Archives for February 2010

Cray Sweeps HPCMP TI10 Awards

Cray announced a big win for their US Federal business today.  They have officially swept all three system awards as a part of the DoD’s High Performance Computing Modernization Program Technology Insertion for 2010 [HPCMP TI10′].  The award is includes multiple years of services alongside three large system installs.  All told, its worth $45 million, […]

Win a free copy of Programming Massively Parallel Processors [CONTEST CLOSED]

[NOTE: This contest is now over.] With the review of Programming Massively Parallel Processors, the new CUDA-oriented parallel programming book by Kirk and Hwu, published and on the air, I’m left with a question: what to do with the book? Sure, I could put it on the shelf and experience that warm glow of ownership. […]

Microsoft includes 'parallel computing' among software development investments

Microsoft’s S. Somasegar, SVP of the Microsoft Developer Division, posted this week about some of the software development trends in which Microsoft is, or will be, investing. On Somasegar’s list is cloud computing, the web as a platform, agile and distributed development, and parallel computing Moore’s Law, the prediction that CPU performance would double every […]

SGI buys up storage maker COPAN Systems

Product portfolio expansion continues apace. But is it good for business? SGI announced on Tuesday that they’ve bought up storage vendor COPAN Systems SGI acquired the assets with the goal of expanding SGI’s storage portfolio to include a highly scalable, energy efficient enterprise Massive Array of Idle Disks (MAID) platform. COPAN storage solutions are designed […]

HPC startup Convey announces push in life sciences

HPC startup Convey Computer announced this week that it is starting a new push into life sciences with the formation of a new business unit. The unit will be headed by George Vacek, formerly in the HPC group at HP. “We are focusing much of our efforts on genomics because of the large data volumes […]

AMD outed as Magny-Cours show up on eBay early

Early this week Oakville Mehlville Computers listed four G34 socket 12-core Opterons for sale eBay UK. This is interesting because the product isn’t shipping yet, and at the time we didn’t have a window into whether AMD was on schedule with the launch (the auction is over, with no bids according to eBay). The listing […]

Book Review: Programming Massively Parallel Processors by Kirk and Hwu

This book is very focused on one thing: teaching readers how to develop parallel applications that perform well on NVIDIA’s GPUs using NVIDIA’s CUDA language. The authors do a good job explaining Tesla and CUDA, and as a beginning text this book has a significant advantage that beginning texts written for MPI, OpenMP, and so on don’t have: there are 200 million CUDA-capable GPUs already deployed, and the odds are pretty good that most readers either have, or can readily get access to, a computer on which they can meaningfully learn parallel programming.

If you are new to parallel programming and have access to a Tesla GPU, this book is a fine place to start your education. Readers already comfortable with parallel programming will find clear explanations of the Tesla GPU architecture and the performance implications of its hardware features, as well as a solid introduction to the principles of programming in CUDA, though they’ll probably do a lot of skimming over the already-familiar basics.

Companies, researchers encouraged to apply for Blue Waters time

This from NCSA this week The National Science Foundation is currently soliciting proposals from researchers who are interested in tackling challenging science and engineering problems using Blue Waters, a sustained petascale supercomputer that will come online in 2011 at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. Time on Blue Waters will be awarded through the National […]

PRACE to Establish Scientific Steering Committee

The Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe [PRACE] has announced that they will soon establish a scientific steering committee.  The first discussions of which will be held at an upcoming workshop on April 20th at at Forschungszentrum Jülich.  The Scientific Steering Committee [SSC] will serve as an important step in creating the new Europe-wide Research […]

Purdue Awarded Funds for State's First NSF Science and Tech Center

Purdue has announced that they were recently awarded $25million by the National Science Foundation to create the first NSF Science and Technology Center in the state of Indiana.  The center’s charter says they will explore the new frontiers of information science to “develop a set of principles extending information theory to integrate the elements of […]