HPC News with Snark for August 12, 2011

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

We had an amazing time at SIGGRAPH in Vancouver this week, and there’s some cool videos from the show floor in the pipeline. In the meantime, here’s the this week’s HPC News with Snark:

  • Battery-Powered Cloud Sever. NextComputing just announced the Vigor EX-B, “the first completely battery-powered and fully mobile rugged server able to run on its own internal power for up to 4 hours.” Designed to support tactical operations centers and other mission-critical environments, the Vigor EX-B delivers virtualized “local cloud” computing services to multiple users in remote settings.
  • $$MegaCache. The LSI folks are out with their new MegaRAID CacheCade Pro 2.0 SSD Caching Software, which can deliver “up to 13X more transactions per second” compared to HDD-only arrays.
  • Apollo 18 today. The film won’t be out until September, but BlackSky Computing was showing off their new Apollo enterprise storage system for HPC at SIGGRAPH 2011. Packing 180 TB in a 4U chassis, the device reportedly delivers a blistering 80 Gb/s of IO performance.
  • Wasted, man. Totally wasted. According to Real-Status CTO Stace Hipperson, there are tens of millions of dollars tied up in petabytes of wasted storage, with zombie virtual machines continuing to be a problem. The company’s Hyperglance 3D software gives you the power to see what’s going on in your virtual machines, so check out my video interview with Stace Hipperson to learn more.
  • 21st Century Schizoid Man. Researchers at the Cape Universities Brain Imaging Centre in South Africa are using HPC systems to simulate the brain structures of patients suffering from schizophrenia. CHPC’s Sunfire visualization nodes can reconstruct 120 brains in 14 hours, where conventional systems required days per brain.
  • Careful with that Wax, Daedalus. The Silicon Wolves are readying their souped up Daedalus, an “entry-level developer system” for supercomputing. Daedalus will reportedly feature two AMD Opteron 4284 (Bulldozer) processors running at 3.0 GHz, 3.3GHZ Stage 1 Turbo, AND 3.7GHz STAGE 2 Turbo. Don’t try this at home.