Archives for May 2011

Webinar: HPC for the Masses, June 7

One June 7, our friends at The Register are hosting a webinar entitled HPC for the Masses: New Applications, New Sectors, New Opportunities. It’s time to start thinking creatively about HPC: can it be standardised and commoditised? Can it be applied to more of your compute-intensive problems? Can virtualisation and the cloud create a flexible, […]

Video: The Man Who Taught Watson to Speak

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dYt57K8TJO8 In this video, Barry Mitchell talks with Dr. Andrew Rosenberg, an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Queens College of the City University of New York. Dr. Rosenberg worked on the Speech Synthesis Team for the IBM Watson computer — the supercomputer that made a media splash in February, 2011 by defeating two human […]

Why Parallel Programming is So Hard

Intel’s Aater Suleman writes about why parallel programming is so hard in a multicore world. Unlike ST code which would get faster every process generation, MT code has complex non-deterministic interactions that can make its performance swing long ways when hardware changes. For example, I had a branch-and-bound algorithm (a 16-Puzzle solver) which would slow […]

Video: Panel Discussion on the Compute Challenges of the National Archives

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7soNZFBNXQ In this video from the National Archives Assembly forum, panel members Dr. Peter Bajcsy (National Center for Supercomputing Applications), Dr. Maria Esteva (Texas Advanced Computing Center), and Dr. William Underwood (Georgia Tech Research Institute) discuss their research on Automated File Format Identification, Visualization/Data mining, and locating relevant records in large collections. As reported here, […]

Podcast: So You Want To Get To Exascale?

Mike Bernhardt from The Exascale Report writes that we need a reality check when it comes to developing a supercomputer with 1000x today’s performance by 2018: Unfortunately, a number of people in government see exascale as just a very large procurement. Lots of computers requiring lots of power. But the truth is, commercial computer manufacturers have absolutely […]

Platform Gets Graphic with HPC Cluster Manager

The Platform HPC tools, by contrast, are aimed at smaller customers with less daunting grids and perhaps a lot less expertise in managing clusters. Rather than sell Platform HPC directly, the stack is sold through OEM partners who brand and push the product as part of their cluster sales. Platform HPC OEMs include Cray, Hewlett-Packard, Fujitsu, and Dell; when the HPC stack was completely open source, Red Hat also OEMed it, but when Platform moved its proprietary LSF scheduler into the stack, Red Hat could not resell it since all of its wares need to be open source.

Podcast: The Secret Sauce in Cray's XK6 Hybrid Supercomputer

In this podcast, Cray’s Barry Bolding describes the secret sauce in the company’s new Cray XK6 hybrid supercomputer. Scalable to 50 Petaflops, the Cray XK6 is expected to start shipping later this year. Capable of tens of millions of MPI messages per second, the Gemini ASIC complements current and future massively multicore and many-core processors. […]

Firing Up HP's GPU Starter Kit

HP’s Marc Hamilton writes about the company’s innovative new GPU Starter Kit: With the launch of the M2090 last week, I challenged my team to come up with an affordable, easy to buy, easy to install, GPU Starter Kit. HP customers like George Tech have been benefiting from the performance and efficiency of GPU computing with […]

Slidecast: IO Turbine Launches Accelio SSD Accelerator for Virtualization

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lO0q_3zYRRw& In this slidecast, Rich Brueckner from insideHPC interviews IO Turbine CEO Rich Boberg. The company’s newest product, Accelio uses SSD/Flash on the compute server to solve I/O bottleneck problems in VMware environments. When installed on VMware servers, Accelio transparently identifies the highest priority data and offloads IOPS from primary storage to Flash, delivering performance […]

Cray Rolls Out XK6 Hybrid, Scalable to 50 Petaflops

Today Cray announced the XK6 hybrid supercomputer. Using the company’s proprietary Gemini interconnect, the Cray XK6 combines the compute power of AMD Interlagos processors and NVIDIA Tesla 20-Series GPUs. The company claims the system can scale to more than 50 petaflops (quadrillions of operations/second) of compute power, which would be roughly 20 times faster than […]