A story in the San Jose Mercury News last week cited officials confident that NASA’s Ames Research Center, located in Silicon Valley, will benefit from the proposed FY11 budget
“We’re highly confident that we’re going to get more money, and we do believe it’s going to enhance employment here, and in Silicon Valley,” said Lewis Braxton III, deputy director of Ames Research Center in Mountain View. He said it is too early to know how many additional local jobs would be created by NASA’s proposed new emphasis on unmanned space missions, climate change research, an extension of the International Space Station and plans to partner with private companies to launch astronauts into orbit.
The potential boon may extend to Ames’s HPC center as well
…Braxton said he could imagine more work for Ames’ supercomputer facility and additional partnerships, such as the center’s cooperation with Google, in which NASA has tapped Google’s expertise to help make its spacecraft more autonomous, and building on partnerships, such as one with Cisco Systems, to integrate the world’s climate change databases.
by John West on Feb 8
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Thierry Manfe has a post at the Sun HPC blogs helping beginners navigate the esoterica of compiler options in the Sun Studio compilers
Sun Studio offers a unique set of optimization features dedicated to processor instruction set that help me squeeze out the best perf out of C, C++ or Fortran code. Yet these options are so numerous that it can be a bit daunting to look into them.
If you are in a rush, you can use the -fast option. What it really does is triggering a set of other options for maximum runtime performance.
What I like about the post is that it talks about options, and gives those just learning enough information to make their own decisions. To whit
Yet -fast has its own drawbacks. First, the options triggered might change from one compiler release to another. Also, the values for -xarch -xcache -xchip specify the processor for which to optimize, and -fast decides of these values based on the processor on which the compiler runs, which can deffer from the processor on which the code will eventually be executed. This is why I usually stay away from -fast.
by John West on Feb 8
Last week Dr. Arden Bement, Jr., Director of the National Science Foundation in the US, announced that at the end of his term he will be stepping down to lead Purdue University’s new Global Policy Research Institute. Bement was appointed to a six year term as the 12th director of the NSF by the second President Bush in 2004.
During Bement’s tenure as NSF director, he oversaw the foundation’s annual budget of more than $7 billion that supports the research and education of roughly 200,000 scientists, engineers, educators and students across the United States. As part of the White House’s American Competitiveness Initiative in 2006, he guided initiatives that supported the training of the U.S. work force to operate in a high-tech global economy.
House Research and Science Education Subcommittee Chairman Daniel Lipinski (D-IL) had this to say
“As Chairman of the Research and Science Education Subcommittee, which is responsible for the National Science Foundation, it was my privilege to work closely with Dr. Bement to improve and elevate the NSF. Dr. Bement never forgot either his engineering roots or his time in the Midwest. As an engineer, he could not see a problem without wanting to solve it, and he did a great deal to enhance America’s competitiveness and respond to our STEM education challenges. And as a Midwesterner, he did so with grace and soft-spoken but determined leadership. Our loss will be Purdue’s gain, and I wish Dr. Bement well in his return to academia.”
by John West on Feb 8
Last week the Transaction Processing Council (TPC) announced that it has defined a methodology for measuring watts per performance in the context of its existing benchmarks
The TPC-Energy specification outlines methodologies for measuring energy consumption in data processing servers, disk systems, and system components associated with typical business information technology environments.
…The TPC-Energy specification augments existing TPC Benchmark Standards, including TPC-C, TPC-E and TPC-H, by outlining requirements to measure and report energy metrics in conjunction with each benchmark. TPC-Energy enables manufacturers to provide power metrics in the form “Watts per performance,” where the performance units are particular to each TPC benchmark. As vendors publish TPC-Energy results, customers will be able to identify systems, via the TPC Web site, that meet their price, performance and energy requirements.
TPC-C is for online transaction processing, TPC-E is for databases, and TPC-H is for data warehouses, so you quickly get the idea these benchmarks don’t directly translate to HPC. Still, understanding the approach may be useful to those looking for ways to extend our benchmarks to include an energy dimension. The TPC-Energy report is available from the council’s Web site.
by John West on Feb 8
Wondering what to read at insideHPC? Some of the most popular posts this week are:
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by John West on Feb 5
Just in over the email transom, news of a data center haiku contest being run at ServiceCatalog101.com:
It’s time to boot up the cerebral right side and balance those cortical hemispheres!
For global fame, peer recognition and a beautiful coffee mug featuring YOUR winning Haiku, simply submit your best haiku and win!
We’ll keep the rules super simple:
No more than three lines.
Make at least one seasonal reference.
Keep it data center relevant.
Reference at wikipedia in case you …
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The Green Grid had its third annual tech forum this week and during that event announced its latest round of tools for helping the IT community get a handle on the efficiency of its datacenters. From the release
Power Efficiency Estimator
The new Power Efficiency Estimator is designed to help data center operators compare different scenarios of power topologies and technologies inside of their facility. It takes …
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A post at the CCC blog points us to the video of a talk that Peter Lee, on leave as Head of the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University to serve at DARPA as the Director of the new Transformational Convergence Technology Office (DARPA/TCTO), gave a U Wash this week.
TCTO is re-establishing basic research programs in a broad range of rapidly emerging computing-enabled technology areas
…
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Yesterday Dan Reed posted on his blog about a new partnership between the NSF and Microsoft
Today, February 4, Microsoft and the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) announced a collaborative project where Microsoft will offer individual researchers and research groups (selected through NSF’s merit review process) free access to advanced client-plus-cloud computing. Our focus is on empowering researchers via intuitive and familiar client tools whose capabilities extend seamlessly
…
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The folks at the Texas Advanced Computing Center [TACC] are celebrating a birthday today. Their massive cluster system called Ranger just turned 2! The 579.4TF machine was the first in the NSF “Path to Petascale” program. It still remains in the top ten of the Top500 list.
We’re proud of the fact that Ranger has been so widely requested and used for diverse science projects,” said Jay Boisseau,
…
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