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 …
PRACE awards 320 million hours to 10 projects
This week PRACE announced a big award of computational time to 10 projects in Europe
Ten research projects, five from Germany, two from the UK one each from Italy, the Netherlands and Portugal, have been awarded access to the PRACE infrastructure. In total 321.4 Million compute core hours were granted. Sixty-eight applications requesting a total of 1870 Million compute hours were received in this call, which was the first opportunity for researchers to apply for PRACE resources.
The successful research projects are in the fields of astrophysics, earth sciences, engineering, and plasma and particle physics including collaborators from 31 Universities and research institutes in 12 countries. These projects will have access to JUGENE, IBM BlueGene/P,
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PRACE announces call for allocation requests
Continuing with our “PRACE day” theme, let’s pass along news that I got over the email transom today about PRACE’s first call [PDF] for allocation applications. This call covers JUGENE, the IBM Blue Gene/P installed at the Gauss Centre. Allocations are due in August and will run from Nov 1 2010 to Oct 31 2011.
The deadline for submission of proposals is August 15th at 16.00 CEST. All proposals must be submitted via the PRACE website at:
http://www.prace-project.eu/hpc-accessThe First PRACE Regular call is intended for large-scale projects of high scientific quality and for which a significant impact at European and international level is anticipated. High scalability of the code (at least 8000 compute
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Blue Waters will not run AIX
It isn’t too much of a surprise that Blue Waters, NCSA’s 10+ PFLOPS super expected to come online in 2011, will run Linux. According to the November 2009 list, 89% of the Top500 (or 446 systems) use some variant of that ubiquitous OS. But it is perhaps a little more surprising that the system, a POWER7-based IBM that grew out of DARPA’s HPCS program, will not run AIX.
Staff at NCSA and IBM evaluated both the open-source Linux and IBM’s AIX as potential operating systems for Blue Waters, extensively testing both on identical hardware at large scale. SARA Computing and Networking Services in the Netherlands and the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) shared their
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IBM POWER7 system at Rice offers free cycles for medical research
Chron.com, the online presence of The Houston Chronicle, reported yesterday on a new super to be installed at Rice University. The system is one of the early POWER7-based systems shipped by IBM
IBM has given Rice one of its first supercomputers with the company’s new POWER7 microprocessors, a $7.6 million award, on the condition that Rice open up access to the computer to all in the Texas Medical Center. For free.
This effort builds on earlier collaborations between TMC and Rice, and peaks out at about 18 TFLOPS
When combined, Rice’s ‘Blue BioU’ system is accordingly 18 times more powerful than Deep Blue. It doubles Rice’s existing supercomputer capacity.
Just one planned use? Genomics
Baylor College of Medicine is participating in a federal project
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Companies, researchers encouraged to apply for Blue Waters time
This from NCSA this week
The National Science Foundation is currently soliciting proposals from researchers who are interested in tackling challenging science and engineering problems using Blue Waters, a sustained petascale supercomputer that will come online in 2011 at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. Time on Blue Waters will be awarded through the National Science Foundation’s Petascale Computing Resource Allocation (PRAC) program.
The PRAC program is open to universities, government laboratories, and industry; proposals are due Mar 17, 2010. Access to Blue Waters will be free for non-proprietary research; those wishing to keep their results to themselves have to pay
Companies may also join NCSA’s Private Sector Program. The program offers opportunities to perform proprietary research on Blue Waters, as well as other work on
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FSU adds 3Leaf systems to HPC configuration
3Leaf Systems, a relatively new company whose hardware can be used to create virtual SMPs, announced this week that Florida State University’s Department of Scientific Computing has signed up to install the 3Leaf Systems Dynamic Data Center Server into their HPC environment.
“As an organization that supports true multidisciplinary research, we provide a general access computing platform that must meet a diverse set of application requirements for our user community,” said Jim Wilgenbusch, Director of HPC, Research Associate in the Department of Scientific Computing of FSU’s shared-High Performance Computing facility. “3Leaf Systems is meeting our requirements for performance, flexibility and cost. With this platform we can add, remove, divide up, resize or reallocate resources across
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Ames expects Obama budget will mean growth
A story in the San Jose Mercury News last week cited officials confident that NASA’s Ames Research Center, located in Silicon Valley, will benefit from the proposed FY11 budget
“We’re highly confident that we’re going to get more money, and we do believe it’s going to enhance employment here, and in Silicon Valley,” said Lewis Braxton III, deputy director of Ames Research Center in Mountain View. He said it is too early to know how many additional local jobs would be created by NASA’s proposed new emphasis on unmanned space missions, climate change research, an extension of the International Space Station and plans to partner with private companies to launch astronauts into orbit.
The potential boon …
NASA goes further with its computational portal project
Parabon announced yesterday that NASA has extended the small business grant it awarded to Parabon Computation last January. That project was for a portal to let NASA’s users run scientific codes from their browser. The new effort is a two year, $600,000 project
As part of the space agency’s highly competitive Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) award program, Parabon will deliver a first-of-its-kind software service that enables scientists and engineers to interactively develop, execute and collaborate on modeling and simulation (M&S) applications from any standard web browser.
Built upon Parabon’s Frontier Grid Platform, which manages some of the largest computational grids, the new Modeling and Simulation as a Service (M&SaaS) solution will provide web-based Platform as a Service tools. These tools – such
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ORNL researcher proposes to use supers to identify health care fraud
Government Computer News carried a story last week about a proposal from a computer scientist at Oak Ridge to put Jaguar to use processing — or at least analysing — healthcare claims looking for fraud
Combining and analyzing health care data in real time could save as much as $50 billion a year by eliminating waste and preventing fraud in government-run health care programs, and also could improve the quality of medical care, said Andrew Loebl, a senior researcher in the lab’s Computational Science and Engineering Division.
“We have never put all of this data together,” Loebl said. “My idea is to use the storage capacity of the supercomputers at Oak Ridge to analyze the data.”
$50B is a lot of money, and if he can …
