Sweden’s Royal Institute of Technology to Upgrade XT to XE6
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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ALICE at U of Leicester Billed as Green Machine
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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University of Minnesota Goes Purple with UV 1000
SGI announced today that the University of Minnesota Supercomputing Institute for Advanced Computational Research (MSI) will soon deploy a new HPC system based around the Altix UV 1000. The new system will be made possible by a grant by the National Institutes of Health [NIH] awarded to the University of Minnesota in June of this year.
From the release:
MSI named the system Koronis after a Minnesota lake; it will feature a 1,152-core SGI Altix UV 1000 system with a shared-memory architecture in which each core can access all 3.1 terabytes of memory directly. Koronis
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TACC Lands Another Super
The Texas Advanced Computing Center and the University of Texas announced details on the latest in computing gear to enter their Austin campus. The $9 million machine, named “Lonestar”, will land on the J.J. Pickle Research Campus early next year. Wait, don’t they already have a “Lonestar” machine? Indeed they do, but this version is a big upgrade.
The new system, like its predecessors, will be dedicated to open science research. As such, it will join its older [and larger] brother “Ranger” as being served out to Teragrid consumers. How much new research? 302 Tflops worth. Not too shabby.
I think the most interesting thing about this system is that it’s really optimized for achieving real performance on scientific applications,
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Architect talks about China’s Godson chip
The EE Times is reporting this week that Wei-wu Hu, a professor at Beijing’s Institute of Computing Technology, gave a talk about the present and future of China’s homegrown chip at the annual Hot Chips conference. Hu’s paper focused on the high-end Godson 3B
5-nm STMicroelectronics process. The chip–which taped out in May and will be in silicon in September–measures 300 mm2 and delivers 128 gigaflops, Hu said.
The heart of the chip is the 64-bit, MIPS-compatible 464V core which sports a superscalar out-of-order pipeline capable of retiring four instructions per clock cycle. It supports 200 instructions to emulate the Intel x86.The “V” in the core’s name indicates the latest twist in the Godson design, extensions for vector processing.
The
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SGI Delivers to Stanford Solar Variability Project
SGI announced today that the Hansen Experimental Physics Laboratory Solar Observatories Group at Stanford University has lined up a full range of SGI gear for their Solar Dynamic Observatory (SDO) group’s research in solar variability. The SDO strives to understand the characteristics of the Sun’s interior and the components of its magnetic activity to help forecast space weather, and relies on SGI’s technology to receive, process and archive massive amounts of data.
For the first time, scientists are able to comprehensively view the dynamic nature of storms on the Sun. The immense amount of data collected during our research requires a powerful HPC solution capable of ingesting and analyzing data quickly and with precision,” said Phil
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University of Arkansas Receives $1.7 million for HPC Improvements
The University of Arkansas at Fayetteville announced that it has received a $1.7million grant from the National Science Foundation to improve the facility that houses the supercomputers for the college. The funds will be used to purchase air conditioners for the supercomputers and equipment that ensures that electricity can run around the clock, since many research projects require programs to run for several days and cannot sustain a power outage.
This National Science Foundation grant will allow Arkansas to move forward substantially in the area of research computing. It will provide the infrastructure that we need to house large-scale computers and storage that support several areas of science, and will improve
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NICS To Add 300 Teraflops
The National Institute for Computational Sciences (NICS) managed by the University of Tennessee has announced that it will add an additional 300 teraflops of computing capability to the NSF’s Teragrid. With twin awards totaling $3.4 million, NICS will add 200 million additional service units per year to the allocations pool, bringing their total to over 800 million.
We are extremely pleased to be able to put more continually available resources at the disposal of researchers with smaller codes, while still supporting the very largest applications,” said NICS Director Phil Andrews. “The importance of a research activity cannot be defined by the size of the code involved, and we want to give all NICS users the
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Marshall University Receives Grant for Internet2
Marshall University has announced that it is one of the recipients of a new NSF grant headed to West Virginia. The West Virginia’s Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR) received a $1,176,470 grant is aimed at enhancing the cyberinfrastructure across the state. As a part of the announcement from U.S. Senator Jay Rockefeller and West Virginia Governor Joe Manchin, Marshall will receive $525,874 from the grant to enable inter-campus Internet2 access for the state’s predominantly undergraduate institutions, community and technical colleges, and the K-12 community.
This vital funding will allow Marshall University to establish the mechanisms that will help our partners and collaborators strategically position themselves to join us in cutting-edge opportunities not
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AMD Appoints New Server CTO
AMD today announced that it has named a new Chief Technology Officer to its Server group. Donald Newell will take the post of vice president and CTO in the group. Newell was previously as a senior principal engineer leading the System-on-Chip [SoC] and datacenter networking architecture groups at AMD rival, Intel Labs.
As CTO, Newell will be responsible for the concept and definition of AMD’s long-term server roadmap based on current conditions, expected demand and long-term server trends. Newell will report to Rick Bergman, senior vice president and general manager, AMD Products Group.
Don Newell brings a strong combination of leadership skills, engineering and design expertise, and strategic direction,” said Bergman. ” We’re fortunate to have Don on board
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