HPC Wire: Global News and Information on High Performance Computing (HPC)

Aug 4, 2012

Swiss Researchers Propose 'GreenIT' Methodology for HPC

The latest Green500 list announced this week at SC10 is once again shining the spotlight on the energy efficiency of the world's top supercomputers. But the path to more efficient high performance computing goes beyond this simple benchmark-based approach. Ralf Gruber and Vincent Keller, both from École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), describe a holistic approach to more energy-efficient HPC operations in their book, HPC@GreenIT. HPCwire contributor Steve Conway interviewed the Swiss duo about their ideas, including a new benchmark.

2010 Annual HPCwire Readers Choice Awards

Feature Articles from sc10

Is 10 Gigabit Ethernet Ready for HPC?

(11/18/2010) - Despite the still-modest showing of 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE) technology in high performance computing deployments, vendors at SC10 were showcasing a wide array of performance-laden Ethernet products. IT Brand Pulse Labs analyst Tim Dales takes a look at the prospects for 10GbE in high performance computing, the migration pattern from GbE to 10GbE, and some application areas that seem especially suitable for the technology.
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The Greening of HPC -- A Conversation with Professor Wu Feng

(11/18/2010) - The increased awareness in the HPC community of the need to maximize energy efficiency in compute-intensive environments has never been greater. With The Green500 results coming out this week, HPCwire's Caroline Connor turned to Professor Wu Feng from Virginia Tech, the man largely credited with the movement towards environmentally-sustainable supercomputing.
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Python Snakes Its Way Into HPC

(11/17/2010) - Interpreted programming languages usually don't find too many friends in high performance computing. Yet Python, one of the most popular general-purpose interpreted languages, has garnered a small community of enthusiastic followers. True believers got the opportunity to hear about the language in the HPC realm in a tutorial session on Monday and a BoF session on Wednesday. Argonne National Lab's William Scullin, who participated in both events, talked with HPCwire about the status of Python in this space and what developers might look forward to.
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The Not-So-Unlikely Marriage of CUDA and x86

(11/16/2010) - NVIDIA's CUDA is easily the most popular programming language for general-purpose GPU computing. But one of the more interesting developments in the CUDA-verse doesn't really involve GPUs at all. In September, HPC compiler vendor PGI (The Portland Group Inc.) announced its intent to build a CUDA compiler for x86 platforms. The technology will be demonstrated for the first time in public at SC10 this week in New Orleans.
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A Call to Arms for Parallel Programming Standards

(11/16/2010) - Although the parallel programming landscape is relatively young, it's already easy to get lost in. Beside legacy frameworks like MPI and OpenMP, we now have NVIDIA's CUDA, OpenCL, Cilk, Intel Threading Building Blocks, Microsoft's parallel programming extensions for .NET, and a whole gamut of PGAS languages. And according to Intel's Tim Mattson, that's not necessarily a good thing.
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Graph 500 Takes Aim at a New Kind of HPC

(11/15/2010) - Data-intensive applications are quickly emerging as a significant new class of HPC workloads. For this class of applications, a new kind of supercomputer, and a different way to assess them, will be required. That is the impetus behind the Graph 500, a set of benchmarks that aim to measure the suitability of systems for data-intensive analytics applications.
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SGI Gets Its Mojo Working for Supercomputing Conference

(11/15/2010) - SGI has made good on its promise to create a petaflop-in-a-cabinet supercomputer that can scale up to tens and even hundreds of cabinets. Developed under the code name "Project Mojo," the company has dubbed the new product Prism XL. SGI will be showcasing the system this week in their exhibit booth at the Supercomputing Conference in New Orleans.
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The Business of Disruptive Innovation

(11/14/2010) - Like every technology-based sector, high performance computing takes its biggest leaps by the force of disruptive innovation, a term coined by the man who will keynote this year's Supercomputing Conference (SC10) in New Orleans. Clayton M. Christensen doesn't know a whole lot about supercomputing, but he knows a great deal about the forces that drive it.
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Special Commentary from sc10

Michael Feldman
Exotics at SC10
Yes, there is life beyond Xeons, Opterons and GPGPUs. Read more...

Michael Feldman
Podcast: More GPUs On Demand; Fledgling Graph 500 List
Addison and Michael revisit some news items from last week's Supercomputing Conference. Read more...

Michael Feldman
Conference Highlights Dividing Lines Across GPGPUs
If there was a dominating theme at the Supercomputing Conference this year, it had to be GPU computing. Read more...

Michael Feldman
Podcast: Highlights from SC10
Addison and Michael consider the results of the TOP500 and Green500, pick the winners and losers of SC10, and discuss the biggest news of the week. Read more...

Michael Feldman
InfiniBand Continues Upward Climb in Top Supers
Lost in the hoopla about the ascendency of China and GPGPUs in the TOP500 is the continuing saga of the InfiniBand-Ethernet interconnect rivalry. Read more...

Michael Feldman
GPGPUs, China Take the Lead in TOP500
Top seven supercomputers make it into the petaflop club. Read more...

Michael Feldman
What to Look for at SC10
A short list of "can't miss" sessions at this year's Supercomputing conference. Read more...

Off the Wire from sc10

Computer Science Team Places Third in Supercomputing Competition - (12/16/2010)
IU Open Systems Lab Researchers Receive SC10's Best Paper Award - (12/10/2010)
Ethernet Vendors Demo'ed 10, 40, 100 GbE Interoperability at SC10 - (12/09/2010)
UK's Premiere Supercomputing Campus Seeks American Partners for Collaboration - (12/08/2010)
Purdue Computing Resources Rank Near Top Nationally - (12/08/2010)
U of Colorado's SC10 Cluster Competition Team Receives Fan Favorite Award - (12/06/2010)
DDN Expands Global Footprint and Leadership Across Listing of World's Fastest Supercomputers - (12/03/2010)
Blue Waters Staff, Partners Bring Home Awards from SC10 - (11/29/2010)
Awards for Outstanding High Performance Computing Achievements Presented at SC10 - (11/24/2010)
TACC's Student Cluster Challenge Team Wins Highest Linpack Award at SC10 - (11/24/2010)
Stockton Computational Science Program Earns Top National Honors at SC10 - (11/23/2010)
Blood Simulation on Jaguar Takes Gordon Bell Prize - (11/22/2010)
UNO Takes Second Place in National Supercomputing Competition - (11/19/2010)
IBM Supercomputers Are Most Energy Efficient - (11/19/2010)
Kove Sets World Record for Sustained Storage Speed with Xpress Disk Gen2 - (11/19/2010)
NAG Expertise Helps UK Researchers Solve Eggshell Formation Problem - (11/19/2010)
SMART Modular Technologies to Provide High-Speed Storage for Forthcoming IBM POWER7 Supercomputer - (11/19/2010)
Concurrent Thinking Receives Intel Cluster Ready 'Pathfinder' Award - (11/19/2010)
Fixstars Completes Linux OS Integration for Air Force Research Lab's 2,016 PS3 Cluster - (11/19/2010)
Trapeze Networks Gives Wireless Mobility to Thousands at SC10 - (11/18/2010)
Tougher Rating System Evaluates Nine Supercomputer Capabilities - (11/18/2010)
Bay Microsystems to Showcase First 4X/8X InfiniBand QDR Global Extension Platform at SC10 - (11/18/2010)
Adaptive Computing Selected to Manage Job Scheduling for Sweden's Leading Academic HPC System - (11/18/2010)
Ixia Powers Higher Speed Ethernet at SC10 - (11/18/2010)
World's Greenest Petaflop Supercomputers Built with NVIDIA Tesla GPUs - (11/18/2010)
NAG Computing Algorithms Support US Climate Change Research - (11/18/2010)
Molex to Present Overview of InfiniBand FDR/EDR I/O Connectors at SC10 - (11/17/2010)
Terascala Announces Next Generation of High Performance Storage Appliances - (11/17/2010)
Aquantia, Fulcrum Partner to Launch First 48-Port 10GBASE-T Ethernet Switch Reference Design - (11/17/2010)
Allinea Software Announces Allinea DDT Version 2.6.1 - (11/17/2010)
Avago Announces High-Density Embedded Parallel Optical Interconnects at SC10 - (11/17/2010)
Tech-X Corporation Releases GPULib v1.4.2 - (11/17/2010)
Voltaire 10GbE Switch Delivers 3X Faster Job Runtime for High-Performance Applications - (11/17/2010)
Apon Elected National Chair of the CASC - (11/17/2010)
LSI Storage Technology Deployed in World's Sixth Most Powerful Supercomputer - (11/17/2010)
Intel Teams Up with Leading Researchers to Make Football Helmets Safer - (11/17/2010)
Terascala Announces Availability of Storage Client for Platform Cluster Manager - (11/17/2010)
AccelerEyes Introduces LIBJACKET - (11/17/2010)
Reflex Photonics Showcases 112 Gbps OTU4 CFP Transceivers at SC10 - (11/17/2010)
HPCwire Annual Readers' Choice Awards Announced at SC10 - (11/16/2010)
T-Platforms Demonstrates Steady Momentum Despite Sluggish HPC Market Segment - (11/16/2010)
Scientific and Academic Institutions Accelerate Research Initiatives with HP Supercomputers - (11/16/2010)
Number of Systems Connected by InfiniBand Grows 18 Percent Year-over-Year in the TOP500 List - (11/16/2010)
Juniper Demos Industry's First Live 100G Traffic from the Network Core to Edge - (11/16/2010)
AlpenIO Introduces New Line of LightFinity Active Optical Products at SC10 - (11/16/2010)
PRACE Awards Over 362 Million Compute Hours to Nine European Research Projects - (11/16/2010)
Dell Technology Helps CERN Expand Access to New Research Studies - (11/16/2010)
Voltaire Introduces RapidStorage Appliance with Supermicro - (11/16/2010)
CAPS to Announce HMPP 2.4 - (11/16/2010)
OpenFabrics Alliance Software Being Utilized by More Than 44 Percent of the TOP500 Systems - (11/16/2010)
Lawrence Livermore National Lab Chooses Mellanox for Large-Scale Hyperion Cluster - (11/16/2010)
Scalable Informatics Announces New siCluster NAS Scale Out Storage - (11/16/2010)
Quantum's StorNext Software Performance Scales More Than 100 Percent to Support CERN's Heavy Ion Experiment - (11/16/2010)
Fulcrum Announces Barcelona 10G/40G Top-of-Rack Ethernet Switch Reference Platform - (11/16/2010)
SC10 - World's Leading Supercomputing Forum Kicks Off Week of Discovery - (11/15/2010)
Nexsan Demonstrates Advanced Storage Solutions at SC10 - (11/15/2010)
Supermicro TwinBlade Offers 2,880 CPU Cores per Rack - (11/15/2010)
Ciena Puts High Performance Networking into Action at SC10 - (11/15/2010)
China Grabs Supercomputing Leadership Spot in Latest Ranking of World's TOP500 Supercomputers - (11/15/2010)
Mellanox Introduces 8 and 18-port 40Gb/s InfiniBand Switch Systems - (11/15/2010)
AMD Reinforces HPC Leadership with CPU and GPU Technology at SC10 - (11/15/2010)
First Ever Multi-Network, Multi-Vendor 100GigE Wide Area Network Demo to Take Place at SC10 - (11/15/2010)
AMAX Unveils New HPC 8-Way Solution - (11/15/2010)
Mindspeed Expands Crosspoint Product Line, Showcases Family at SC10 - (11/15/2010)
Supermicro Demos 10-Core Xeon MP Solution at SC10 - (11/15/2010)
Cray Launches Midrange Version of the Cray XE6 Supercomputer - (11/15/2010)
SGI Introduces SGI Prism XL Computing Platform - (11/15/2010)
cPacket Networks Technology Is Key to Monitoring High Performance of NASA/NOAA 100-Gigabit Demonstration at SC10 - (11/15/2010)
T-Platforms Announces Exascale Development Alliance with Moscow State University - (11/15/2010)
Force10 to Demo Market-Ready 40 Gigabit Ethernet Solutions at SC10 - (11/15/2010)
Platform Computing Debuts Platform LSF 8 - (11/15/2010)
Mellanox Announces Next Generation InfiniBand Technology - (11/15/2010)
Intel Powers World's Fastest Supercomputer - (11/15/2010)
Voltaire Leads InfiniBand Growth on the TOP500 with Switches Accelerating More Than Half of All InfiniBand Deployments - (11/15/2010)
Adaptive Computing Announces Moab and Viewpoint Upgrades - (11/15/2010)
ORNL Systems Lead in Petascale Science - (11/15/2010)
PRACE Announces SC10 Participation - (11/15/2010)
Sandia Labs Proposes New Standard for Supercomputing - (11/15/2010)
TACC to Present Research Highlights and Future Directions at SC10 - (11/12/2010)
BlueArc to Demonstrate pNFS at Supercomputing 2010 - (11/12/2010)
ORNL to Have Big Turnout at Premier HPC Conference - (11/12/2010)
IU Explores the Future of High Performance Computing at Supercomputing 2010 - (11/12/2010)
MetaFlows Showcases a Novel SaaS Approach to Network Security Monitoring at SC10's SCinet - (11/12/2010)
ScaleMP to Showcase Latest Innovations at SC10 - (11/12/2010)
Tyco Electronics Exhibits High-Speed Products at SC10 - (11/12/2010)
Hardcore Computer to Showcase Liquid Submersion Computing Technology - (11/11/2010)
Caltech to Demo Large-Scale Data Transfer Using Nexsan SATABeast at SC10 - (11/10/2010)
Xtreme Compute Technologies Launches with New 'a-BriX' line of NVIDIA Tesla Powered Solutions - (11/10/2010)
BOXX Industry Survey Points to Personal Rendering Option - (11/10/2010)
Georgia Tech Keeps Sights Set on Exascale at SC10 - (11/10/2010)
SGI Announces AMD Support for Altix ICE Supercomputers - (11/10/2010)
RAID Inc. Announces GPFS Demonstration with New Xanadu Series Storage at SC10 - (11/09/2010)
IDT to Demonstrate First DDR3 Register to Run 1,867 Mbps in Server at SC10 - (11/09/2010)
Supercomputing Conference Highlights NASA Earth, Space Missions - (11/09/2010)
International Conference a Showcase for Purdue's Economical Research Technologies - (11/09/2010)
AMAX Launches High-Density GPGPU Server Solution - (11/08/2010)
Kaminario Demonstrates Extreme Application Performance at SC10 - (11/08/2010)
Allinea Software Appoints Mike Fish as New CEO - (11/08/2010)
SGI to Unveil Breakthrough Hybrid Computing Platform at SC10 - (11/08/2010)
SCinet Research Sandbox to Demonstrate Unprecedented HPC Industry Collaboration - (11/03/2010)

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August 03, 2012

ARM Submits GPU for OpenCL Conformance

August 02, 2012

August 01, 2012

July 31, 2012

July 30, 2012

July 27, 2012

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July 23, 2012

More Off the Wire...

SC10 Virtual Booth Videos

Soundbites

Podcast: Supercomputing without Side Effects; Israel Welcomes a Baby Super
Addison and Michael discuss a new way supercomputing can speed up drug discovery. Also, a new SGI cluster at an Israeli research institute underscores the nation's small HPC footprint.
Read More...

Podcast: Supercomputers Moving Up Down Under; Mellanox Rises on InfiniBand Gains
Addison and Michael talk about a trio of new supercomputers for Australia and the latest surge in InfiniBand's prospects.
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View all Soundbites and Blogs...

Contributors:

James Reinders
James Reinders is a senior engineer for Intel and has helped develop supercomputers, microprocessors and software tools for 25 years. James focuses on parallel programming models and is the author of a number of books on the topic. More > >

Gary Johnson
Gary M. Johnson is the founder of Computational Science Solutions, LLC, and a specialist in HPC management as well as the development of national science and technology policy. He is also involved in the creation of education and research programs in computational engineering and science. More > >

Andrew Jones
Andrew Jones has over 15 years of experience in HPC, in supercomputer center management and as a research user in industry. He now leads the HPC Services & Consulting at Numerical Algorithms Group (NAG). More > >

Addison Snell
Addison Snell is the CEO of Intersect360 Research and a veteran of the high performance computing industry. During his tenure, he has established Intersect360 Research as a premier source of market information, analysis and consulting. More > >

Michael Wolfe
Michael Wolfe has developed compilers for over 30 years in both academia and industry, and is now a senior compiler engineer at The Portland Group, Inc. More > >