Ok, so Shakespeare was talking about a name, not a definition. But Chris Willard is getting his Webster on as he captures an illuminating and entertaining list of some of the definitions of “supercomputer.” Some of my favorites: Any computer built by Seymour Cray Any computer that turns a compute bound problem into an I/O […]
Archives for June 2008
UIUC named first CUDA center of excellence
June 30, 2008 by
NVIDIA announced today that UIUC has been named the first CUDA Center of Excellence. In addition to the appointment, NVIDIA has donated $500,000 to UIUC for the development of parallel computing facilities and the continuation of its research programs. What’s it all about? “The CUDA Center of Excellence program rewards schools that truly embrace the […]
Science funding in supplemental inked by president
June 30, 2008 by
Melisa Norr, writing at the outstanding CRA Policy Blog The Emergency Supplemental for FY08 — the last chance to rectify the appropriations shortfall for science caused by the FY 08 Omnibus Appropriation — has been signed by the President and is now law. Though science funding made it into the supplemental — one of the […]
HPC Admin Certification
June 30, 2008 by
Doug Eadline has a post over at ClusterMonkey that references a really cool thing. In case you hvae not noticed, the ARC division has created a certification program for computer systems administrators wanting to advance in the field of high performance and high throughput computing From the certification site GridsWatch Grid Portal team – with […]
Construction Manager Named for NCSA Petascale Facility
June 30, 2008 by
Clayco Inc of St. Louis announced today that it was named the prime construction manager for the new NCSA Petascale Computing Facility at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The 90,000 square foot facility will house the the upcoming NSF Track 1 machine, Blue Waters, built by IBM. What goes under 90,000 square feet? Glad […]
Chip Ganassi Racing and Microsoft HPC
June 30, 2008 by
Microsoft has just cut a press release detailing the latest racing team to utilize high performance computing gear in order to gain a competitive edge. This time, however, the team does not race in Formula1 and is not based in the EMEA. Chip Ganassi Racing, most widely known as a competitive NASCAR team, is utilizing […]
Mellanox Announces Support for IBM iDataPlex
June 27, 2008 by
Mellanox has announced that it will provide ConnectX 20Gb/s [4X DDR] Infiniband adapters to IBM in support of the iDataPlex system. The iDataPlex system is IBM’s multi-core-based, dense processing platform aimed at boosting Web 2.0 [read internet multimedia] performance. With our innovative iDataPlex system design, customers realize significant savings on power and cooling, as well […]
Sweet Sweet Supercomputing
June 26, 2008 by
IBM has released details of a project working with candy giant Mars Inc. and the US government directed a studying the genetic code of cocoa trees. The overarching goal being to develop methods by which to safeguard the world’s chocolate supply. The group with use BlueGene, LLNL’s supercomputer, to sequence and analyze the entire cocoa […]
Big data changing the way we think
June 25, 2008 by
Michael Feldman has an interesting blog post at HPCwire this week on big data Fresh from ISC’08 and the associated petaflop-mania, I noticed that the latest issue of Wired magazine has a series of articles on the ramifications of petabyte data. The issue is titled “The End of Science,” and the main thesis is that […]
Powerwall with 250,000,000 pixels [UPDATED]
June 25, 2008 by
That’s .25 billion pixels people. We’ve got a (smaller) powerwall at my work, and it gets pretty hot. I imagine you’ll have to wear a heat suit to use this thing. Here is the lede Developed by scientists and engineers in the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) Division at Ames, the 128-screen hyperwall-2, capable of rendering […]
