Archives for July 2010

OSC partners with Moldex3D to bring industrial simulation software to Blue Collar Computing

In mid-July OSC let me know about a new development with their Blue Collar Computing program, which is seeing something of a resurgence these days (then I went on vacation and forgot to publish it). OSC has partnered with Moldex3D to demonstrate the performance of its pioneering 3-D simulations for efficient verifications of part/mold designs […]

NVIDIA-based cloud service offers GPUs for rent

PEER1 Hosting announced from SIGGRAPH yesterday in Los Angeles that their GPU-powered public rendering cloud is up and going. From the press release The system is running the RealityServer 3D web application service platform, developed by mental images, a wholly owned subsidiary of NVIDIA. The RealityServer platform is a powerful combination of NVIDIA Tesla GPUs […]

TACC works to build supercomputing skills with curriculum

One of the things that you start to worry about as soon as you have to manage your first HPC team is where your new recruits are going to come from. There just aren’t that many to choose from. One of the places working on that challenge is TACC at UT Austin (home to Ranger) […]

Open Grid Forum president says grids not dead yet

OGF president Craig Lee contributed an opinion piece to iSGTW last week opining (unsurprisingly) that grids aren’t dead yet. He sees a role for all the work that has gone before in grid computing as users seek to federate clouds To sum it all up in one phrase – grids are about federation; clouds are […]

Cray boots first multi-cabinet XE6 out the door

Yesterday Cray announced that the first of its new make-or-break HPC systems, the XE6 (formerly known as Baker), had been shipped in June “We are very proud of achieving this important milestone, which is the result of innovation, hard work and a strong commitment from Cray employees company-wide,” said Peter Ungaro, president and CEO of […]

State of the Union: Modeling and Simulation

NCSA has posted another of their recorded presentations by interesting visitors. This time Cynthia McIntyre, senior vice president of the Council on Competitiveness, describes how high-performance computing can transform industry, and what the Council is doing to expand the use of modeling and simulation in the private sector. Video here.

Vuduc wins NSF CAREER Award to make HPC better "by any means necessary"

In early June the NSF announced that Georgia Tech’s Richard Vuduc received an NSF CAREER Award for his work in tuning software to run on parallel systems. The name of his proposal, “Autotuning foundations for exascale systems”, attracted my attention and Rich agreed to tell us a little about himself, his work, and this prestigious award.

Here’s an excerpt from the interview where Dr. Vuduc describes the technical work in his proposal:

The proposal has two major research thrusts, one that explores analytical and statistical performance models to guide tuning, and another that explores tuning in emerging dataflow-like programming models. In both cases, we want methods that work on (a) the kinds of sparse, irregular, adaptive computations that I’ve been studying for some time now and that are a particular challenge to scale; and (b) the kinds of systems we can expect to see at exascale, which I am told will have “absurdly heterogeneous manycore nodes.” If we are successful, we will contribute to a goal…of developing a “science” of performance programming and engineering.

NAG grows C and C++ libraries

Late last week NAG announced it has expanded its NAG C library with 150 new functions, bringing the new total to over 1300. The new release of The NAG Library includes two new chapters on wavelet transforms and global optimization. A new sub-chapter has also been introduced on option pricing. Enhancements have been made in […]

Acceleware Announces NVIDIA Fermi Support

Acceleware today announced official support for NVIDIA’s Fermi silicon in their line of oil & gas and Electromagnetic software simulation products.  The release quotes the boost in double precision performance as one of the major contributors to the software speedup. For over six years Acceleware has leveraged its extensive experience in utilizing GPUs for HPC […]

OpenGL 4.1 Specs Released

The Khronos Group today announced the final specifications for the latest OpenGL release.  Version 4.1 of the open graphics spec looks to be aimed at moving ahead of its main competitor, DirectX 11.  One of the major features of interest to HPC users is the explicit ability to share data with OpenCL constructs. New specs […]