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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News about the Intel team, now with SGI inside
When we wrote about DARPA’s UHPC press release earlier this week the notable thing was how little information it contained beyond the names of the lead institutions for the five teams. NVIDIA did its own release, spilling the beans about its team (Cray, ORNL, and others). Now we know a little more about the Intel team, thanks to teammate SGI.
Actually, that’s pretty much all the additional info we have. The SGI release says this
SGI…today announced it is partnering with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Intel and other industry leaders to develop a future computing architecture that will overcome the limitations of the current evolutionary approach. DARPA’s Ubiquitous
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The rest of the UHPC awardees, and not much else
We already mentioned the award that the NVIDIA team received as part of DARPA’s UHPC program, but in fact four TA1 design teams were awarded funding as part of the program this week. DARPA released its own press release [PDF] which doesn’t say much new other than who is leading the winning teams: the four TA1 teams are Intel, NVIDIA, MIT’s CSAIL, Sandia; and the TA2 benchmark team is led by the Georgia Institute of Technology. We know that Cray is on NVIDIA’s team from the NVIDIA announcement. The only other vendor I’ve heard of that is playing a major role on one of the teams is SGI. According the grapevine SGI is on Intel’s …
Hawaii Open Supercomputing Center Receives $5Million Grant
The Hawaii Open Supercomputing Center [HOSC] at the University of Hawaii today announced that it has received a $5 million grant for expansion and upgrades. Senators Daniel K. Inouye and Daniel K. Akaka announced that the money was appropriated in the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2010 approved by the Senate back in December.
In order for Hawaii to seriously compete in the global economy we must continue to innovate by investing in high technology and developing the intellectual and physical infrastructure necessary to support growth,” said Senator Inouye.
As information technology advances, our infrastructure must keep up,” said Senator Akaka. “This funding will help Hawaii to lead in a rapidly changing economy.”
HOSC will acquire a new system to be housed at the …
NNSA administrator on the next generation of computational scientists
In mid-June National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) Administrator Thomas D’Agostino delivered a speech at the 2010 Department of Energy Computational Science Graduate Fellowship conference. In keeping with the setting, D’Agostino focused on the importance of trained humans as the centerpiece of a vibrant computational policy and essential component in achieving the NSSA mission.
You can read his full remarks online, but I’ve pulled a few items I thought were especially interesting
Take, for example, the Nuclear Posture Review released publicly this past April. While it obviously defines the role of nuclear weapons for our future national security, it also recognizes and explicitly mentions a key theme I have been promoting for a number of years: the importance of recruiting
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State of the Union: Modeling and Simulation
NCSA has posted another of their recorded presentations by interesting visitors. This time Cynthia McIntyre, senior vice president of the Council on Competitiveness, describes how high-performance computing can transform industry, and what the Council is doing to expand the use of modeling and simulation in the private sector.
COMPETES out of committee in the Senate
On Thursday of last week the Senate version of the COMPETES Reauthorization Act (S. 3605, text here), made it out of committee with bipartisan support. Bart Gordon (D-TN), the man largely responsible for getting it out of the House over a slew of republican shenanigans aimed at stopping the bill on largely frivolous terms, had this to say
“I applaud Senator Rockefeller for his work moving this important piece of legislation. The legislation that the Senators voted on moved the funding levels in line with what passed the House in May.
I applaud their work, balancing importance of these investments with realities of our current fiscal environment. This pragmatic approach—and the bipartisan manner with which it
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DARPA at Dugan plus one year
It’s been a year since DARPA’s new chief, Regina Dugan, took over the reigns from an administration that found itself crosswise with the academic community at just about every opportunity. By all accounts, she has been a welcome change.
According to a blog post at the CCC Ken Gabriel, the deputy director of DARPA, recently gave a talk looking back at the past year. Some of the changes he highlighted
Specifically, Gabriel started by highlighting five key changes that have occurred at DARPA in the past year:
- “Go/no-go” is gone.
- Contracting has been simplified. The process is as clear, simple, and fast as the law allows.
- More realistic conflict of interest rules have been applied to people coming to work at DARPA.
- Program
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House calls for investigation into security of cloud computing at NASA
Here’s something that people tend to gloss over when they get all wide-eyed with the promise of clouds: a good deal of the scientific computing around the world done by the state, in state-owned computing facilities. And more than half of that is done in the United States. Where there is a patchwork of legislation and regulation that expressly forbids the storage of federal data of various kinds on non-federal computers.
So it was with interest that I read Title IX of the House National Aeronautics and Space Administration Authorization Act of 2010 (text here)
TITLE IX. OTHER PROVISIONS
Sec. 901. Cloud Computing
(b) REPORT.—Not later than 1 year after NASA has entered into a contract for its first use
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China focus on technology could transform world technology
China’s rapid move up the past several Top500 lists is getting attention inside our community and in the mainstream press as well, where coverage is beginning to reflect the changes to markets and technologies that the world is likely to experience as a result of China’s growing investments in, and successes with, high tech.
An article at Bloomberg Businessweek last week is a case in point that includes reference to the recent #2 Top500 machine.
The article lists 5 of the top reasons that China will “rule tech.” Those reasons include: Chinese leadership understands engineering, as evidenced by 8 of 9 of the country’s top leaders (including the president) having engineering degrees (US leaders have law degrees); China has …
