Archives for October 2008

Is Supercomputing Just About Performance?

Our own Andrew Jones has written an interesting perspective piece for ZDNet on the “real” meaning of ‘P’ in HPC.  As we as an industry jump at the notion to immediately expand ‘HPC’ to High Performance Computing, Andrew postulates that there is more to ‘P’ than just performance. While I stand firm on ‘P equals […]

Visual Studio preview includes parallel programming tools

Found at MultiCoreInfo.com Microsoft released a Community Technology Preview (CTP) of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0 at its Professional Developers Conference (PDC) on Monday, and developers may be pleased with the new parallel computing capabilities now available in the CTP. To better deal with the problems of concurrency, where threads of code run at […]

Will cloud pricing answer the age-old question: is Windows more expensive?

Interesting angle from ComputerworldUK today exploring what cloud pricing may reveal about the total cost of ownership of various the various cloud platforms. I say “may” rather than “does” primarily because we are in the very early days of the development of business models and we don’t yet know whether the current pricing is rational […]

Reed comments on Azure

Lots of voices in the news-o-sphere about Microsoft’s Azure cloud services offering, but not any I trust as much as Dan Reed. From his blog today I don’t normally pitch Microsoft products in the blog, preferring to discuss science policy, technology research and development and global competitiveness. However, something big just happened at Microsoft, something […]

Open Education Cup

As the HPC industry has continued to grow and gain acceptance in mainstream commercial industry, more people are faced with the perils of efficiently architecting parallel applications.  There will always be a series of flagship universities and national laboratories that have the knowledge and means by which to further educate their staff on the Zen […]

Penguin Computing Announces High Density Solution

Penguin Computing has announced its latest line of server products designed for cluster computing operations.  The BladeRunner II platform enables one to pack up to 960 cores and 3.84TB of memory in a single rack.  The platform currently has interconnect options including DDR Infiniband and 10Gbps Ethernet. To support the latest data center designs and […]

CSC Upgrades Cray Super

The Finnish IT Center for Science [CSC] announced that they have recently upgraded their Cray compute platform.  The upgrade bumps the system to an XT5 with over 85 Tflops of peak capability.  They have also announced that later this year the system will undergo a second upgrade, a bump to over 100 Tflops.  The second […]

Mitrionics Announces Hybrid System Based on HP

Mitrionics has announced announced its MVP610 Hybrid Computing Server accelerated computing system based on the HP ProLiant DL165 server.  The DL165 is a 1U server chassis with a single 2.1Ghz Quad-Core AMD Opteron 2352 CPU.  The Single Socket Accelerated Server will include licensed copies of the Mitrion Virtual Processor [MVP], the XtremeData XD2000 HyperTransport socket-based […]

Darkstrand Announces High-Bandwidth Commercial Network

Darkstrand has formally announced the availability of its high-speed network.  In June of this year, Darkstrand won a bid to commercialize one half of the National Lambda Rail’s [NLR] 15,000 route-mile optical network.  Spanning thirty US cities, the NLR uses a 10-Gbps backbone to support large-scale digital production work for research groups that require lots […]

New research: GPU market growing despite hard times

From DailyTech The latest figures are in from Jon Peddie Research (JPR) on the overall GPU industry for Q3 2008. JPR reports that more than one third of computer systems shipping today use multiple GPUs accounting for some of the increased growth in the market. In Q3 2008 111 million GPUs were shipped, that is […]