insideHPC.com

ITNews Australia has posted an interesting interview session with David A. Bader, author of the first book on petascale computing. The interview sheds a bit of light to what David covers in his book.

Take a look here.

“Soma” Somasegar, chief of Microsoft’s Developer Division, wrote in his blog today that the company has made a “preview” version of the ParallelFX (Parallel Extensions to the .NET Framework) library available for download. ParallelFX provides a programming model for data and task parallelism on multicore/multiprocessor hardware.

Writes Somasegar:

Although we understand the

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Here’s a new PodTech podcast by Paresh Pattani, Director of HPC and Workstation Applications at Intel, on testing systems with real-world software application workloads.

In this podcast, Pattani outlines the most important criteria to use when testing high-performance computing systems, and also which tests not to rely on solely, such as SpecFP rate. Pattani explains how Intel’s new Xeon 5400

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I found this Computerworld story profiling Linux, Windows, and Unix use in datacenters interesting for this nugget:

Windows and Linux operating systems are getting an ever-growing share of data center environments, as inexpensive x86 servers take over jobs once the domain of Unix operating systems, said Gartner Inc.

But Unix use remains core in data centers, and while its revenue share

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I’m really excited to see the raft of recent announcements for fellowships in HPC and scientific computing.

Here are a few of the ones I’ve seen lately. If you’ve seen others, email me links, and I’ll put together a cheat sheet and post it at the site permanently for interested future applicants.

Ken Kennedy-Cray Inc. Graduate Fellowship (graduate studies at Rice …

If you chase money for a living, you’ll probably be interested in this from SC Online:

On Thursday, Nov. 29, 2007, from 1 to 3 p.m. EST, the National Science Foundation (NSF) will conduct a webcast about its new cross-cutting funding opportunity, Cyber-Enabled Discovery and Innovation (CDI). The webcast will be accessible at http://tvworldwide.com/events/nsf/071129/.

Being a recent graduate of the University of Maine and a member of their HPC team it’s nice to see that they are continuing to improve their HPC offerings at the University.

The UMaine Department of Computer Science has received two National Science Foundation grants, one for $200,000 to buy a second university supercomputer, and a

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The folk over at AnandTech pitted the new 45nm Intel Xeon processors against the latest and greatest quad-core AMD Opterons to see how they stacked up on a variety of benchmarks. The conclusion was that Intel’s newest chips consistently outperform the new quads from AMD, as long as the benchmark doesn’t stress memory performance. For …

Congratulations to the University of Alberta for taking home the gold at the first annual Supercomputing Cluster Challenge.  Of all the competitors, U of Alberta didn’t have the fastest cluster design on paper.  However, good planning, preparation and a wonderful stroke of luck following a power outage on the show-floor powered the team to win the competition.

To all the teams …

NCSA at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign has announced that it will host a free workshop on entitled “Building the Data Center of the Future: Effective Energy-Efficient Design.”  The workshop, part of the Blue Waters project, will together industry experts from research centers, IT, engineering, consulting and architecture firms.  The workshop addresses some of the unique problems facing large-scale HPC, …

HP did well in its latest fiscal quarter. This is well covered throughout the interwebs; The Register says it thusly, leaning on research from Gartner:

Gartner had the worldwide server market growing by 8.7 per cent in terms of shipments to 2.2m units and increasing revenue 2.6 per cent to $13.4bn. The analyst house attributed the healthy sales

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The DailyTech is carrying news of Rambus Inc.’s new hardware plan, to be announced tomorrow: a new memory initiative aimed at delivering 1 terabtye per second of memory bandwidth to the market by 2011.

Rather than simply increasing the clock speed of memory to achieve higher output, Rambus looks to boost bandwidth with a 32X data rate. Just as DDR

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If you’re keeping up with Sun’s HPC moves, you’ll probably want to at least skim over the presentations from their recent Consortium meeting.

What is the Sun HPC Consortium?

The Sun High Performance Computing Consortium (SHPCC) is an independent, volunteer-organized, international group of member organizations that own or use Sun computer systems with emphasis

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Cray and Rice University announced today the first Cray HPC graduate fellowship fund has been awarded to Mackale Joyner in honor of the late Ken Kennedy. Cray endowed the Ken Kennedy-Cray Inc. Graduate Fellowship Fund with $150,000 gift. The fund will help support graduate students with a preference towards high performance computing.

From

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IBM today announced a series of cloud computing offerings named “Blue Cloud.” Initially targeted at enterprise customers, Blue Cloud will be based on open standards and open source software supported by IBM systems, software and services. It will also include Xen and PowerVM virtualized Linux operating system images and Hadoop parallel workload scheduling.

Blue

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