HPC News with Snark for Friday, Dec. 2

I produced something like 45 videos so far from SC11. It was great fun, but when my editor came down with food poisoning (don’t do hotel buffets in Indianapolis) I had my work cut out for me following the show.

Now we’re back, so here’s the HPC News with Snark for Dec. 2, 2011:

  • UK Missing Middle Putting on the Pounds. Her Majesty’s United Kingdom put out an announcement this week that they are investing £158M  into eInfrastrucure HPC projects to bolster research and industrial competitiveness. This includes £43 million for ARCHER, a new national supercomputer for chemistry, climate science, and helping industry design new products.
  • Big Data in Outer Space. IBM is spinning up a new Big Data initiative to tackle astronomical data from Square Kilometer Array, or the SKA Project. The company’s Information Intensive Framework (IIF) takes knowledge that’s inside the head of an astronomer and put it into this system; so you can do automatically some of the things that an astronomer can do manually.
  • Moving a Mirror. Speaking of Space, Prof. David Walker from HPC Wales helping to develop state-of-the-art mirrors for the European Southern Observatory, which will be the biggest optical telescope in the world. It’s an ambitious bid to bring new business and employment to North Wales.
  • HPCC to Fill Dryad Space. As Microsoft’s Dryad vaporware effort moves to Hadoop, the HPCC Systems division of LexisNexis pushing a big-data, processing-and-delivery platform to fill the void. According to GigaOm’s Derrick Harris, now there are really only two unstructured-data processing platforms of note.
  • Blue Waters Rolling in. On December 1, Cray delivered it’s first cabinets for the Blue Waters system at NCSA. The 10 Petaflop system will eventually grow to 265 cabinets comprising a combination of Cray XE6 and XK6 technology.
  • SC11 Award Winners. As a follow up to the conference, the complete list of award winners has been posted. For the Student Cluster Competition, the Overall Winner was National Tsinghua University (who won last year as well) and the Highest Linpack value was gotten by Nizhni Novgorod State University from Russia.