Archives for November 2010

The Call for More Hardware Innovation in Cloud Computing

Theodore Omtzigt over at the High-productivity Cloud Computing Blog asks, Why is there so little hardware innovation in Cloud Computing? The market dynamics of IT has created this situation. It used to be the case that the enterprise market drove silicon innovation. However, the enterprise market is now dragging the silicon investment market down. Enterprise […]

Podcast: Allinea Software Ramps up for Exascale

In this podcast from SC10, we discuss recent developments from Allinea Software with Mike Fish, CEO, and Jacques Philouze, the company’s VP of marketing. Download the MP3 or Subscribe on iTunes. Allinea had a number of announcements at SC10 including: A big win at Taiwan’s National Center of High-performance Computing (NCHC) as part of a […]

Whitepaper: Xeon 5600 Memory Performance and Optimization

In this new whitepaper, the authors examine the architecture and performance of the Intel Xeon processor 5600 Series in IBM System x and BladeCenter Platforms. Similar to the 5500 Series processors, the 5600 architecture presents challenges to customers due to the flexibility and configuration choices offered by the new platform. The paper’s performance analysis covers […]

Video: Virident 800 GByte SSD Speeds HPC Applications

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CdqOZgi7ThQ In this video from SC10, Virident CTO Vijay Karamcheti describes the company’s new tachIOn SSD with 800 GBytes of usable capacity. This increased capacity doubles the storage in a low-profile, half-length form factor. Learn more at Virident.com.

Interview: Deep Computing Guide to Balancing GPUs with CPUs

Robin Bloor interviews IBM Deep Computing expert Scott Denham on the rise of heterogeneous systems for HPC. Processors are just not getting any faster. The simple fact is that once you raise a chip’s clock speed to 3 gigahertz and above, you run into diminishing returns as regards computer power. So the model of using an […]

Cloud HPC Makes the Rounds at SC10

The Science Clouds blog has posted a nice roundup of HPC Cloud developments from SC10 last week. Highlights included the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and the University of Colorado at Boulder, who used 150 Amazon EC2 instances for the Linux Cluster Construction tutorial. The virtual machines were launched on-demand the morning of the tutorial. They provided participants with a realistic software environment for configuring and deploying a Linux cluster using a variety of open source tools such as OpenMPI, Torque, and Ganglia.

Authors Paul Marshall And Pierre Riteau go on to say that it would be cool to see an HPC challenge category for cloud computing, perhaps running on Amazon’s cluster compute resource that premiered at number 231 on the TOP500.

Nvidia Reveals Details of Echelon GPU Designs for Exascale

According to this report at Xbit Laboratories, Nvidia revealed details of its Exascale development project known as Echelon at SC10 last week. The company is convinced that the road to Exascale will be through heterogeneous systems, though it will require a radical and rapid evolution of GPUs in order to enable exascale performance in the […]

Penguin Serves Up Scyld Insight Web-based Management

Penguin Computing is expanding the functionality of their offerings with Scyld Insight, a new web based management system that provides a next-gen interface to Scyld ClusterWare. This release simplifies how users can access, monitor, and control local system resources while providing dynamic spillover capabilities onto the Penguin On Demand cloud. Scyld ClusterWare is recognized for […]

Voltaire Ramps up for FDR InfiniBand

This week Voltaire announced plans to deliver FDR (fourteen data rate) InfiniBand switches for next generation InfiniBand. With a projected 80 percent increase in server-to-server throughput, the next-gen technology promises to deliver improved scalability and faster application runtimes. Expected in the second half of 2011 in alignment with next generation server platforms with PCIe 3.0, […]

Eric D. Isaacs on Why America Must Win the Supercomputer Race

Director of Argonne National Laboratory Eric. D. Isaacs blogs that the United States cannot afford to take a back seat in computer technology to the Chinese, or to anyone else. He contends that the nation that leads the world in HPC will have an enormous competitive advantage in every sector and will attract the best […]