Archives for 2008

Waiting for the bat signal: the economy and the future of HPC

Doug Eadline posted the results of his Linux Magazine poll, “How has the recent economic events effected your HPC budget plans for 2009?” on the 16th, but somehow I didn’t see it until now. Here is what he found (out of 42 votes so, like my surveys, not exactly a large sample) No effect (40%) […]

As HPC'ers how do you stay in touch with trends in the community? Develop professionally?

I’m curious to know what mechanisms you use for professional development as HPC’ers. Which conferences are especially useful? Do you belong to a professional society that is helpful in your career (ACM, IEEE Computer, etc), either from the point of view of staying current on technology or achieving career goals? To date I’ve mostly relied […]

Computing research challenges for the 21st century

Peter Lee and Ed Lazowska posted at the CCC’s blog last week on an initiative they have going to collect short idea pieces on the future of computing research from the industry’s best and brightest Well, the response has been tremendous. A sample of what we received is now posted on the CCC web site […]

HPCwire: Top 10 hits and misses in HPC

One of the things I learned during the time that I was blogging for InfoWorld was that web readers love lists. I just wasn’t very good at writing them. But HPCwire’s Michael Feldman is, and he has a list of the top 10 hits and misses in HPC for 2008. My favorite? Number 10 Even […]

900 million processor-hours awarded in 2009 DOE INCITE round

Last week the United States Department of Energy announced their sixth annual round of large HPC allocation awards “From understanding the makeup of our universe to protecting the quality of life here on earth, the computational science now possible using DOE’s supercomputers touches all of our lives,” said DOE Under Secretary for Science Raymond Orbach, […]

U of Houston Installs New Sun Cluster

The University of Houston Research Computing Center [RCC] in collaboration with the Texas Learning and Computation Center [TLC2] recently purchased and installed a new cluster decorated with Sun logos.  The new machine, developed at a cost of ~$200k, contains 82 Sun machines equipped with 2.3Ghz AMD Opteron processors and an Infiniband interconnect. It runs faster, […]

Green HPC in Scientific Computing World

Twitter user erincollopy points us to this article at hpcprojects.com (a subsite of Scientific Computing World) on the greening of HPC HPC suppliers are addressing this problem on a number of fronts: at the chip level, at the blade/box level, in computing infrastructure, and with software. HPC users must consider the entire ecosystem ‘from chips […]

Rackable's new racks

Last week Rackable announced a new “data center enclosure” for your gear. You can slot in either AMD or Intel servers, but they’ll have to be Rackable’s, since they are made to hold the company’s half-depth servers MobiRack enclosures allow new levels of data center mobility and feature a, light weight plastic case that will […]

Sun Compute Cluster part of new Rapid Solutions program

Sun announced last week a new services offering tied to its hardware and designed to help customers get their installation done faster. Mostly this is done by pre-packaging solutions — this controls options and let’s Sun streamline the provisioning of certain popular (they hope) offerings. Sun, oddly, calls these “reusable artifacts” Sun is leveraging its […]

New computer memory possible with good old-fashioned pencil lead

Scientists at Rice have found a way to create a new kind of memory from a strip of graphene, the stuff that in bulk is called graphite, and drives No 2 pencils the world over Rice professor James Tour says that graphene memory would increase the amount of storage in a two-dimensional array by about […]