Archives for March 2007

via HPCwire This post is for my pal Mike, a UK alum: The state-of-the-art IBM System Cluster 1350 offers a theoretical peak performance of 16 teraflops of calculation capacity, offering both greater speed and broader access for scientific research in a broad range of academic disciplines. This means the new machine can handle up to […]

Isilon announced today a new relationship with NASA (full release here): Isilon…announced that the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is using Isilon IQ clustered storage to power World Wind, an open source, virtual globe enabling online users to explore the Earth and its terrain through visually rich, high resolution 3D imagery. With Isilon IQ, […]

From the New York Times today: John W. Backus, who assembled and led the I.B.M. team that created Fortran, the first widely used programming language, which helped open the door to modern computing, died on Saturday at his home in Ashland, Ore. He was 82. Thanks to Savas Parastatidis for the pointer. The Wikipedia says […]

Reader Paul Adams pointed insideHPC to an interesting article in which Sam Holland argues that supercomputers belong in the offices of “regular people”, not in hermetically sealed machine rooms accessible only to die hard and determined researchers. Sam argues that supercomputers are one of the biggest creativity-enhancing tools we have right now and that everyone […]

As everyone knows the only thing cooler than lasers is a blackhole—if we could just get that laser-based supercomputer doing blackhole simulations I could stop waiting for a Pink Floyd reunion tour. Researchers are using PSC’s Cray XT3 to perform simulations that show how the large-scale structure of the universe evolved over 14 billion years. […]

I got this piece of news by email from Tracy Peet at the EPCC: The FPGA Supercomputer “Maxwell”, based on technology invented in Scotland and constructed by the FPGA High Performance Computing Alliance, is launched today. …More powerful than a conventional system of a similar size and using ten times less power, Maxwell is delivering […]

We are closing out on a petabyte of storage around the ranch here, and are wondering how much longer we’ll have to keep buying tapes before someone asks whether we actually will ever need all this data users are creating. Anywho, this post by Jonathan Schwartz (CEO of Sun) amused me: I made a speech […]

So, apparently it’s not just me (and some of my buds) who thinks that Intel’s marketing machine should get extra credit for distorting reality. The Register on Saturday ran a story covering AMD’s realization that Intel’s marketing team ran all over them when they welded two chips together and called it a quad core: Bruised […]

You might care about this: The Open MPI community announced yesterday the availability of Open MPI 1.2, which includes a number of bug fixes, feature enhancements, and performance improvements over 1.1.x versions of the library. Congratulations to the community, including Sun’s MPI engineering team, for reaching this significant milestone! Tip of the cap to Josh […]

Sun has been talking recently more about hosted computing solutions, including hosted applications for science and engineering the ordinarily run locally on supercomputers. All of this ties in with the grid computing and virtualization strategies. Scott McNealy talks about the concept here (pdf). Sun announced this week that it has added additional features to its […]