the IEEE/ACM Supercomputing Conference. The event is intended to be a very casual, social atmosphere between community attendees. The event details are as follows:

When?: 6-8PM Tuesday November 13.

Where?: …

SGI: getting the “G” to stand for “graphics” again

Remember when I reported from the HPC User Forum last month that CEO Bo Ewald had just told the audience that SGI was getting back into the visual supercomputing business? My favorite quote:

It was really stupid for the company to stop doing visualization types of things.

Well, I know a little birdy who’s at IEEE Vis this week. He ran …

ClearSpeed grows presence in TSUBAME [UPDATED]

ClearSpeed announced today that they’ve been awarded an order to supply X620 accelerators Tokyo Tech for use in its Molecular Dynamics Simulation Acceleration System known as TSUBAME.

“As a next stage in the increased quality of service to our HPC users at our GSIC center at Tokyo Tech., we are procuring additional ClearSpeed acceleration cards from Nissho Electronics,” said Professor Satoshi

Platform buys Scali Manage

Platform announced today that it has scooped up Scali Manage from Scali.

While the use of clusters and grid infrastructure is on the rise, the integration and management of these systems remains complex. Products such as Platform Open Cluster Stack (OCS)* and Scali Manage have been developed specifically to improve performance, simplicity,

Intel out early with new Penryn

The Daily Tech reported yesterday that Intel bumped the release of its new high end 3.0 GHz 45nm quad-core Penryn processor. TheQX9650 is a process shrink of the Core 2 Duo architecture, width additional L2 cache and SSE4 instructions added for good measure. According to the Daily Tech

The QX6950 features 12MB of L2 cache, a 1333 MHz front-side bus

NERSC Names New Director

The Department of Energy National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center has named a new director. Dr. Kathy Yelick, a professor of computer science at the University of California at Berkeley, will succeed Horst Simon as director of NERSC. Dr. Yelick earned her PhD in computer science from MIT and has served …

SDSC returning to service

My latest contact with SDSC’ers indicates that the facility was unharmed during the recent fires, and the center is beginning to resume operations.

As of 10/26 the center had returned its Blue Gene to service. More here.

Bull Acquires French HPC Integrator Serviware

Back in July it was rumored that HP was to acquire Bull, it’s fall now and the rumors are no longer in bloom. With the French government bailing out Bull in 2004 it appears that Bull is on the mend, their recent acquisition of Serviware, Bull is in a healthy state and is investing …

DICE Program Award Selects Obsidian Research

Obsidian Research has announced that its Longbow XR product line has been selected for a Data Intensive Compute Project [DICE] in researching long-haul Infiniband technologies. Professor DK Panda from Ohio State University [of MVAPICH fame] in conjunction with the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National

Liquid Computing Announces Federal Business

Liquid Computing Inc has formally announced the launch of Liquid Computing Federal Inc. The new federal branch will focus on meeting the needs of federal civilian, intelligence and defense markets. Former head of Sun Microsystems Federal, Tom Kreidler, has been named president of the new organization.

I always envisioned that the computing

UPDATE: SC07 Public Events Google Calendar

Supercomputing 2007 is upon us! We are officially two weeks out from the November 10-16 conference on high performance computing technologies sponsored by the IEEE and ACM. As I previously posted, the folks at InsideHPC have created a Google calendar to keep track of all the exciting events …

Nvidia Releases CUDA Rocks Roll

Nvidia has gone one step further in making headways into high performance computing. Announced on the Beowulf mailing list, they have released a Rocks roll containing their CUDA GPU toolkit. The CUDA libraries, runtime and associated SDK allow scientific users to harness the computational power available in Nvidia graphics processing units [GPUs]. …

SC07 Cluster Challenge

This year’s IEEE/ACM Supercomputing conference will showcase a new academic challenge event. The Cluster Challenge is an event designed for students [no degrees permitted] to attempt to harness the power of a modern high performance computing cluster. The green flag drops on Monday night of SC07 for teams to construct, test and tune …

Rackable takeover target rumors, part 2

Back in March rumors were circulating that Sun was considering acquisition of Rackable. If they were, it didn’t happen.

This week Rackable is back in the news with a new rumored suitor, IBM. Barron’s Tech Trader Daily reported on Tuesday that

Rackable Systems (RACK) shares are sharply higher in pre-market trading, aided in part by comments by an options analyst