Archives for February 2013

SDSC Fosters New BigData Top100 List

This week the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) announced plans for a community-based effort to create the BigData Top100 List, the first global ranking of its kind for systems designed for big data applications. The explosion in data and the value of repurposing and exploiting data assets have created what we now call the ‘big […]

Student Cluster Teams: Start Your Engines for SC13

Team submissions are now being accepted for the SC13 edition of the Student Cluster Competition, a spirited event featuring young supercomputing talent from around the world competing to build and operate powerful cluster computers. As the world’s largest gathering of HPC professionals, the SC13 conference will be held Nov. 17-22, 2013, in Denver. The energy […]

The British are Coming to a Supercomputer Near You

Bradley Keelor from the British Embassy writes that a visiting delegation from the UK has a mission to collaborate with U.S. and its abundant supercomputing resources. After coming away amazed from a tour of Blue Waters at NCSA, the team wants to get the Allies back together again. The UK is one of the scientific […]

Grid Simulation Plays the Epigonion for the First Time Since 500 B.C.

In this video, researchers use the power of the European Grid Infrastructure to simulate the sounds of the Epigonion, a Greek musical instrument that hasn’t been heard for centuries. Using a technique called physical modelling, Domenico Vincinanza recreated the sound of the instrument’s 48 strings as digital files. With the help of grid computing resources […]

CSIRO Supercomputer to use Geothermal Cooling

Over at The Register, Richard Chirgwin writes Australia’s CSIRO plans to use Geothermal cooling for a new petascale supercomputer. Located in bone-dry Perth, the system will be used to process data from the Square Kilometer Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) telescope. The water to cool the Pawsey machine will be drawn from an aquifer 100 meters below […]

Professor Marc Snir Recognized with TCSC Award for Excellence in Scalable Computing

This week the IEEE Technical Committee on Scalable Computing announced that the 2013 IEEE Award for Excellence in Scalable Computing has been awarded to Professor Marc Snir for outstanding contributions to scalable computing. As one of Rock Stars of HPC, Marc Snir currently serves as Director of the Mathematics and Computer Science Division at the […]

Interview: Wolfgang Gentzsch on Cloud Sustainability

Over at International Science Grid This Week, Andrew Purcell catches up with Wolfgang Gentzsch to learn more about the challenges of cloud sustainability in Europe. Sustainability in the context of cloud infrastructures means the long-term maintenance of their services for a wider user and customer community. Researchers who previously have used their own limited resources […]

Video: Helix Nebula Science Cloud at CERN

In this video, Jurry de la Mar from T-Systems describes the Helix Nebula Science Cloud. The talk was recorded at the CERN Workshop on IT Requirements for the next generation research infrastructures held on February 1. A Tip of the Hat goes out to Primeur Magazine for pointing us to this video.

Simulating Ancient Glacial Meltdowns gives Clues to Global Warming

Melting icecaps are not a new phenomenon, but the causes of past deglaciations has remained a mystery. Now, researchers are using ORNL supercomputers to pinpoint the last deglaciation on planet Earth. The simulations, conducted by Feng He and Zhengyu Liu of UW-Madison and Bette Otto-Bliesner of NCAR, help to recreate the climate during the first […]

Spectra Installs 550 Petabytes Tape Capacity in Just Six Months

With the rise of Big Data and increasing emphasis on data-intensive computing, you may be wondering how the tape vendors are doing. Well, very well, thank you, as evidenced by Spectra Logic’s announcement that that the company installed more than half an exabyte of tape storage capacity in the past six months alone. With revenue […]