Archives for February 2007

Frances Allen receives prestigious Turing award

via HPCwire ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery, has named Frances E. Allen the recipient of the 2006 A.M. Turing Award for contributions that fundamentally improved the performance of computer programs in solving problems, and accelerated the use of high performance computing. This award marks the first time that a woman has received this honor. […]

Bill McColl on two disk reliability papers

Bill McColl has an entry today that points to two papers from Google and CMU that studied the reliability of a pool of 100,000 disk drives. I’m not into re-blogging without adding value, but his entry is really interesting and already pithy. The punchline: Two conclusions that can be drawn are that (a) high price […]

Sun technology aimed at connecting multi-threaded processors

Sun is talking today about its new silicon-based technology for connecting multi-threading processors (like, say, the Niagara 2) to the network [Sun] today unveiled its Sun Multithreaded 10 Gig E Networking Technology, the first network interface specifically designed to accelerate multi-threaded application performance by optimizing I/O throughput within environments that utilize parallel threads. … Also […]

New AMD Athlon 64

The Athlon isn’t ordinarily used in HPC (there was no instance of it on the November Top500), but AMD has announced a new single core low power version of its 64 bit processor that weighs in at 45 watts. They’ve also announced a new dual core performance Athlon. AMD press fluff here.

Google hosting conference on scalable systems

Google, the arbiter of most things big in the IT world, is hosting a conference on scalability this June at their offices in Seattle: An algorithm that works only on a small scale doesn’t cut it when we are talking global access, millions of people, millions of search queries. We think big and love to […]

Building a replica of the brain

Fascinating story in Spiegel Online about an experiment that connects together computer chips to replicate part of a rat brain: A network of artificial nerves is growing in a Swiss supercomputer — meant to simulate a natural brain, cell-for-cell. The researchers at work on “Blue Brain” promise new insights into the sources of human consciousness. […]

nVidia tries to make stream programming a little easier

nVidia has just announced the beta release of the NVIDIA CUDA Software Developer Kit (SDK) and C-compiler for computing on NVIDIA graphics processing units (GPUs). This release is targeted at Windows XP and Redhat and the GeForce 8800 graphics card and even includes FFT and BLAS reference implementations. The aim of the SDK is to […]

M$oft's your pal

Wanted to point those of you interested in learning more about Microsoft’s Compute Cluster Server to their series of 3-day Platform Adoption Labs coming up over the next several months. There are some coming up in the US and Europe between now and May. Haven’t been to one myself, so I can’t vouch for them […]

View from Berkeley

So, I’ve been holding off linking to this, but since everyone is commenting on it I wanted to go ahead and point you to “The Landscape of Parallel Computing Research: A View from Berkeley,” released in December. PDF here.

Cray closes UK HPC deal, announces quarterly profit

Cray announced yesterday that they’ve just signed a contract to deliver a hybrid Opteron/vector system to the UK’s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) High End Computing Terascale Resources (HECToR), a large HPC initiative in Europe. The new supercomputer will be installed at the University of Edinburgh’s Parallel Computing Centre (EPCC) in Edinburgh, Scotland, […]