DARPA calls for petaflops-in-a-rack proposals
We talked about this back in June of last year when DARPA issued an RFI for its Ubiquitous High Performance Computing program. That RFI was intended to gauge the community’s thinking on how we’d get to a system that was easy to program, computationally efficient, and computed at 50 GLOPS/w. That’s a big jump, considering that the #1 slot on the Green500 in November of 2009 weighed in …
Russia Investing In Supercomputing Development
According to an article today at The Register, Russia’s leaders are investing heavily in supercomputing technology. The post cites the APA saying that Vladimir Putin has allocated $37million to develop supercomputing technologies in Russia.
Russia launched its fastest supercomputer, Lomonosov, at the Moscow State University’s Research Computing Center in 2004. With the peak speed of 420TFLOPS, it is still ranked 12th in the
…
HPC cameos in Gordon Brown speech
I debated about whether this was news, but decided it was given that everyone was talking about President Bush’s mention of supercomputing in his 2006 state of the union address
First, I propose to double the federal commitment to the most critical basic research programs in the physical sciences over the next 10 years. This funding will support the work of America’s most creative minds as they explore promising areas such as nanotechnology, supercomputing,
…
PRACE looks at ClearSpeed
PRACE, the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe, sent me news via email about a PR they just issued covering some of the prototypes they have been evaluating in their continuing quest to catalogue, test, and document the known HPC universe.
PRACE is a press machine, so a release from them isn’t remarkable. What I thought was interesting was that the technology they chose to highlight features ClearSpeed quite prominently in the …
DOE dedicates new top secret computing center
Yesterday the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), a part of the US Department of Energy, dedicated its new National Security Computing Center (NSCC) at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, N.M.
The NSCC is a Department of Energy user facility for top-secret level applications that require high performance computing. Its unique capabilities will be applied to help solve pressing national security problems such as cyber defense, vulnerability assessments, informatics (network discovery), space systems threats and …
House subcommittee hearing on university research infrastructure, advanced computing
On Tuesday the House Committee on Science and Technology’s Subcommittee on Research and Science Education held a hearing in the Rayburn House Office Building to gather information and perspectives on the research infrastructure needs of universities and colleges as part of the push to new the America COMPETES Act.
From the committee press release
“Our focus on this legislation is a direct acknowledgement of the fact that America’s
…
G8 Research Councils to fund exascale software development
As noted in this article at Computerworld, the Group of 8 (or G8) Research Councils have announced a preliminary call for proposals for a new software program called “Interdisciplinary Program on Application Software towards Exascale Computing for Global Scale Issues”
By agreeing to set aside funds for supercomputer software development projects, the U.S., Canada, France, Germany, Japan, Russia and the United Kingdom, are heeding the arguments of some top researchers who believe that the
…
Obama’s Climate Service proposal
This isn’t an eco blog, but a lot of our community is involved in fielding systems that support climate research, so I thought this item from the USA Today was worth a mention
President Obama’s administration is creating a “climate service” and as part of that endeavor, it launched a website, www.climate.gov, Monday that provides data on such factors as carbon dioxide levels and arctic sea ice.
Commerce …
National Economic Council endorses exascale quest
This happened in September of 2009, but I just saw a reference to it today in a post by Irving Wladawsky-Berger (which is interesting in itself). Evidently the President’s National Economic Council lists getting to exascale as a part of its plan, “A Strategy for American Innovation: Driving Towards Sustainable Growth and Quality Jobs.”
Exascale computing shows up in the section titled “Harness Science and Technology to Address the ‘Grand Challenges’ of …
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
…










