Link and run for 08/05/2010

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Japanese Supercomputer Ranked 1st In The Little Green500 List
A Japanese university and research institute has announced that their supercomputer system was ranked first in a ranking of supercomputer’s performance per unit power consumption. The supercomputer system, Grape-DR, was ranked first in the Little Green500 list, getting a 5% higher score than IBM Corp’s system that is located in Germany, and ranked second in the list. In order to achieve this, they combined 64 pairs of Intel’s Core i7-920 processors and a board mounted with four of the Grape-DR accelerator chips.

Mathematics + Supercomputers = Big Bang Explained
Scientists now have a better chance of finding answers to that mystery because of the massive computational power of supercomputers – today’s fastest, most powerful computers, says Daniel R. Reynolds, assistant professor of mathematics in Dedman College.

CHPC Awards First GPGPU Cluster Contract to Orange Business Services
Orange Business Services has been awarded the supply and implementation order for the first GPGPU (general-purpose computation on graphics processing units) high performance computing cluster at the Centre for High Performance Computing (CHPC) in South Africa.

BioTeam Tweaks Amazon’s HPC Cloud
The BioTeam has devised a method for expanding the boot volume of Amazon’s HPC-oriented Cluster Compute instances. The guys at BioTeam wanted to run bonnie++ (a benchmark suite for disks and filesystems) on an Amazon boot volume but Bonnie++ ideally needs to work with a system that is roughly twice the size of the currently available 23GB of physical RAM on the Cluster Compute instances, which also only has 20GB of disk space. However after 20 or so minutes of tinkering (by really technically endowed people), they claim that they were able to expand the system disk to 80GB. The pleasant surprise here according to BioTeam is that all of this was possible without having to debug boot failures or grapple with ugly kernel panics or any of the other issues that one runs into when partitioning low level disk systems.

Linux supercomputer, worth £2m, sought by University of Warwick
The University of Warwick is tendering for a new Linux-based High Performance Computing facility for its research Centre for Scientific Computing (CSC). A “significant” share of the new facility will be used for research in the field of magnetohydrodynamics (MHD – the study of the dynamics of electrically conducting fluids such as plasma and metal liquids), to support the computational requirements of the UK MHD research community. The facility will also be used to support research from other disciplines at the university.

Budding Engineers Build a Supercomputer
From 6th to 9th July, twenty 16 and 17 year-old students descended on the University of Southampton to take part in a Supercomputing course put together by The Smallpeice Trust and delivered in partnership with the University of Southampton’s School of Engineering Sciences and Microsoft.