There’s an upstart conference on Commercial HPC coming up at the end of the month called HPC 360. Will they be able to attract Joe Businessman to come and hear about the benefits of high performance computing? Maybe, considering that they are throwing in tickets for a Big Ten tailgate party.
So that raises a bigger question about whether Commercial HPC even exists. In my mind, HPC is a never-ending journey towards infinite performance. And on this Odyssey, Commercial HPC has long been the song of the sirens for IT vendors. 
The song goes something like this; sure the supercomputing market of scientists and researchers is small in the world of IT, but invest in R&D and innovate the superfast gear we want, and the Enterprise guys will soon come running with their big checkbooks.
To be fair, we can cite all kinds of examples where HPC is being used by commercial businesses. And while we tout CFD simulations on Pringles as a soon-to-be mainstream practice, the rocky waters of the HPC market continue to sink some of the most innovative companies on the planet.
In my time at Sun, we were very taken with the Song of Commercial HPC. We even went so far as sponsoring the disastrous Commercial HPC Conference & Expo back in 2002. Trust me, you weren’t there.
Is Commercial HPC is really coming this time? I want to believe, but I I don’t bet with my heart. In the meantime, I’m thinking I should scrape up airfare for this show and put my money on Ohio State.
by Rich Brueckner on Sep 2
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by Rich Brueckner on Sep 2
SGI announced their financial results today. Normally, this would be followed by analyst speculation, CFO pontification and lots of yawning. Well, this is a special quarter for SGI. It marks the end of the first full fiscal year after Rackable purchased the company in the spring of 2009. So, how’d they do?
The SGI sales figures were up 74% to $101.6 million. Not bad considering the the lackluster economy. However, due to charges from the acquisition of Copan, installation of a new Oracle ERP system [which cost $3 million], foreign exchange and other effects, SGI’s losses actually widened. How bad? They rose to $27.6 million, which is +34%. They had revenues of $122 million at an average gross margin of 24%.
So how did the entire year look? For FY2010, SGI had sales of $403.7 million, which is very respectable for a company of their size. Their net loss was $88.5 million, which means their net sales need to creep near $500 million in order to get over the hump.
Fiscal 2010 was a transformative year for SGI with many successes,” said SGI CEO Mark J. Barrenechea. “We focused on completing the integration, delivering innovative products to market and making investments in key areas that will serve as a foundation for future growth. Further, we have strategically focused the company on the $9 billion technical computing market, where we have begun to emerge as a trusted partner. These successes translated into strong financials – full-year non-GAAP revenues of $525 million, exceeding our original plan of $500 million. As we enter fiscal year 2011, we are projecting up to 10% revenue growth and EPS breakeven, both on a non-GAAP basis.”
All told, SGI is not yet profitable. However, they’re not moving backwards. Mergers and acquisitions are difficult. The two cultures, products and markets were very different. For more info on SGI’s financial results, check out their official results here.
Growing up in the Midwest, I saw my share of severe weather. The sirens would go off and we would have only a few minutes to take cover in the nearest basement.
Now supercomputers are being used to improve that lead time and predict how destructive a tornado will be. While that might not be too surprising, this new story in International Science Grid This Week describes how modern stormchasers used Windows as part of their supercomputing workflow.
A lot of scientists use Windows tools such as Excel,” Plale explained. “We think that utilizing a Windows workflow system on a Windows box is a step towards providing broader flexibility, because of this affinity of a lot of scientists to use Excel and because of the emergence of the cloud-based Azure platform.”
Most of the data assimilation experiments conducted by the research group make use of a supercomputer at NCAR. According to the article, the conclusions they reach could ultimately lead to improved forecasts.
The SC conference has a tradition of showcasing HPC work samples before plenary sessions. Now is your chance to submit your great work for display at SC10 in New Orleans!
This is your platform to showcase your current projects in videos and pictures. We would especially like to encourage submissions related to the thrust areas for SC10 — Climate Simulation, Heterogeneous Computing and Data-Intensive Computing — but other themes are welcome as well. With capacity seating in the hall reaching into the thousands, this is a great opportunity to share your work with your peers and leaders in the community.”
Submission details are available at the SC10 web site. Submissions are due by Friday, October 15, 2010.
by Rich Brueckner on Sep 1
indigoBit LLC today announced that insideHPC has been acquired by 24-year HPC industry veteran, Rich Brueckner.
On September 1, 1010, NVIDIA hosted a live chat session with their Chief Scientist, Bill Daily and Director of Graphics Research, David Luebke. Designed to build some buzz around the GPU Technology Conference starting September 23, a replay of the chat session has been posted here.
Bill Daily’s segment will focus on Life After Moore’s Law and attendees will be able to submit questions about the future of parallel computing and GPU architecture. David Luebke will then follow up with a discussion on computational graphics research at NVIDIA.
I’ll be attending the GPU Technology conference as insideHPC’s Man on the Street. If you see the guy in the red hat, be sure to say hello.
Cray announced details today surrounding their latest order from Sweden’s Royal Institute of Technology (KTH: Kungliga Tekniska Hoegskolan). Earlier this year, KTH purchased a new Cray XT6 supercomputer. This procurement will upgrade the brand new machine to an XE6 platform. The upgrade will bump performance to around 300TF and swap SeaStar networking gear for Cray’s new Gemini network.
We are very pleased that after only a few months, PDC has made the decision to upgrade its Cray XT6m system to our new Cray XE6 supercomputer,” said Dr. Ulla Thiel, Cray vice president, Europe. “Easy upgradeability is an important design element of Cray supercomputers, and this is a great example of a customer leveraging its HPC investment and
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The University of Leicester has deployed a new supercomputing system, deemed ALICE, that is being billed as a performance and green upgrade from previous systems. The new system and facility cost an estimated £2.2 million in order to make it an efficient operational environment.
Mary Visser, Director of IT services at the university, said: “It’s fascinating to see how researchers work these days — looking for patterns in huge datasets and simulating complex phenomena. Usually, you need to be a real techie to engage with this kind of work. But, we have social scientists and economists with big problems to solve who didn’t sign up to be computer programmers. Our team aims to help
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With SC10 coming up in New Orleans, it seems many of us have Louisiana in our hearts and minds these days. And so it was with great pleasure that I read today the NSF awarded the Louisiana Board of Regents more than $1 million to connect Xavier University, a historically black university in New Orleans, to the Louisiana Optical Network Initiative (LONI).
LONI already provides a strong foundation for the research institutions in our state, and we are pleased to enhance the network by adding a new university,” said Donald Vandal, LONI Executive Director. “Through this connection, Xavier will have unprecedented access to a high-speed optical network, allowing faculty, staff and students there to conduct research faster and
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