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Exascale Computing: The View from Argonne

Jun 21, 2012 | As a result of the dissolution of DARPA's UHPC program, the driving force behind exascale research in the US now resides with the Department of Energy, which has embarked upon a program to help develop this technology. To get a lab-centric view of the path to exascale, HPCwire asked a three of the top directors at Argonne National Laboratory -- Rick Stevens, Michael Papka, and Marc Snir -- to provide some context for the challenges and benefits of developing these extreme scale systems.
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TOP500 Gets Dressed Up with New Blue Genes

Jun 19, 2012 | The 39th TOP500 list was released today at the International Supercomputing Conference in Hamburg, Germany, with a new machine at the top. Sequoia, an IBM Blue Gene/Q machine, delivered a world record 16 petaflops on Linpack, knocking RIKEN's 10-petaflop K Computer into second place. The Japanese K machine had held the TOP500 title for a year.
Read more...

Intel Will Ship Knights Corner Chip in 2012

Jun 18, 2012 | On Monday at the International Supercomputing Conference in Hamburg, Intel announced that Knights Corner, the company's first manycore product, would be in production before the end of 2012. The company also released a few more details about the upcoming product line, including the creation of a new Xeon brand for the architecture, some performance updates on pre-production silicon, and Cray's adoption of MIC as part of its future Cascade supercomputer.
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Mellanox Cracks 100 Gbps with New InfiniBand Adapters

Jun 18, 2012 | Mellanox has developed a new architecture for high performance InfiniBand. Known as Connect-IB, this is the company’s fourth major InfiniBand adapter redesign, following in the footsteps of its InfiniHost, InfiniHost III and ConnectX lines. The new adapters double the throughput of the company’s FDR InfinBand gear, supporting speeds beyond 100 Gbps.
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HPC Lists We’d Like to See

Jun 15, 2012 | Since the release of the first TOP500 list in June of 1993, the HPC community has been motivated by the competition to place high on that list. We’re now approaching the twentieth anniversary of the TOP500. In recent years, two additional lists have gained traction: the Green500 and the Graph 500. Would a few more lists be useful?
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SGI Launches Second Generation UV Supercomputer

Jun 14, 2012 | The sequel to SGI's UV supercomputer has arrived. Dubbed UV 2, the new platform doubles the number of cores and quadruples the memory that can be supported under a single system. The product, which will be officially announced next week at the International Supercomputing Conference in Hamburg, represents the first major revision of SGI's original UV, which the company debuted in 2009.
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Xyratex Doubles Storage Throughput in Latest Lustre Offering

Jun 14, 2012 | Today storage maker Xyratex introduced ClusterStor 6000, a Lustre-based storage platform which doubles the throughput of the company’s first generation product. HPCWire spoke with Eric Lomascolo, director of solutions marketing and Mike Stolz, VP of marketing at Xyratex to get the particulars about the new system.
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The TOP500 Celebrates 20th Anniversary, Will it Survive 20 More?

Jun 12, 2012 | With the upcoming release of the TOP500 next week, the latest rankings are usually a hot topic of discussion this time of year. Over the past 20 years, the list has proven to be a useful and popular compilation of supercomputers for the HPC community. In this exclusive interview, Professor Hans Meuer, considered by many to be the driving force behind the project, offers his thoughts on the TOP500; its past, present, and future.
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Cray Expands Narrative on Blue Waters Supercomputer and Company's New Storage Business

Jun 12, 2012 | Two of Cray's more notable achievements in 2011 -- the contract win of the "Blue Waters" supercomputer re-bid and the addition of a high-performance storage line -- are reaping dividends in 2012. In this interview with Barry Bolding, Cray's vice president of storage and data management, HPCwire takes a behind-the-scenes look at that unusual procurement and the company's subsequent move into the storage business.
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Intel Releases Knights Corner ISA, Lays Groundwork for MIC Launch

Jun 11, 2012 | Intel has released a partial software stack for Knights Corner, the company's first commercial chip based on its Many Integrated Core (MIC) architecture. Also released were a number of documents describing the processor's micro-architecture, including the Knights Corner Instruction Set (ISA) Manual, which will help toolmakers and application developers build software for the upcoming chip.
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Petaflop In a Box

Jun 06, 2012 | As we move down the road toward exascale computing and engage in discussion of zettascale, one issue becomes increasingly obvious: we are leaving a large part of the HPC community behind. But it needn't be so. If we developed compact, power efficient petascale computers, not only could we help broaden the base of high-end users, but we could also provide a foundation for future bleeding-edge supercomputers.
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AMD Cranks Up Opteron Speeds

Jun 04, 2012 | AMD has announced an update to their Opteron 6200 family aimed at HPC and performance-driven enterprise applications. The new 16-core Opteron 6278 and 6284 SE processors fall under the Bulldozer architecture, sporting similar core density and cache as their predecessors.
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Calxeda Takes Aim at Big Data HPC with ARM Server Chip

May 31, 2012 | With Dell's news this week of its renewed plans to bring ARM-based servers to datacenters and Intel's recent unveiling of new Xeon CPUs aimed at ultra-low-power servers, the "microserver" marketplace is being primed for some commercial offerings. Chip startup Calxeda has been working to bring its own ARM-based SoC technology into the datacenter and, with the help of its OEM partners, the company is positioning the technology for its commercial debut.
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ARM Gets Behind Accelerator Programming Project

May 29, 2012 | ARM Holdings, along with seven other academic and industrial partners, is ramping up a European research project designed to bring accelerator programming to mainstream developers. Known as CARP (Correct and Efficient Accelerator Programming), the effort is focused on developing hardware-independent programming tools around OpenCL, the industry standard parallel computing environment for GPUs and other accelerators.
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HP Jettisons 8 Percent of Workforce, Refocuses Priorities

May 24, 2012 | This week HP announced it will slash 27,000 workers from the payroll over the next couple of years as part of a company-wide restructuring. When complete, the effort is expected to generate between $3.0 to $3.5 billion of savings per year. The workforce reduction is the largest in the company's 73-year history and reflects how far HP has drifted into unprofitable businesses.
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NVIDIA Works On CPU Co-Dependency Issues with Kepler GPU

May 22, 2012 | NVIDIA is telling everyone that the GK110, its new Kepler GPU aimed at supercomputing, is all about improving performance per watt. But the other driving theme behind the new architecture is reducing the GPU's reliance on its CPU host. How well it accomplishes both these goals areas could determine the success of the new chip in high performance computing.
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OpenACC Starts to Gather Developer Mindshare

May 17, 2012 | PGI, Cray, and CAPS enterprise are moving quickly to get their new OpenACC-supported compilers into the hands of GPGPU developers. At NVIDIA's GPU Technology Conference this week, there was plenty of discussion around the new HPC accelerator framework, and all three OpenACC compiler makers, as well as NVIDIA, were talking up the technology.
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NVIDIA Launches Kepler Into HPC

May 15, 2012 | NVIDIA has introduced its first Kepler-generation GPU product for high performance computing, and revealed some of the inner working of the new architecture. The announcement took place at the kickoff of the company's GPU Technology Conference taking place this week in San Jose, California.
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Intel Rolls Out New Server CPUs

May 14, 2012 | Intel Corp. has launched three new families of Xeon processors, joining the Xeon E5-2600 series the chipmaker introduced in March. These latest chips span the entire market for the Xeon line, from four- and two-socket servers, down to entry-level workstations and microservers. A number of HPC server makers, including SGI, Dell, and Appro announced updated hardware based on the new silicon.
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Novel Chip Technology to Power GRAPE-8 Supercomputer

May 10, 2012 | With the fastest supercomputers on the planet sporting multi-megawatt appetites, green HPC has become all the rage. The IBM Blue Gene/Q machine is currently number one in energy-efficient flops, but a new FPGA-like technology brought to market by semiconductor startup eASIC is providing an even greener computing solution. And one HPC project in Japan, known as GRAPE, is using the chips to power its newest supercomputer.
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Myricom, Emulex Take Aim at High Performance Networking

May 09, 2012 | Myricom and Emulex are teaming up to bring a series of network offerings to market targeted for high performance applications. The partnership will kick off with Emulex reselling Myricom 10GbE products into selected application domains, but the end game is to go after the high-flying InfiniBand market with products based on Emulex's Ethernet ASICs and Myricom's high performance software.
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Thomas Sterling: 'I Think We Will Never Reach Zettaflops'

May 07, 2012 | As supercomputing makes its way through the petascale era, the future of the technology has never seemed so uncertain. HPC veteran Thomas Sterling takes us through some of the most critical developments in high performance computing, explaining why the transition to exascale is going to be very different than the ones in the past and how the United States is losing its leadership in HPC innovation.
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The Last Mile of Virtualization

May 03, 2012 | The advent of multicore servers presents something of a challenge for application virtualization. This is especially true in the realm of high performance computing, an environment that has never been particularly friendly to virtualization. To overcome these hurdles, eXludus Technologies has introduced "micro-virtualization," a technology that brings virtualization down to the level of the core, and does so with minimal overhead.
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TACC-Intel Symposium Highlights MIC Architecture Developments

May 01, 2012 | Researchers, hardware and software engineers, and high performance computing specialists from around the country attended the TACC-Intel Highly Parallel Computing Symposium last month at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC). The meeting showcased the experiences of researchers who had ported their scientific computing codes to Intel’s Knights Ferry software development platform, as well as those working on the single-chip cloud (SCC).
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Hot Interconnects Event Warms Up for Summer Meeting

Apr 30, 2012 | This August, the IEEE is hosting its annual symposium on high-performance interconnects, known as Hot Interconnects. Now in its 20th year, the event focuses on the latest developments in the field with a special emphasis on how the technology is advancing in the realm of supercomputing and large-scale datacenters. The event covers both chip-to-chip interconnects as well as networking fabrics that bind whole systems and datacenters together.
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Feature Articles

Exascale Computing: The View from Argonne

As a result of the dissolution of DARPA's UHPC program, the driving force behind exascale research in the US now resides with the Department of Energy, which has embarked upon a program to help develop this technology. To get a lab-centric view of the path to exascale, HPCwire asked a three of the top directors at Argonne National Laboratory -- Rick Stevens, Michael Papka, and Marc Snir -- to provide some context for the challenges and benefits of developing these extreme scale systems.
Read more...

TOP500 Gets Dressed Up with New Blue Genes

The 39th TOP500 list was released today at the International Supercomputing Conference in Hamburg, Germany, with a new machine at the top. Sequoia, an IBM Blue Gene/Q machine, delivered a world record 16 petaflops on Linpack, knocking RIKEN's 10-petaflop K Computer into second place. The Japanese K machine had held the TOP500 title for a year.
Read more...

Intel Will Ship Knights Corner Chip in 2012

On Monday at the International Supercomputing Conference in Hamburg, Intel announced that Knights Corner, the company's first manycore product, would be in production before the end of 2012. The company also released a few more details about the upcoming product line, including the creation of a new Xeon brand for the architecture, some performance updates on pre-production silicon, and Cray's adoption of MIC as part of its future Cascade supercomputer.
Read more...