Archives for May 2012

HPC Community Member Kyril Faenov Passes Away

The HPC community lost one of its own this week with the untimely passing of Kyril Faenov of Microsoft, formerly lead of their Technical Computing Group. Before joining the SQL organization in 2011, Kyril was the General Manager of the Technical Computing Group, which developed Windows HPC Server, Parallel Computing Platform and mathematical modeling tools […]

CFD Speeds Formula One Cars at Marussia F1

Stephen Harris from the Engineer writes that Marussia F1 is using CFD technology to help optimize race car performance. Facing a highly competitive field where only McLaren, Red Bull and Ferrari were the only teams that had a realistic chance to win, Marussia F1 decided to bet the farm on improving aerodynamics with CFD simulations. […]

New Fujitsu HPC Hub in Spain

Penny Jones from DatacenterDynamics writes that Fujitsu has chosen Spain as its fifth HPC hub in Europe. Representing about 5 percent of the market for supercomputing in EMEA, Spain will benefit from what Fujitsu calls the Human Centric Intelligent Society, with new initiatives in e-agriculture, e-healthcare, e-personal assistance and e-learning, among other areas. Fujitsu will […]

Marc Hamilton on the Last Exascale Supercomputer

Rather than fretting about how to build the first machine capable of an Exaflop, Marc Hamilton is starting to think about what comes after that–the last Exascale computer. No matter what you think about the future of ExaFLOP and ExaSCALE computing, the experts pretty much agree, improving the performance/watt will be one of the key […]

Does Your Device Support OpenCL?

Vincent Hindriksen from StreamComputing writes that it can be difficult to determine if your CPU supports OpenCL, so he put all the information in one handy place. Often it is not clear how OpenCL works on CPUs. If you have a 8 core processor with double threading, then it mostly is understood that 16 pipelines […]

Video: The Golden Age of Supercomputing

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_wqN1_aKk0 Our Video Sunday feature continues with this showcase of the very latest in supercomputing visualization with comments from Chris Johnson from the University of Utah.

Disk Performance Expectations vs. Reality

Joe Landman from Scalable Informatics writes about why the delivered performance of disk subsystems doesn’t look anything like marketing specifications. The overhead is the killer. Most people building systems really don’t understand how much of a killer it is. IO is usually relegated to secondary or tertiary consideration, though as data sets grow large, this […]

Video: Green Revolution Does Immersive Cooling

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVGjMicFkQA When Dan Olds first ran into the Green Revolution guys back at SC09 in Portland, he didn’t think they would get too far. But when he saw their latest gear at GTC 2012, he came away impressed. I shot a quick video of their demo while they told me about their plans, and why fluid submersion […]

The New Time-to-Answer Metric for Big Data – This Week on inside* Publications

In case you missed them, here are some recent highlights the other inside* publications: Slidecast: Time-to-Answer – A Business-Driven Scorecard for Big Data. Paul Barth from NewVantage Partners describes why the key to business success is data preparation (cleanse, normalize, and integrate the data), not the total amount of data that you have. Feature: The Big Bang Meets Big […]

Video: Titan Supercomputer Session Showcases Science on GPUs

In this video from GTC 2012, Jack Wells, Director of Science at ORNL introduces a series of talks on the research that will be accelerated by the hybrid Titan supercomputer. The whole system is an upgrade,” said Jack Wells in describing how Oak Ridge’s current Jaguar supercomputer is being transformed into Titan. ORNL is transitioning […]