Archives for July 2014

Podcast: NNSA Discusses $174 Million Trinity Supercomputer

“Forty-two petaFLOPS equals one big upgrade for the National Nuclear Security Administration. A new super computer dubbed Trinity will be assembled next year at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. The $174 million deal with Cray is one of the biggest contracts in the supercomputer manufacturers history. Cray also built supercomputer Cielo, which will be retired after Trinity is up and running.”

Video: An Introduction to OpenACC

In this video, Bronson Messer from ORNL presents: An Introduction to OpenACC. “OpenACC is gaining momentum and adoption,” said Duncan Poole, President of the OpenACC Standards Group. “Developers benefit because using OpenACC directives makes parallel programming more productive and collaboration easier. Large, legacy codes are easier to maintain and accelerated code is more portable across HPC systems.”

New Whitepaper: File I/O on Intel Xeon Phi (RAM disks, VirtIO, NFS, and Lustre)

“This paper provides information and benchmarks necessary to make the choice of the best file system for a given application from a number of the available options: RAM disks, virtualized local hard drives, and distributed storage shared with NFS or Lustre. We report benchmarks of I/O performance and parallel scalability on Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors, strengths and limitations of each option.”

Bright Computing Secures $14.5 Million Funding

“Bright is in markets as competitive as we’ve ever been, especially in the big data Hadoop and OpenStack private cloud spaces. I believe we will thrive in these markets because we are bringing years of relevant experience to bear in new ways that will accelerate the adoption of these new technologies. But most people today are still struggling to build and maintain their clouds and clusters using a collection of mismatched tools. We have a lot of work ahead of us, and we’re ready to roll. Onwards!”

PRACE Awards 1.2 Billion Core Hours for Research

Today the European PRACE initiative announced that a total of 1.2 billion core hours have been awarded to 43 HPC projects as part of their 9th PRACE Regular Call for Proposals.

SC14 Technical Program: an Interview with Jack Dongarra

“Over the years I have chaired many parts of the Technical Program, but never had a chance to chair the whole Technical Program. SC plays an important role in the high-performance community. It is through the SC Conference that HPC practitioners get an overview of the field, get to showcase our important work, and network with the community.”

Radio Free HPC Looks at the Need for Better Resource Management in Linux

“I think the time has come for Linux – and likely other operating systems – to develop a more robust framework that can address the needs of future hardware and meet the requirements for scheduling resources. This framework is not going to be easy to develop, but it is needed by everything from databases and MapReduce to simple web queries.”

2112 Cores at Just 200 Watts: Introducing the Adapteva A-1

In this video from Primeur Magazine, Andreas Olofsson from Adapteva unveils the Adapteva A-1 prototype supercomputer at ISC’14. Based on the company’s 64-core Epiphany chip, the system sports a total 2112 RISC cores in a very small space while consuming only 200 Watts.

Station Q Tackles Quantum Computing at Microsoft

“Our belief is that trying to build a quantum machine by controlling electron spin and using surface codes is like trying to build a computer using vacuum tubes. Labs all over the world can do that, but you’ll never be able to scale up.”

Video: Founders Discuss the Latest TOP500 List

In this video, Jack Dongarra, Erich Strohmaier, and Michael Resch discuss the current TOP500 list at ISC’14. “Although the United States remains the top country in terms of overall systems with 233, this is down from 265 on the November 2013 list. The number of Chinese systems on the list rose from 63 to 76, giving the Asian nation nearly as many supercomputers as the UK, with 30; France, with 27; and Germany, with 23; combined. Japan also increased its showing, up to 30 from 28 on the previous list.”