Rick Regan from the Exploring Binary blog writes that Java produces incorrect answers when it does nondeterministic floating-point conversions: Recently I discovered that Java converts some very small decimal numbers to double-precision floating-point incorrectly. While investigating that bug, I stumbled upon something very strange: Java’s decimal to floating-point conversion routine, Double.parseDouble(), sometimes returns two different […]
Archives for February 2011
Are the New Iranian Supers Powered by GPUs?
February 25, 2011 by
Few architectual details were released this week about two new Iranian supercomputers at Amir Kabir University. But, in a recent blog post, Chris Samuel has done a bit of forensic investigation that indicates these systems are likely powered by GPUs: However, looking at the Iranian photo spread that they link to, the boxes in question are SuperMicro […]
Flex Bits: HPC News with Snark for Friday, Feb. 25, 2011
February 25, 2011 by
It’s been a cold, but eventful week up here in Portland, so here’s the News with Snark for Friday, Feb. 25, 2011: Things that make you go, Boom! Iran doubles-down with not one, but two in-country supercomputers with components purchased from the black market. DTrace your file system. From their soon-to-be-published book: DTrace: Dynamic Tracing in […]
Podcast: How NASA's Nebula Cloud is Taking Off
February 25, 2011 by
As a ground-breaking platform, NASA’s Nebula Cloud Computing Platform has gotten a lot of attention from government agencies looking to move to the cloud. In this podcast, Chris Kemp, the Chief Technology Officer for IT at NASA, speaks with Federal News Radio about the challenges and rewards of cloud computing. Initially, the Nebula cloud was […]
Symmetric Computing Duet Aggregates Servers into Terabyte SMP
February 24, 2011 by
Today Symmetric Computing announced a new line of low-cost, aggregated shared memory systems. Described as a “Departmental Supercomputer,” Symmetric’s Duet is a 64-core, large shared-memory SMP server with up to 1 Tbyte of memory and 3 Teraflops of power. The large system memory and programming simplicity of SMP supercomputers are critical. Researchers, scientists and engineers […]
Where are the Next Storage Startup Stars?
February 24, 2011 by
By Chris Mellor • Get more from this author Have we witnessed the end of an era? Has the great storage company growth boom ended with a series of big bang acquisitions: 3PAR, Archivas, Compellent, Data Domain, Diligent, EqualLogic, Isilon, LeftHand Networks, Ocarina, Storwize and more? Over the last five years a whole swathe of […]
SGI to Cut Workforce
February 24, 2011 by
Just when things sounded like they were starting to go really well, SGI announced what looks to be a layoff of up to 10 percent of its workforce. On February 22, 2011, Silicon Graphics International Corp. (the “Company”) began providing notices to employees whose employment will be terminated as part of a worldwide workforce reduction. […]
Jaguar Super to Unlock Mysteries of Turbulence in Solar Winds
February 24, 2011 by
Researchers are using the Jaguar supercomputer at ORNL to better understand turbulence in the cosmos. Turbulence has always been a major unsolved problem in physics, and in the realm of space physics it’s a particularly important one,” said University of Iowa astrophysicist Gregory Howes. A team led by Howes is pursuing this mystery on Oak […]
Time-Lapse Video: Building the Most Powerful Super in Switzerland
February 23, 2011 by
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7wbvR5nutDw In this video, the site team from CSCS assembles the Cray XT5 named “Monte Rosa” at the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre in Manno in May 2009. As reported here, CSCS recently ordered a next-generation, multi-streaming Cray XMT system. At tip of the hat goes to Data Center Knowledge for pointing us to this video.
Podcast: Grid Dynamics CEO Victoria Livschitz on Delivering Cloud Scalability
February 23, 2011 by
In this podcast, I interview Victoria Livschitz, President & CEO of Grid Dynamics. As an engineering company, Grid Dynamics has helped companies like eBay, Paypal, and Microsoft build next-generation, mission-critical systems that deliver extreme scalability and elasticity. In our cloud computing survey of engineers, we learned that they are all about scalability and elasticity, the […]
