Report at The Tech Report from Friday detailing a preview of working silicon for AMD’s new six-core Opteron, the chip that AMD hopes will stave off Intel’s forthcoming Nehalem Xeons. The chip is codenamed “Istanbul” Istanbul is a fairly straightforward upgrade over current ‘Shanghai’ Opterons: a 45nm processor with 6MB of L3 cache that fits […]
Archives for February 2009
HyperTransport group's definition blender
February 22, 2009 by
Last week HPCwire ran this press release from the Hypertransport Group, released during their annual pow wow. Pretty standard stuff, except for the way this one reads Believing that the economic downturn makes computing technology key to reducing cost and increasing operational efficiency, the HyperTransport Technology Consortium today stated that it sees ongoing demand for […]
Intel aims tweaked servers at cloud computing
February 22, 2009 by
From a story at the UK’s TechWorld we learned last week that Intel is tweaking its Nehalem implementation to be more attractive to “cloud” installations Intel is developing a new motherboard, designed for servers used in cloud computing, that reduces power drawn to 85 watts in idle compared to 115 watts for standard Nehalem-based boards. […]
Kenworth's Rented Engineering Approach
February 20, 2009 by
When one sees a large commercial truck roll down the highway, aerodynamic efficiency doesn’t usually come to mind. However, the engineers at Kenworth are utilizing some fairly sofisticated fluid dynamic methods to improve the fuel efficiency of their vehicles. Trimming and tapering small valences and flaps will save an average driver $400 per year in […]
University of Louisville Buys IBM Supercomputer
February 19, 2009 by
HPCWire: The University of Louisville has announced the delivery of a new IBM supercomputer. The new silicon will become the fastest machine in the state of Kentucky. The “Cardinal Research Cluster [CRC]” will spin at 25Tflops with 5.2TB of memory. This computer infrastructure represents leading edge technology,” said Priscilla Hancock, UofL’s vice president for information […]
NMCAC and Dreamworks/Cerelink Collaboration
February 19, 2009 by
The New Mexico Computing Applications Center has announced a collaboration with media firms DreamWorks Animation SKG and Cerelink DMG to explore the development of a cloud computing service for computer generated film rendering. The collaboration would virtually expand the DreamWorks render farm out to a cluster in New Mexico during peaks times of concern. Richard […]
Red Hat and Windows to support each others hypervisors
February 18, 2009 by
Timothy Prickett Morgan reports from The Register this week that Red Hat and Microsoft have been coerced by customers into playing nice with each other Operating system suppliers Red Hat, which is the leading commercial Linux distro by some measures, and Microsoft, the only maker of Windows, today announced a cross-platform support agreement that will […]
Coding in the cloud, Mozilla's new web-based text editor
February 18, 2009 by
Michael Feldman has been reliving his past coding glory (not everyone knows he used to do compiler work for a living), as reflected in a blog post yesterday While a lot of the talk surrounding productivity in the HPC space has to do with parallel programming models and language compilers, for coders in the trenches, […]
TPC video overview of the new energy efficiency spec
February 18, 2009 by
The Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC) is working on several new benchmarks this year, one of which is an energy efficiency benchmark. Here’s a link to a YouTube video featuring Mike Nikolaiev from HP (chair of TPC’s Energy committee) with an overview of the new spec.
SiCortex hardware supports Virtual Prairie
February 18, 2009 by
A quick search of past posts verifies that, yes, this is the first pairie-related post here in nearly three thousand news posts. Sure, its a niche record, but I’m counting it. From SiCortex today Researchers at the University of Houston and the University of Rennes1 are leveraging several SiCortex high-productivity computing (HPC) systems at the […]
