HPC News with Snark: Friday, April 29, 2011

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Having worked around HPC professionals most of my life, I am rarely the smartest guy in the room. Call it an occupational hazard. Perhaps this has made me a better listener, though, and this week reminded me that sometimes it’s even more important to watch what people actually do after they’re done talking. This applies to companies as well, something to keep in mind as we review the HPC News with Snark for this week.

  • Jobs! I met with the founder of Puppet Labs here in Portland last week. Call me impressed. As makers of open source datacenter automation products, this is a company to watch and they have jobs for engineers who have actually shipped code.
  • Shrink-Wrapped Hadoop. This week SGI rolled out a set of pre-configured solutions for data-intensive computing, high-frequency trading, web content distribution, cloud storage, and high-performanceqq academic computing.
  • PetaBugs check in, but they don’t check out. This week Allinea Software released what they’re calling the “first industrial strength” debugger for parallel computing on systems with hundreds of thousands of processor cores that deliver Petaflop performance.
  • OpenFOAM on Tap for GPUs. This week Symscape released ofgpu, a free GPL library that provides GPU linear solvers for OpenFOAM.
  • Rhetoric of Runners-Up. China’s lead on the TOP500 has the spin-doctors weaving a tale of how smarter supercomputer designs win over faster machines. Translation: Pay no attention to the list. That is, until we get back on top next year, Bokay?
  • Swiss Army Knives of HPC. In my Internet travels, I’ve come across a number of engineers who are admired for their ability to fix just about anything that needs fixing. Nathan Stone is one of those guys and it’s good to see him get some recognition.
  • Training the next HPC brigade. The Numerical Algorithms Group, NAG, has announced that over 1,000 people have now benefitted from their on-going HPC training programme.
  • HPC and Burgers. I ran across this new Let’s Lunch site this week. I think this sounds like a great way to network with my readers, so I’m on there now. I invite HPC community folks to check it out and join me for a Nobby Burger next time your’re in Portland.

Comments

  1. Rich, nice post! This might be the first ever HPC post combining news about Petascale debugging, admin tools, training and Nobby Burgers. I like the format. Looking forward to more of the same and to seeing you get snarkier every week!

    Best,
    Bob