Mainstreaming HPC Hampered by Skills Gap
El Reg has a new feature story on how HPC adoption in mainstream enterprise IT has been hampered by a skills gap.
From our research, it is clear that the impact of HPC on mainstream IT is less to do with technology, and more to do with skills and operations management. Commodity hardware is widely regarded as suitable for HPC, with custom hardware reserved for the most demanding tasks. One of the reasons for this, apart from the direct cost advantage, is the pool of available skills. This has undoubtedly broadened the use of HPC, but the lack of high-end HPC skills has the potential to be a barrier to translating HPC experience into more general IT performance improvement.
Based on research published by Freeform Dynamics, the …
NCSA gets $200k from NSF to push simulation further into industry
This week NCSA announced that it has won an NSF grant to understand the gaps between the needs of industry today and the capabilities of simulation-based engineering and science
The National Science Foundation has awarded $200,000 to the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) to investigate the use of simulation-based engineering and science in industry and to report on areas where scientific advances are required to achieve gains in simulation capability. This Early-Concept Grants for Exploratory Research (EAGER) project will be carried out over the next 15 months by NCSA’s Private Sector Program staff.
NCSA will host a series of meetings and surveys to capture the perspectives of current industry users about the challenges they face in using simulation …
DataRush posts 2 TB per hour on MalStone B
I thought this might be of interest to at least some of you — Pervasive Software announced last week that their flagship DataRush product posted a rate of 2 TB/hr on MalStone B (a stylized benchmark for data intensive computing, Robert Grossman describes it here) using a 32-core Intel Xeon 7550 server. MalStone B10 has 10 billion records, which equates to just under 1 Terabyte of data (100 byte, fixed record size).
“These results provide powerful validation of the ability of Pervasive DataRush to scale massively and consume all available cores as commercially available core counts increase,” said Ray Newmark, vice president of sales and marketing for Pervasive DataRush. “This kind of performance is a beacon for organizations struggling with complex or
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Private cloud starter kit from Platform
Yesterday Platform Computing announced the launch of the Platform ISF Starter Pack, “an out-of-the-box, end-to-end software product and services offering for companies to quickly set up a private cloud.”
Platform ISF was introduced in 2009; the Starter Pack is aimed at letting small groups get their feet wet without investing in a substantial deployment.
For only US$4,995, the Platform ISF Starter Pack includes a one-year Platform ISF license for 10 sockets, consulting, training and support.
…“Organizations have plenty of toolkits to choose from as they evaluate private cloud, but they require multiple tools that users must string together themselves,” said James Pang, Vice President Product Management, Platform Computing. “What’s more, these toolkits can cost $50,000 or more, and require 30-plus
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HPC gives scientific computing on your cell phone a boost
Reader Jay Blair sent me a pointer to this story from TACC about an Android app that runs a reduced model locally on the cell phone based on results computed over a long series of runs on Ranger.
The team performed a series of expensive high-fidelity simulations on the Ranger supercomputer to generate a small “reduced model” which was transferred to a Google Android smart phone. They were then able to solve problems on the phone and visualize the results on the fly.
The project proved the potential for reduced order methods to perform real-time and reliable simulations for complicated problems on handheld devices.
This approach is already used operationally in a variety of civilian and defense scenarios to allow …
X-ISS Beefs Up HPC Administration Products and Services
X-ISS made two big announcements today regarding some new HPC-centric products and services. Those of you with reasonably sized Dell clusters might know X-ISS has the integration and services company that, on occasion, assists Dell in performing HPC deployments. The first press release officially announces what they call the DecisionHPC monitoring suite. The web-based monitoring and analytics package helps collect and report data on heterogeneous computing systems. The goal of DecisionHPC is provide information to systems administrations such that they can make more reliable decisions.
“With more than 500 HPC cluster system installations and support services since 1993, X-ISS has observed that most users of HPC systems struggle to maximize system productivity, aligning computing resource usage with organizational goals, and plan for future needs; these problems
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Verari Changes the Sign Out Front
Verari has announced that they have changed the sign on the front of the building. Why, you ask? They’re focusing their business model specifically on providing hardware for cloud-like environments. You mean big datacenters? Yeah, those too.
Being able to base our cloud storage and compute products on Verari’s world class BladeRack® 2 Series technology and FOREST containerized data center infrastructure puts us at the front of the pack to serve the demanding cloud customer,” said Marc Brown, President and COO, Cirrascale. “These products, based on Verari’s patented Vertical Cooling Technology, generated over $500 Million in installed systems in the high performance computing and enterprise markets; these customer segments are the foundation of the
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OSC partners with Moldex3D to bring industrial simulation software to Blue Collar Computing
In mid-July OSC let me know about a new development with their Blue Collar Computing program, which is seeing something of a resurgence these days (then I went on vacation and forgot to publish it).
OSC has partnered with Moldex3D to demonstrate the performance of its pioneering 3-D simulations for efficient verifications of part/mold designs for educational use. As part of this partnership, Moldex3D is donating 30 eDesign licenses over a three-year period with a cost value of $1,050,000 in support of OSC’s Ralph Regula School of Computational Science education program.
…As part of its Blue Collar Computing™ offerings, OSC will provide manufacturers with the training and computational resources needed to use advanced modeling and simulation
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