China has announced the launch of its latest homegrown supercomputer today.  The new machine, based on homegrown server standards, it said to make 230Tflops peak and a usable compute mark of 160Tflops.  Dawning 5000, as its named, was developed by a cooperation between the Chinese Academy of Sciences [CAS] and Dawning Information Industry Co. Ltd.

Dawning 5000 uses quad-core silicon to …

I’m finally home from my first journey to the NVIDIA NVISION conference.  Frankly, I have mixed reviews.  First and foremost, to those readers at NVIDIA.  Please ask Jen-Hsun Huang to hire an outside conference management firm.  The logistics for the conference were far from smooth.  However, since this is your first conference NVIDIA, I’ll give …

I’m told the deadline on these is hard: absolutely no exceptions.

The ACM/IEEE Computer Society High Performance Computing (HPC) Ph.D. Fellowship Program is now accepting nominations for its second annual competition at https://submissions.supercomputing.org. The deadline for submissions is Friday, September 8, 2008.

ACM/IEEE-CS HPC Ph.D. Fellowships are awarded with a certificate and a stipend of at least $5,000 (US) for one academic

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My pal and regular reader Rich Hickey (hi, Rich!) dropped me an email to let me know about an upcoming Cray technical workshop in Scotland. Here are the details

Please join us at the 5th Cray Technical Workshop Europe, hosted by EPCC at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland during 24-26 September 2008.

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Here’s a shorty announced yesterday by Fujitsu

Fujitsu has donated to the Computer History Museum several components based on technologies developed for the Numerical Wind Tunnel supercomputer, which was ranked No. 1 when it debuted in the Top 500 Supercomputer Sites list in November 1993. The museum will accept the gift at a dedication ceremony on Sept. 12, 2008, at

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Today Cray announced a new liquid cooling approach that promises more efficient cooling. The system is called ECOphlex (PHase-change Liquid EXchange), and will ship in new XT5s from the company later this year.

Here’s an interesting quote from the release

The ECOphlex technology is designed to be “room air neutral,” meaning that the

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From Joan Barron at the Star-Tribune comes the following news about continued hard times at NCAR:

CHEYENNE n [sic] Budget problems at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., should not affect the proposed $60 million Cheyenne supercomputer project, officials said this week.

NCAR is facing a $10M budget shortfall this year according to the story even after losing …

ComputerWorld UK had an article last week about increasing pain in the British government’s troubled IT program in the National Health Service. Some high points:

The Conservative party has commissioned the British Computer Society to review NHS IT policy including the £12.7 billion National Programme for IT, which they claim is “crashing down”.

The review is the latest sign that the

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Here’s a great headline from the Economic Times:

Canada to get world’s first supercomputer outside the US

This refers to the big IBM being built at U of Toronto. At first I thought this was a copy edit problem, but upon further reading I think it’s just a language problem

Further, it will also be the first largest supercomputer outside the US

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Multicore.info with the pointer to a blog post by Bartosz Milewski on some of the problems with threaded programming in the mainstream languages

Thread model based on heavy-duty OS threads and mutexes has its limitations. You can ask server writers, or Google for “thread per connection” to convince yourself. Servers use thread pools exactly because of that.

Thread pools are

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Multicore.info points to an article at EE Times Asia with a partial overview of the approaches to multicore as highlighted by Intel and Microsoft at the recent IDF

Microsoft stressed its vision for placing new layers to its system software stack and point extensions to its .Net environment. Meanwhile, Intel said it plans to have extensions to its x86

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The Computing Computing Consortium weblog is carrying an opinion piece this week from David Patterson, Professor in Computer Science at UC Berkeley, on why we need more government funding in multicore research.

You can read it here.

Michael Feldman ponders that question at HPCwire this week

…Optical has already notched a high-profile HPC win with the IBM Roadrunner supercomputer. That system is linked with EMCORE’s optical gear using DDR (InfiniBand) connections. According to IBM, they used over 55 miles of cable to hook all the compute and storage nodes together. For a massive system such as this,

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I think this is an interesting bit of technology (tip of the hat to HPCwire for the link). The tool, developed at TACC, is called MyCluster and allows researchers to aggregate resources on the TeraGrid such that they appear to be a single large cluster

This wasn’t a trivial task a few years ago, when Jeffrey P. Gardner, senior research

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From news at HPCwire

ANSYS, Inc., a global innovator of simulation software and technologies designed to optimize product development processes, today announced that preliminary performance data for its software running on Microsoft Windows HPC Server 2008 will be highlighted during the 2008 International ANSYS Conference to be held in Pittsburgh, Pa., in late August.

…Early adopters of the solution include Spraying

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