Entries filed under “Compute”

News related to the processors used in HPC gear.

Video: Titan Supercomputer Session Showcases Science on GPUs

By Rich Brueckner | Published May 25, 2012

In this video from GTC 2012, Jack Wells, Director of Science at ORNL introduces a series of talks on the research that will be accelerated by the hybrid Titan supercomputer.

The whole system is an upgrade,” said Jack Wells in describing how Oak Ridge’s current Jaguar supercomputer is being transformed into Titan. ORNL is transitioning from Cray’s XT5 compute blades to their XK6 compute blades, which use hybrid chipsets comprised of AMD Opteron CPUs and NVIDIA Tesla GPUs. Application benchmarks conducted thus far have demonstrated that the XK6 is yielding performance improvements ranging from 50 percent to 230 percent compared with the XT5.

The following talks comprised the rest of the session:

Also posted in Events, GPUs, GTC - GPU Technology Conference, HPC, HPC Hardware, Video | Leave a comment

ARCHIE Boosts Research at Scottish Universities

By Rich Brueckner | Published May 23, 2012

A high-performance computer that can tackle complex calculations to solve major challenges in science and engineering, including drug development, energy systems and space technologies research, has been installed at the University of Strathclyde, UK.

The computer is at the core of a new £1.6 million regional Supercomputing Centre, funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), which will help academics further their research and support business and industry through the next generation of product design and development.

Professor David Littlejohn, associate deputy principal at the University of Strathclyde, said: ‘The new centre will make a step-change in high-performance computing provision for Scotland, helping researchers to work with industrial colleagues from around the world to develop and test innovative new products and technologies.

‘Our plans for the centre have received overwhelming support from industry, and we are delighted that the EPSRC has chosen to invest in our infrastructure and the work of our internationally leading scientists and engineers.’

The advanced computer is known as ARCHIE (Academic and Research Computer Hosting Industry and Enterprise), and was the result of a successful funding bid submitted by scientists Professor Littlejohn, Professor Maxim Federov and Dr Richard Martin, and engineers Professor Jason Reese and Dr Paul Mulheran.

The funding will enable multidisciplinary researchers at the Universities of Strathclyde, Glasgow, Glasgow Caledonian, Stirling and the University of the West of Scotland to access the Supercomputing Centre and link up with other supercomputing centres around the world.

They will work with public and private sector partners in a wide range of research areas, including the purification of seawater, renewable energy, the next generation of mobile communications and improved air transport systems.

This story originally appeared on HPC Projects. It appears here as part of a cross-publishing agreement with Scientific Computing World.

Also posted in HPC, HPC Hardware, New Installations | Leave a comment

GPUs Power Penguin Computing, from HPC to Cloud and on to the Enterprise

By Rich Brueckner | Published May 17, 2012

In this video, Tom Coull from Penguin Computing describes the company’s GPU-powered computing solutions for HPC. Penguin On Demand has offered GPUs in the Cloud for years, and the recent Kepler GPU announcement from Nvidia is figuring prominently in Penguin’s plans.

Coulll also describes Penguin Computing’s move to provide enterprise customers with the same powerful server and storage solutions that have powered its HPC customers.

Also posted in Events, GPUs, GTC - GPU Technology Conference, HPC, HPC Hardware, Video | Leave a comment

GPUs Power Part-Time Scientists’ Plan for Lunar Rover Autonomy

By Rich Brueckner | Published May 17, 2012

Today at the GTC 2012 conference, a team calling themselves the Part-Time Scientists presented plans for their GPU-powered lunar rover entry in the Google Lunar X Prize.

The autonomous navigation system of Asimov is a major technological leap. While the Russian Moon rovers Lunokhod 1 and 2 in the early 70s were fully controlled from Earth, today’s Mars rovers like NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover “Opportunity”, which has been tirelessly exploring the Red Planet since 2004, are autonomous. However, Opportunity requires nearly three minutes to process a pair of images – a delay that causes it to move at an average speed of just 1 cm/sec or less. New developments by the technology partnership between the DLR Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics (RMC) and the PTS have created, for the first time, an autonomous navigation system for a rover that has the capacity to process multiple images per second. The technology boosts a stereo camera that Asimov will use to calculate its own motion, generate a 2.5-dimensional environmental model, evaluate the site and determine a collision-free path – all in real time.

Read the Full Story.

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DoD HPC Mod to Double Compute Capacity with Four Petaflop Upgrade

By Rich Brueckner | Published May 16, 2012

The Department of Defense High Performance Computing Modernization Program (DOD HPCMP) has just completed its largest one-time investment in supercomputing capability supporting the science, engineering, test and acquisition communities of the DoD. The total acquisition is valued at $105 million, and includes $80 million for multiple systems along with an additional $25 million in hardware and software maintenance services. This will more than double the DOD HPCMP’s current sustained computing capability.

This latest acquisition will provide significant capability for DOD scientists and engineers to stretch the boundaries of scientific discovery, expand engineering capabilities and accelerate the delivery of new technologies to the defense communities,” observed John West, director of the HPCMP. The purchase includes seven systems that will collectively provide over 225,000 cores, over 520 gigabytes of memory and a total storage capacity of 23 petabytes. Each system is scheduled to be fully accepted and operational by the end of the calendar year.

The HPC vendors participating in the system deployments include IBM, SGI and Cray, Inc. Read the Full Story.

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BOXX Demos Deskside Supers using Nvidia Maximus Platform

By Rich Brueckner | Published May 16, 2012

This week BOXX Technologies is demonstrating their 3DBOXX workstation computers featuring NVIDIA Maximus technology at GTC 2012. Maximus technology enables engineers to complete simulation or rendering plus visualization simultaneously on the same workstation.

In the past, content creation that employed both visual design and physical simulation often resulted in these tasks occurring on different systems or at different times,” said Shoaib Mohammad, BOXX VP of Marketing and Business Development. “Our integration of NVIDIA Maximus technology enables users of Autodesk, NVIDIA iray, SolidWorks, CATIA, Bunkspeed and other professional applications to design and render simultaneously resulting in a faster, seamless workflow essential to increasing productivity.”

Read the Full Story.

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SGI Boosts Big Data Performance with Sandy Bridge

By Rich Brueckner | Published May 15, 2012

This week SGI announced world record benchmark performance with full support for the newest Intel Xeon processor E5-2400 and E5-4600 product families. The E5-2400 is now the base processor in the SGI Hadoop Starter Kits and is available in the SGI Rackable product line for use in other applications.

Big Data is characterized not just by its volume but also by its velocity and variety. Moreover, Big Data can be in either structured or unstructured forms. These dynamics give rise to a broad range of demands made on a computer system, especially for high performance and comprehensive analytics,” said SGI CTO Dr. Eng Lim Goh. “Our long design relationship with Intel and the incorporation of the more robust Intel Xeon E5 processors, have enabled us to develop the next SGI coherent shared memory platform that scales up even higher, in compute, memory and IO, than our previous generation. The result is a system ideally suited to meet this broad spectrum of existing and emerging Big Data challenges.”

Read the Full Story.

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Interview: Cray Not Becoming a Software Company

By Rich Brueckner | Published May 14, 2012

In this podcast, Mike Bernhardt from The Exascale Report sits down with Cray CEO Peter Ungaro to discuss the company’s continuing mission as a systems company. As reported here, Cray recently announced that Intel has acquired Cray’s interconnect technology, a move that has puzzled some media pundits.

Contrary to misleading rumors – Cray continues Its focus as a systems company. Intel and Cray should be applauded for smart, strategic business decision. A number of publications have voiced their opinions that Cray is shifting its focus and strategic direction to software. Some public comments have even gone as far as stating that Cray is becoming a software company.

Read the transcript (PDF) * Download the MP3 * If Dropbox is blocked, download from this Google page.

Also posted in GPUs, HPC, HPC Hardware, Network, Podcast | Leave a comment

Video: Appro Supercomputer Solutions

By Rich Brueckner | Published May 11, 2012

In this video, Steve Lyness from Appro presents: Appro Supercomputer Solutions.

Abstract:
To survive in an ever-changing global environment, creating and delivering innovative products and services are what give any business the competitive edge in today’s global markets. In this presentation, you will learn how Appro, a US based High Performance Computing company met the supercomputing requirements of the University Of Tsukuba Center Of Computational Sciences in Japan. Learn how reliability, availability, manageability and compatibility were essential for the successful 800TF hybrid supercomputing implementation. Learn best practices on improving data I/O performance and memory size limitations configured with Lustre™ File System to offer the best performance per dollar with excellent memory capacity per FLOP. Explore how the University of Tsukuba’s Appro Xtreme-X™ Supercomputer is accelerating large scale parallel code by combining CPU/GPU processing cluster configurations and how this implementation will be used as a pioneer for a competitive advantage for future exascale computing systems.

Recorded at the 2012 National HPCC Conference in Newport.

Also posted in Events, HPC, HPC Hardware, National HPCC Conference, Video | Leave a comment

Video: Data Intensive Computing from SGI

By Rich Brueckner | Published May 9, 2012

In this video, Dr. Eng Lim Goh from SGI presents: Data Intensive Computing. Recorded at the 2012 National HPCC Conference in Newport.

Dr. Goh always gives great talks and this one is no exception. The presentation includes remote demos of SGI’s Big Data capabilities.

Here are the three videos Dr. Goh points to at the end of the talk:

In related news, today SGI announced that the DoD Supercomputing Research Center will install a 1.5 Petaflop SGI ICE X supercomputer. Read the Full Story.

Also posted in Events, HPC, HPC Hardware, National HPCC Conference, Storage, Video | Leave a comment

Penguin Computing Makes Moves Toward the Enterprise

By Rich Brueckner | Published May 8, 2012

In a move to expand its market to Enterprise computing, Penguin Computing today announced its new Relion E-series line of Sandy Bridge servers engineered to meet the demanding requirements of enterprise customers.

Achieving business results with minimal TCO is key in enterprise IT environments,” said Charles Wuischpard, president and CEO of Penguin Computing. “This is where our new Relion E-series servers shine. Built on Intel’s ‘Sandy Bridge’ processor platform, they deliver on performance. All servers are meticulously engineered by our Linux experts and include the software tools that are needed for large scale deployments.”

Read the Full Story.

Also posted in Business of HPC, Enterprise HPC, HPC, HPC Hardware | Leave a comment

New Whitepaper: Arithmetics on Intel’s Sandy Bridge and Westmere CPUs – not all FLOPs are Created Equal

By Rich Brueckner | Published May 8, 2012

A new whitepaper from Colfax International presents a new arithmetic efficiency benchmark and uses it to compare the Intel Sandy Bridge E5-2680 CPU to the Intel Westmere X5690 CPU performance.

These results lead to the conclusion that the edge of the 8-core, 2.70 GHz Sandy Bridge CPU over the 6-core, 3.46 GHz Westmere processor will be most significant in both single and double precision for linear algebra and other tasks based on addition and multiplication. Re-compilation of codes performing addition and multiplication-based tasks with AVX intrinsics instead of SSE2 should lead to additional performance benefits on Sandy Bridge. However, CPU- bound calculations heavily using the division operation and transcendental functions are likely to experience a smaller speedup from using the Sandy Bridge processor in place of Westmere. Likewise, they will benefit less from the migration from SSE2 to AVX.

Read the Full Story.

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Video: Bull Positioning in HPC

By Rich Brueckner | Published May 5, 2012

In this video, Eric Monchalin from Bull presents: Bull Positioning in HPC. Recorded at LUG 2012 in Austin.

Note: Most of the videos from LUG 2012 are now posted at the OpenSFS site.

Also posted in Events, HPC, HPC Hardware, LUG 2012, Video | Leave a comment

Transtec Expands Deskside Supercomputer Portfolio

By Rich Brueckner | Published May 4, 2012

Kronos workstations and Nexxus C deskside supercomputers from Ciara are being added to the Transtec high-performance computing portfolio, the company has announced. Suited to customers who need powerful deskside systems for CAE simulation or CAD applications, both systems feature industrial-standard closed water cooling. This enables the Kronos workstations to be safely overclocked and makes the Nexxus C supercomputers quiet and suitable for deskside installation.

Designed to work with complex applications such as Catia, Ansys, ProEngineer/Creo and NCSIMUL, Kronos workstations are based on Intel Sandy Bridge or Westmere processors. With overclocking, their processing power can be significantly increased to 5.2 GHz and the RAM speed can also be accelerated beyond the manufacturer’s specifications. The integrated industrial-grade advanced high-performance cooling system dissipates the heat produced by overclocking. Configured for high speed, the workstations also come with an SSD hard disk, optimised for the needs of engineering and multimedia workstations, and an Nvidia Quadro graphics card. The systems are available single- or dual-core models and as desktop or rackmount systems.

The Nexxus C deskside supercomputer features the Intel Sandy Bridge CPU (Intel Xeon E5-2600 series) and is designed for operation outside dedicated server rooms. One system can provide up to 20 processors, 120 cores, 16 GPGPUs and almost 2TB of memory. The integrated industrial-grade advanced high-performance cooling system results in quiet operation even at full load, while a backplane manages the cables. The computer can also be linked to QDR Infiniband interconnect.

Read the Full Story.

This story originally appeared on HPC Projects. It appears here as part of a cross-publishing agreement with Scientific Computing World.

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Convey Rolls Out HC-2 Hybrid Core Computer for 2-3x Performance on Genomics

By Rich Brueckner | Published April 24, 2012

Today Convey Computer announced their new HC-2 series of hybrid-core computers designed to provide users with greater performance, functionality, and energy efficiency. The company shipped the first HC-2 to JAX, who is using the system for high throughput sequencing in genomics research.

From our initial benchmarks, we anticipate a ten-fold performance improvement in BWA, a key program we use in our research,” said Chuck Donnelly, director of Computational Sciences at JAX, referring to the Burrows-Wheeler Aligner. “Faster computing analysis with the Convey system means that we can see results faster—which helps us fulfill our mission to discover the genetic basis in preventing, treating and curing human disease.”

Read the Full Story.

Also posted in Accelerators, HPC, HPC Hardware | Leave a comment

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