Entries filed under “Admin”

Microsoft begins expansion of its Data Center in Quincy, Washington
Earlier this month, Microsoft began a major expansion of its Columbia Data Center in Quincy, Washington and has started to excavate ground for the ‘Phase 2’ data center building (see attached photos of the excavation at the Quincy site).

This Week’s Multicore Reading List
A list of book releases compiled by Dr. Dobb’s to keep you up-to-date on parallel programming and multicore technology.

SGI Releases InfiniteStorage 5000 SAS External Storage System
New Storage Product Delivers 6 Gb/s SAS Technology Offering Mid-Range Performance, Scalability and Features at Entry-Level Price Points

Appro Deploys a World Class Linux Cluster Testbed Solution to LLNL in Support of the Hyperion Project
Appro, a leading provider of supercomputing solutions, today announces the deployment of a Data Intensive Testbed Cluster solution based on Appro servers configured with ioMemory technology from Fusion-io to extend the existing Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) Hyperion system. Hyperion is the world’s largest Linux cluster dedicated test bed for development and testing of critical Linux cluster technologies.

SGI Helps Queensland Government Accelerate Climate Science In Australia
SGI, a global leader in HPC and data center solutions, today announced that the Queensland Department of Environment and Resource Management (DERM) has installed a high performance computing (HPC) and large-scale storage solution based on SGI Altix ICE 8200 and InfiniteStorage in its Brisbane facility for the processing of computationally intensive environmental modeling applications.

LSU Physics Professor Jorge Pullin Chairs Selection Committee for Einstein Prize
Jorge Pullin, a professor in the LSU Department of Physics & Astronomy and Interim co-Director of the LSU Center for Computation & Technology, or CCT, is chairing the American Physical Society’s selection committee for the prestigious Einstein Prize.

OpenCL Optimization Case Study: Diagonal Sparse Matrix Vector Multiplication
This article discusses performance optimizations for AMD GPUs and CPUs using as a case study a simple, yet widely used computationally intensive kernel: Diagonal Sparse Matrix Vector Multiplication. We look at several topics which come up during OpenCL performance optimization and apply them to our case study.

3-D model of blood flow by supercomputer predicts heart attacks
EPFL Laboratory of Multiscale Modeling of Materials, in Switzerland, has developed a flowing 3D model of the cardiovascular system that should allow for predictions of certain heart diseases before they become dangerous.

Processor Whispers — About Partnerships and Partner Chips
The IT economy is doing better and better, despite the renewed spitting – and now even cloudy twittering – of the Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajökull. This positive development could very well lead to new partnerships and almost-forsaken projects like Intel’s Larrabee graphics chip might make a comeback.

CSC makes $317M play for NOAA supercomputer
Now that hurricane season 2010 is open, there will be plenty of talk of severe weather in the coming months. And whether it is tornadoes, heat waves or floods there is little that can be done about it. But improved forecasting would go a long way toward ameliorating some of the more devastating effects. That’s a big reason why the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s mission, signed Computer Sciences Corp. to a nine-year $317 million to build a supercomputer for modeling weather patterns.

SGI advances Linux on the HPC front
Perhaps it is this acceptance of open source that led SGI’s CTO, Dr Eng Lim Goh to ditch a fancy conference setting and instead talk with a bunch of technologists at a Greater London Linux User Group (GLLUG) meeting held at University College London (UCL). Goh’s belief in his firm’s technology and that of the open source community was given away by the title of his talk, “Linux is supercomputing”. Underlying that claim was the fact that SGI has managed to get the standard Linux kernel, available from the kernel.org repository, to work on systems having 4,096 cores.

Researchers Aim to Achieve Cleaner Coal Through Computation
It’s not possible to see inside the flue where the gases are interacting, so Wilcox simulates the interactions of these particles using the Ranger supercomputer at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC). Her studies of the dynamics of trace metals inside the flue of a power plant are helping her design and improve the technologies capable of removing heavy metals from the combustion process.

Hutchinson Center Receives $10.1M for HPC Cluster and Datacenter
Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center has received two grants totaling $10.1 million from the National Institutes of Health to fund a new high-performance computing cluster and the creation of a campus-based facility to consolidate and safeguard research data.

Fujitsu Supercomputer Achieves World Record in Computational Quantum Chemistry
Fujitsu Limited and Chuo University of Japan today announced that a team of researchers from Chuo University, Kyoto University, Tokyo Institute of Technology and Japan’s Institute of Physical and Chemical Research (known as Riken) employed the T2K Open Supercomputer — which was delivered by Fujitsu to Kyoto University’s Academic Center for Computing and Media Studies — to successfully compute with high precision, as a world first, an optimization problem to reveal the molecular behavior of ethane (CH3 only), ammonia (NH3) and oxygen (O2).

Each week I read (well, skim) a bunch of posts. Many of them are clearly uninteresting to you, my discriminating reader (although the firings at the Health Professions Council are sometimes quite interesting). Some of what I read is both interesting and relevant, and those get read in detail and posted, sometimes with quite a bit of analysis from me.

Then there is the stuff in the middle: might be interesting to some of you, but either there isn’t much more to say than what’s in the post I’ve found or I don’t have time to write it up. Until today I’ve just thrown those links away.

Today that carnage of content ends! Starting today I’ll be posting at least some of the links that I think are interesting but for whatever reason don’t be written up in these “Link and Run” posts. Look for them about once a week.

Infusion adds HPC competency
“Infusion’s deep software development and training expertise will help customers in financial services and government take full advantage of Windows HPC Server 2008, including new capabilities that bring supercomputing power to Excel 2010,” said Vince Mendillo, senior director, Microsoft High Performance Computing Group.

As part of announcing this relationship, Infusion will begin conducting Discovery Workshops in North America, Canada and the UK. These Discovery Workshops are centred on HPC services for Excel 2010 and targeted towards financial services customers.

Dell taps ARM processors for low-power servers
Dell Inc. is set to test multicore ARM processors from Marvell Technology Group for possible use in low-power servers for large data centers. The company has already shipped a few thousand low-power servers based on x86 processors from Taiwan’s Via Technologies Inc.

SGI to distribute LSI enterprise storage products
SGI, a provider of HPC and data centre solutions, has agreed a global initiative with LSI Corporation to expand its SGI InfiniteStorage products with new configurations powered by LSI. This expanded relationship will make available a wider breadth of LSI’s storage technology through direct and indirect sales force.

Vector Fabrics cloud tools to automate sequential C code analysis for multi-threading
Vector Fabrics announces vfAnalyst, a cloud-based tool for parallelizing sequential C code. The first in a planned family of cloud computing tools, vfAnalyst enables software engineers to easily identify the most promising parallelization opportunities so that they can create an effective multicore implementation much more quickly than is possible today.

Structured Parallel Programming with Deterministic Patterns
This document discusses and advocates a structured approach to parallel programming. This approach is based on a core set of common and composable patterns of parallel computation and data management with an emphasis on determinism and scalability. By using these patterns and also paying attention to a small number of factors in algorithm design (such as data locality), programs built using this approach have the potential to perform and scale well on a variety of different parallel computer architectures.