Commerical parallel computing

Bill McColl has an interesting essay at his site on the differences between supercomputing and commercial parallel computing, and the direction that these drivers may push next generation programming approaches. From his post

In the industrial and commercial world:

Applications and services are usually interactive and real-time.
Programmers need to work at a high level to ensure reusability etc.
The time, effort and

Berkeley researchers propose 200 PFLOPS super from embedded processors

The Australian iTnews (yes, the capitalization is both correct and odd) was the most interesting pointer I found to this story.

Lawrence Berkeley Lab researchers shooting for a practical solution for modeling climate at a resolution of 1 km came up with a system design based on low-power embedded processors. You know, the kinds of processors you find in cell …

LBNL and Tensilica Collaborate on Energy Efficient HPC

Tensilica and LBNL have announced a collaboration project directed at exploring new design concepts for energy-efficient high performance computing solutions. The effort will focus on utilizing a large number of small processing cores interconnected with highly efficient, optimized links. One of the main drivers for the project is climate modeling. [Chris Kerr is routinely using the lion’s …

6th annual visualization challenge

The excellent CRA Policy Blog is pointing to the upcoming 6th annual NSF/AAS  Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge. 5 categories for entry, deadline May 31.

If you want to know what you’re up against, previous winners here.

Beyond 10 GbE

John D’Ambrosia, writing over at redOrbit, outlines progress being made on ethernet for the datacenter beyond 10 GbE

Higher-speed standards are on the way for both data centers and computing applications. Prior to its inception as a task force, the IEEE 802.3 higher-speed study group received input that service provider networks, Internet exchange networks, consumer broadband access networks, content provider

New fundamental circuit element discovered

The DailyTech is reporting today on an innovation out of HP labs that appeared in Nature yesterday (Nature article here)

 Researchers at HP Labs, the central research center for the company, confirmed the existence of the previously theorized fourth fundamental circuit element of electrical engineering.

The new component is called the “memristor” — a word blend of “memory” and “resistor”.

The …

A new numerical libraries group at MS focused on HPC

HilbertAstronaut, a PhD student in numerical linear algebra at UC Berkeley, posts at his blog about a recent visit they got from Microsoft

…a new (three months old!) numerical libraries group from Microsoft came over to speak with us linear algebra hackers and parallel performance tuners. Today we did most of the talking, but we learned something from them: They

“We need to teach massively parallel computing to everybody in science”

The EE Times ran an article yesterday on a talk given by David Kirk, chief scientist at NVIDIA, at London’s Imperial College. In the talk he opined on the degree to which GPU technology stands to democratize supercomputing

“For $2,000 per teraflops, anyone can have a single-precision supercomputer in their PC,” he

NVIDIA to Sponsor Stanford PPL

NVIDIA has announced that it will be a founding member of Stanford University’s new Pervasive Parallelism Lab [PPL].  The PPL’s charter is to develop new techniques, tools and training materials to allow software engineers to harness the parallelism of multi-processor systems [including multi-core].

Parallel programming is perhaps the largest problem in computer science today and is

Lustre Over the WAN

HPCWire is running a story today featuring the announcement from the University Information Technology Services [UITS] at Indiana University that they will now support projects mounting Lustre over high speed wide area networks [such as the TeraGrid].   The group has dedicated 350 terabytes of new storage to the initiative.  Stephen Simms, IU’s Data Capacitor Project

Microsoft funds green computing research

c|net’s News.com reported yesterday that the Microsoft has handed out $500,000 in grants to four universities for research in energy efficient computing as part of its Sustainable Computing Program.

The University of Tennessee was awarded research money to develop frameworks to account for power and performance improvements in virtualized

Papaya Genome Sequencing Project and SGI

The International Papaya Genome Consortium, led by researchers at the University of Hawaii have announced the completion of the Papaya Genome Sequencing Project. The two year effort utilized SGI Altix and InfiniteStorage products to sequence 372 million base pairs. This makes the disease-resistant “SunUp” papaya to be the first fruit and the first transgenic crop to be sequenced.

DOE Dedicates Leadership Computing Facility

The Department of Energy’s [DOE] Argonne National Laboratory, yesterday, celebrated the dedication of their upcoming Argonne Leadership Computing Facility [ALCF]. The event was attended by several key federal, state and local officials. The ACLF is a facility dedicated to enabling the research and development community to make innovative and high-impact science and engineering …

UCSD Scientists Construct 3-D Genome Structure

University of California, San Diego scientists in collaboration with the San Diego Supercomputer Center have successfully mapped the genome structure as a three-dimensional image. The image was a first of its kind. The research team was led by Cornelis Murre, professor of biology at UC San Diego and Steve Cutchin, senior scientist for visualization services at San Diego …

Slides from Hadoop summit

Bill McColl points us to an update from Yahoo! Research that slides and videos from last month’s Hadoop Summit and Data-Intensive Computing Symposium are going up on line.

A reminder what these were about:

The Hadoop Summit brought together leaders from the Hadoop developer and user communities for the first time. Apache Hadoop, an open-source distributed computing project of the