Interview with David Bader
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.
Microsoft Releases Preview Version of ParallelFX
“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 shift to parallel computing is a gradual road ahead for our whole industry, we are
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Podcast on Intel HPC benchmarking
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 platform and chipset performed in benchmark testing.
Evidently Unix isn’t dead
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 is predicted to stay flat for the next five years — from $16.4 billion this
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[UDPATED] Great news for the next generation of HPC
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 University, news here)
Charlie Bender Scholarship from CASC (funding for computational chemistry students to attend …
NSF funding opportunities webcast
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/.
New UMaine Supercomputer to Offer Maine Students Access to Climate Change, Scientific Modeling
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 second, for $300,000, to develop new supercomputer software to improve the transfer of massive data
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Opteron-Xeon Benchmark Showdown
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 memory-intensive codes, AMD still wins, thanks to its integrated memory controller/Direct Connect Architecture design.
AnandTech’s Johan …
University of Alberta Wins SC07 Cluster Challenge
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 that entered the competition, keep up the good work. Your work exceeded all expectations for …
NCSA Free Workshop on Data Center Design
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, networking and data storage facilities.
The event takes place Feb 12-13 at NCSA.
For more info, read …
