Archives for March 2009

UPCRC Illinois Summer School for Multicore Programming

The Universal Parallel Computing Research Center has announced a series of courses this summer designed to introduce programmers to multicore programming paradigms.  From their website: Our program will provide a solid foundation in the fundamentals of multicore programming, offer hands-on experience with the use of multicore languages and libraries, and introduce emerging research topics. Upon […]

Monsters vs. Aliens: 100 Terabytes, 1,000 years of rendering, and HP

The boys and I saw Monsters vs. Aliens this weekend. They loved it, I enjoyed it, and I was astonished at the visual quality of what used to be the hard stuff in computer animation: realistic water and human skin. Unbelievable. Late last week HP issued a press release detailing how they had worked with […]

Work with NCSA in the Google Summer of Code

The optics on this are great: marry an HPTC research organization with the cool hip chic-ness of Google. From the release NCSA has been selected as a mentor organization for Google Summer of Code 2009 and is looking for students to participate. Summer of Code offers student developers stipends of up to $4,500 to write […]

Macedonia's first supercomputer

There was sketchy news on the computerwebs on Friday that Macedonia has just installed its very first supercomputer (no, I didn’t where Macedonia was either: it’s in Europe bordered by Serbia, Greece, Bulgaria, and others). The English in the postings isn’t great, and my Macedonian is even worse, but it appears that the system will […]

Intel Details Future Graphics Silicon

On Friday of last week, Intel decided to unveil more details on its upcoming graphics chip, Larrabee.  Tom Forsyth, software and hardware engineer at Intel, spoke at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco.  According to Forsyth, Larrabee will be Intel’s first many-core architecture.  It will look and behave much like a GPU, but will […]

Cray option buy back update

Remember back at the end of February when insideHPC broke the news that Cray was offering to buy back drowning options from employees as a gesture of goodwill? I thought you wouldn’t…so here is the link. Basically the company offered to buy back employee options for prices ranging from $0.10 to $0.801 per option, depending […]

Today's flash-based SSDs and their potential in HPC

I wrote a feature last week for HPCwire on solid state drives. I had two goals: first, to provide a little background for those wondering exactly what an SSD is and just why everyone is talking about them now. My second goal was to talk a little about the potential — and problems — of […]

The week in review

My regular weekly feature at HPCwire was up late last week; from that article’s introduction Sun sells supers down under for weather prediction; new Rackable solution achieves 99% power efficiency. John West recaps those stories and more in our weekly wrap-up.

Oxford installs supercomputer from Streamline Computing

In mid-March I had an email show up in the insideHPC news hopper with a pointer to news that the University of Oxford had just installed a new cluster from Streamline Computing (a division of Concurrent Thinking, an HPC vendor in the UK). The High Performance Computing (HPC) cluster was implemented by Streamline Computing and […]

Academic HPC discounts

A couple weeks ago I invited vendors with academic discounts to send me info and I’d do a round up here in response to what looked like a growing trend. I only got a few responses, but they are good ones. So if you are in an academic setting and short on cash (doesn’t the […]