A rose by any other name…
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 bound problem.
Any computer where the compute time is worth more than the programmer time.
Any computer you can’t program. You knew the job was
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UIUC named first CUDA center of excellence
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 concept of parallel processing as the future of computing,” said Dr. David
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Science funding in supplemental inked by president
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 few non-defense items in the bill — the win for the science community is somewhat symbolic.
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HPC Admin Certification
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 Georgetown University’s Advanced Research Computing is working in conjunction with advanced open source and commercial vendors to strengthen this training and
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Construction Manager Named for NCSA Petascale Facility
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 you asked…
.: Blue Waters command center
.: Systems administration center
.: Office space for 50 people
.: 20,000 …
Chip Ganassi Racing and Microsoft HPC
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 Microsoft CCS 2003 and several simulation packages from Stackpole Engineering Services in order to determine …
Mellanox Announces Support for IBM iDataPlex
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 as space,” said Jim Gargan, vice president, IBM Systems &
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Sweet Sweet Supercomputing
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 genome. Apparently, political unrest and various plant diseases in Africa, home to 2/3 of the …
Big data changing the way we think
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 these enormous data sets are forcing us to rethink the way traditional science is performed.
…In the Wired piece titled “The
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Powerwall with 250,000,000 pixels [UPDATED]
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 one quarter billion pixel graphics, is the world’s highest resolution scientific visualization and data exploration environment.
And some stats
Designed and developed by the
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