We have invented a unique approach to building a fabric across a large number of Ethernet switches, and built a comprehensive technology platform based on this Flexible Radix Switching (FRS) technique. This innovation enables transparent integration with existing data center solutions and big improvements to networks supporting cloud, virtualization, and big data applications. These data center network solutions are superior in terms of cost, performance, robustness and ease of use.
Penguin Computing has revealed its new Cloud CS Storage Platform that will utilize Scality’s RING Organic Storage software.
Performance, availability and scalability requirements of large scale cloud businesses cannot be met with traditional IT approaches to storage, that typically excel in one of these areas and fall short in another,” said Charles Wuischpard, CEO Penguin Computing. “To meet the demands of our customers that require storage solutions at the petabyte scale we based our large scale storage appliance Icebreaker CS on software from Scality. With its distributed no-shared architecture and its sophisticated Advanced Resilience Configuration, Scality RING offers excellent storage scalability and great availability without compromising performance.”
This week SGI announced that iVEC and the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) have selected SGI to provide the massive data management infrastructure at the Pawsey Supercomputing Centre. The centre is part of the Australian Government Super Science Initiative to support the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) and the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) radio astronomy facility.
For decades, SGI has been solving Big Data challenges for researchers across science and industry in an effort to find answers to the world’s toughest challenges,” said Jorge Titinger, president and CEO, SGI. “We are very pleased to support the data management needs of the Pawsey Supercomputing Centre. They are conducting impressive research, and with our InfiniteStorage and UV 2000 technology, will be able to reach results and interactions more quickly. We look forward to continuing this partnership and seeing the Pawsey Centre’s revolutionary solutions to challenges in science.”
In this video, Jim Ryan and Paul Grun from OFA discuss where Open Fabrics is headed in the future.
Open Fabrics began as a way of providing a memory-to-memory messaging service from application to application. So, fundamentally, that’s what sets Open Fabrics apart from any other network. Typically networks are about delivering packets from one platform to another. But Open Fabrics takes a perspective that its about the way the applications communicate, it’s truly about memory to memory.
It’s hard to understate the importance of Gordon Bell to supercomputing as we know it today. While he was known as an architect and as an entrepreneur, for me personally his great charm and greatest contribution has been his ability to understand and then communicate in a very pithy, often funny and understandable manner very deep or complex trends in computing – for example, comments attributed to him include ‘the network becomes the system’ or ‘the most reliable components are the ones you leave out,’ which often popped into my head this past year as we struggled with integrating a 20PF system,” said Michel McCoy, head of LLNL’s Advanced Simulation and Computing Program. “He has also been a part of the Lab’s history in supercomputing, showing us today that his passion for supercomputers and his belief in their importance in advancing human civilization is undiminished.”
In a guest lecture, Bell used his own “Bell’s Law of Computer Classes,” the subject of a 1972 article he authored, as the framework for discussing the evolution of supercomputing since the 1960s. The emergence in the 60s of a new, lower cost computer class based on microprocessors formed the basis of Moore’s Law. Bell posited that advances in semiconductor, storage and network technologies brought about a new class of computers every decade to fulfill a new need. Classes include: mainframes (1960s), minicomputers (1970s), networked workstations and personal computers (1980s), browser-web-server structure (1990s), palm computing (1995), web services (2000s), convergence of cell phones and computers (2003), and Wireless Sensor Networks aka motes (2004).
Finland’s national state-owned high-performance computing centre, CSC, is building a new supercomputer – a Cray XC30 known as Sisu.
The inauguration of the computer in the town of Kajaani this week brought together representatives of the European HPC community, which is hoping that the machine will provide researchers with extremely high performance computing capability and pave their way towards scientific innovations.
Sisu will offer researchers resources to investigate such subjects as nanotechnology, fusion energy and climate change. At the second stage of the installation, in 2014, Sisu’s computing power will reach the petaflop class – capable of one quadrillion floating point operations per second.
As a part of Datacenter CSC Kajaani, the new supercomputer supports Ministry’s goal of Finland being in the vanguard of knowledge by the year 2020. The Finnish researchers will have access to a state-of-the-art research infrastructure that will also support the internationalisation of research,” said Riitta Maijala, from the Finnish Ministry of Education and Culture.
CSC’s new supercomputer Sisu is the first Cray XC30 server in production in Europe. The processors are provided by Intel.
The robot’s task is to learn the timing needed to hit a flying ball, mimicking the sort of visual thinking humans use to quickly learn how to navigate through the real world.
Over at the Nvidia Blog, Brian Caulfield writes that researchers in Japan has used GPUs and the CUDA parallel programming model to create a 100,000 neuron simulation of the human cerebellum, one of the largest simulations of its kind in the world. And they’ve put their model to the test by applying this knowledge to teach a robot to learn to hit a ball.
Our physical actions change the environment, which changes the sensory input to human brain our sensation. The brain then processes this changed sensory information and determines what action to take. It is called the ‘sensorimotor loop,’” Igarashi explains. “The brain must continue to choose appropriate actions on the basis of gradually-changing sensory information.”
One of the biggest challenges in modeling neural brain function: simulation speed. Using a CPU alone it took 98 seconds of compute time to figure out how to respond to a stimulus lasting just one second. Using GPUs resulted in a 100x speedup, giving the GPU-based system the speed needed to handle real world tasks.
To show their system in action, the researchers demonstrated their robotic system learning – in real time – how to hit a small plastic ball thrown by a toy pitching machine with a round plastic racket. Yamazaki believes his work could result in robots within 5 years that rely on a silicon cerebellum that will allow them to “think” – that is, they would be able to assess their environment and organize movements autonomously.
Today Indiana University unveiled the Big Red II supercomputer, a hybrid petascale Cray system.
There are other universities that hold legal title to computers as fast or faster than Big Red II, but IU is the first in the world to have its own one petaFLOPS supercomputer as a dedicated university resource,” said Craig Stewart, IU Pervasive Technology Institute executive director and associate dean of research technologies. “Big Red II will be used by IU, for IU to support IU’s activities in the arts,humanities and sciences, and to support the economic development of Indiana, without any constraints from an outside funding agency.”
The new system is a next-generation Cray XK supercomputer, specifically crafted for IU’s needs. Housed in the university’s state-of-the-art Data Center, Big Red II has more than 21,000 computer processor cores (compared to Big Red’s 4,100). Big Red II will support big data applications in computational research. To further advance Big Data research, IU is also implementing a new disk storage system called the Data Capacitor II (DCII), a five petabyte, high speed/high bandwidth storage system.
The HPC Advisory Council will hold their 2013 European Conference on June 16th, 2013, in conjunction with the ISC’13 conference in Leipzig, Germany. The workshop will focus on HPC productivity and futures, and will bring together system managers, researchers, developers, computational scientists and industry affiliates to discuss recent developments and future advancements in supercomputing.
In this video from the 2013 Open Fabrics Developer Workshop, D.K. Panda from Ohio State University presents: High Performance RDMA-based Design for Big Data and Web 2.0 memcached.
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