Live from the show floor with the InfiniBand Trade Association
During SC09 week I grabbed some time at the end of a day to sit down with Bryan Sparks and Jim Ryan in their capacities as members of the InfiniBand Trade Association (they both have day jobs; Brian is with Mellanox and Jim works for Intel). During our conversation we touched on the IBTA’s ten-year anniversary and the evolution of InfiniBand from fringe technology to stalwart of the Top500 list. Along the way we touch on some of the drivers of that adoption, the close connections of IB to PCI-e, the relationship between the The OpenFabrics Alliance and the IBTA, and how a book may hold the secret to breaking IB out of its HPC stronghold and into broader IT adoption.
Listen to the interview [audio:http://insidehpc.com/media/SC09/ibta.mp3]
Download the audio file.
Live from the show floor with Dell: a discussion about Cray, competition, and partnerships in HPC
During SC week I sat down with Donnie Bell, senior manager in the enterprise marketing group, to talk about the announcement that Dell would be marketing a version of Cray’s CX1 to low-end HPC users. This audio is much more two way than some of the other conversations I’ve posted, because I was curious about some of the details that went into this deal. After giving me an overview of the system, our conversation was pretty wide-ranging over the business aspects of this deal, touching on everything from why Dell (which builds hardware) is partnering with Cray to how you get a product like this to customers who don’t identify with HPC and how the brand exposure doesn’t hurt (rather than help) Dell’s future HPC business. If you are interested in how partnerships like this happen in HPC, this is the conversation for you….
Live from the show floor with Adaptive Computing
As part of my audio catch-up from SC09 here is my conversation with Michael Jackson, the Co-founder, President, and COO of Adaptive Computing (formerly known as Cluster Resources). Michael is talking about Adaptive’s news during the week of the show: Moab’s connection with Voltaire’s Unified Fabric Manager and HP’s plans to resell Moab Adaptive Computing Suite, and Moab in the University of Toronto’s SciNet Consortium (interestingly, they paid for Moab in the first month based on energy savings alone).
This one has some blackberry noise for a few seconds about two-thirds of the way through — sorry. Didn’t hear it at the time.
Listen to the interview [audio:http://insidehpc.com/media/SC09/adaptive.mp3]
Download the audio file.
Live from the show floor with Avere Systems
This year, as with last year, I recorded a bunch of audio during my meetings at SC. Unlike last year, however, I didn’t get hardly anything up during the show. So over the next several days I’ll be mending that sin as I work through my audio backlog.
In this segment Ron Bianchini, the President and CEO of Avere, starts off by introducing us to his well-seasoned team, and then he walks me through the story of his company and where his product is positioned in the storage acceleration market space. Avere’s appliance sits in between your storage and your server and, the company hopes, enables you to separate decisions about performance from decisions about capacity. In terms of results, here’s one: Ron walks us through Avere’s NAS storage appliance and shows results at 130,000 IOPS on the SPECsfs2008 NFS benchmark, with one quarter …
StarGate Demo at SC09 Shows How to Keep Astrophysics Data Out of Archival “Black Holes” [UPDATED with pics]
As both an astrophysicist and director of the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), Mike Norman understands two common perspectives on archiving massive scientific datasets. During a live demonstration at the SC09 conference of streaming data simulating cosmic structures of the early universe, Norman said that some center directors view their data archives as “black holes,” where a wealth of data accumulates and needs to be protected.
Mellanox intros 120 Gbps switch, application offloading of MPI into the adapter
Today Mellanox Technologies announced two new additions to their InfiniBand technology offering from the show floor at SC09.
120 Gbps InfiniBand switch
First up is a 120 Gbps InfiniBand switch. From the release
Based on InfiniScale IV, Mellanox’s 4th generation of InfiniBand switch silicon, the IS5000 switch system family delivers the highest networking bandwidth per port to enable the next generation of high-performance computing, cloud infrastructures and enterprise data centers. The new switch solutions reduces network congestion and the number of network cables by a factor of three, providing customers with the optimal combination of cost-effective, proven performance and efficiency enhancements to address next-generation, Petascale computing demands.
This switch is actually getting some air time on the show floor this year as the hardware enabling the 120 Gbps IB network that exhibitors can connect to as part of SCinet. Mellanox’s John Monson told me in a conversation …
Live from the show floor with Cycle Computing
On Monday while the exhibit floor was still under construction I stopped by Cycle Computing’s booth to talk with Jason Stowe, the CEO of Cycle Computing. To be honest, I went to the Cycle Computing booth thinking that there wasn’t going to be much there of interest to me. But in one of those great surprises that keeps me coming back to SC each year, I came away thinking there was a lot to the company’s technology. With customers from the very large (Lockheed Martin and Johnson&Johnson, among others) to very small start-ups, Cycle is helping customers take advantage of computers they already have for HPC, as well as facilitating a move to the cloud for HPC use cases.
Live from the show floor with Microsoft
On Monday while the exhibit floor was still under construction I stopped by Microsoft’s booth, recorder in hand, to talk with Kyril Faenov, General Manager of Microsoft’s Technical Computing Group. It was an interesting chance to talk not only about the beta release of the latest version of Microsoft HPC Server, but also to get a walk-through of Microsoft’s strategy for HPC — from the desktop to Top10 systems and everything in between — including a petascale GPU system that the company is helping to deploy in the near future.
In the interview Kyril does touch on new software that Microsoft is announcing from the show
Today at Supercomputing 2009, Microsoft Corp. announced the immediate availability of betas for Windows HPC Server 2008 R2 and distributed Microsoft Office Excel 2010 for the cluster. Together with the recently announced Microsoft Visual
…
MathWorks expands support for parallelism, announces TeraGrid tie-in
At SC09 this week The MathWorks made a couple of announcements related to MATLAB and Simulink, the company’s flagship computation products. Many of you will be familiar with MATLAB as one of the very popular high-level languages and interactive environment that enables you to perform computationally intensive tasks without needing to manage all the details that lower-level languages like FORTRAN and C require. With 2,000 employees in offices all over the world, The MathWorks reports over 1,000,000 users in more than 175 countries in industries ranging from aerospace and defense to education and electronics.
Over the years the company has expanded its offerings to support serious computation, including built-in support for multicore parallelism and mechanisms to allow for distributed computation via libraries like MPI on a large scale. The announcements this week build on those developments.
Inaugural HPC Community Leadership Award winners
In early October insideHPC announced voting for the inaugural HPC Community Leadership awards in two categories: Individual and Organization.
As regular readers know, we don’t just report on HPC — we live and work in this community. And we believe strongly in the power of recognizing the people and organizations that make a difference in HPC. The award recognizes the people and organizations who have persevered through technology, budget or organizational challenges to place innovative HPC solutions in the hands of users in business, engineering, technology, and science.
A select panel of HPC rock stars (from both sides of the Atlantic) recommended an impressive slate of nominees. I was enthusiastic about the idea, but even I was taken aback by the tremendous response we got from our readers. And with nearly 1,000 votes cast, the top two in each category were very close. A testament to the quality of the …
