| News digest March 2006 |
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| Industry
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HPCN industry |
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| Linux Networx announces largest supercomputing order in the company's history |
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The Department of Defense (DoD) High Performance Computing Modernization Programme (HPCMP), has placed the largest single order for Linux Supercomputers in the company's history. The DoD purchased five supercomputers from Linux Networx including three Advanced Technology Clusters (ATC's) and one LS-1 for the Army Research Laboratory (ARL) Major Shared Resource Center (MSRC), and an additional LS-1 for Dugway Proving Ground. The procurement increases ARL MSRC's computing capability to over 80 trillion floating-point operations (TFLOPS), making it one of the largest computing centres in the DoD. In addition, the procurement enhances ARL MSRC's visualization capabilities. Linux Networx was selected due to its recognized expertise in designing, building and delivering next generation Linux supercomputers that leverage the price/performance value of open software and hardware platforms.
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| Cray is back in Europe |
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Once Cray was the undisputed king of supercomputing in Europe. At one point, this declined to the level where people were wondering when the last Cray supercomputer would leave the TOP500 list. Instead, a large XT3 sale to CSCS in Switzerland, and a 40 Tlop/s peak system to AWE in the UK, as well as sales of the company's other products to well-known customers, show that Cray is regaining presence in the European market. EnterTheGrid - Primeur magazine talked to Ulla Thiel, vice president of Cray Europe, to understand what led to the recent large successes, and to ask about the Cray plans for Europe in the near future.
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| Are FPGAs ready for HPC? |
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For the 2nd year running the UK National HPC service at the University of Manchester in collaboration with the Ohio Supercomputer Centre (OSC), hosted a technical symposium, on re-configurable computing with Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs). The symposium, sponsored by SGI and Intel, provided a forum to exchange experiences and explore possibilities, of using re-configurable computing to accelerate software applications. Several of the speakers described their own experiences with FPGAs. The Symposium was preceded by a hands-on workshop on how to program FPGAs for HPC applications. It was supervised by Matthias Fouquet-Lapar, from SGI and Stefan Möhl, from Mitrionics. Symposium speakers and many of the attendees enthused about this new area of computing, claiming plenty of promise. In fact one participant of the workshop, without prior knowledge of FPGAs, developed a working design of a medical imaging algorithm and run it on an SGI system with FPGAs. Is that easy! (Chris Lazou)
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| Cray supercomputer excels in interconnect bandwidth |
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Cray Inc.'s "Red Storm" supercomputer installed at Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico is the first computer to surpass the 1 terabyte-per-second (1 TB/sec) performance mark on a widely used test that measures communications among processors in high-performance computing (HPC) systems and provides a key indication of the total communication capacity of the network.
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| TACC's top-ranked Terascale compute cluster gets significant upgrade |
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The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at the University of Texas at Austin has made a significant upgrade to its top-ranked terascale cluster, Lonestar. The upgrade, which will occur in two phases, will benefit researchers who rely on this powerful system to further research innovation in the areas of computational science, engineering and technology.
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| TotalView Memory Debugger now available on IBM Blue Gene/L |
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Etnus LLC, provider of TotalView, the debugger for complex code, has released version 7.1.1. This version supports memory debugging on the IBM Blue Gene/L platform. With TotalView, software programmers on Blue Gene/L and other supported platforms can perform interactive source code and memory debugging within the same session, making it easier to find and fix memory problems.
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| NEC SX-8 Multi-TeraFlop-System at HLRS |
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The High Performance Computing Center (HLRS) in Stuttgart will organise a special 2-day course on NEC SX-8 usage details, vectorization, and parallel filesystem usage in the framework of an HLRS and hkz-bw workshop, March 20-21, 2006 at HLRS in Stuttgart.
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| IWOMP 2006 Workshop to take place in Reims, France |
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IWOMP 2006 will take place June 12-15, 2006 in Reims, France. The workshop will be a great opportunity for learning more about OpenMP, for practical experience and interaction between OpenMP users and developers.
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| PathScale releases highest performance OpenIB software stack |
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PathScale has released version 1.2 of its InfiniPath software for the PathScale InfiniPath InfiniBand interconnect. This latest InfiniPath software release, includes OpenIB support.
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| United Devices unveils HPC Collaboration Center |
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United Devices has unveiled a High-Performance Computing (HPC) Collaboration Center, or HPC³ - that provides the technology and expertise necessary for companies to validate the business benefits of a collaborative HPC solution in an environment that emulates their real-world operations.
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| A supercomputer for Iowa State University |
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Finally, Iowa State University researchers can talk about trillions of calculations per second. That's because a $1.25 million IBM Blue Gene/L supercomputer is now on campus. The National Science Foundation awarded a research team led by Srinivas Aluru, an Iowa State professor of electrical and computer engineering, $600,000 to purchase the supercomputer. Iowa State paid the remaining $650,000 with allocations from the President's Office, the Office of the Vice Provost for Research, Information Technology Services and the Plant Sciences Institute.
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| Korea Meteorological Administration's new Cray X1e supercomputer is world's fastest weather prediction system |
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The Korea Meteorological Administration (KMA) has put into production the fastest operational numerical weather prediction system in the world. KMA takes advantage of the processing speed of its new Cray X1E supercomputer to facilitate development and operational services for long-range weather prediction and climate study, resulting in more accurate and timely weather, seasonal climate and ocean wave forecasts.
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| Sun HPC Workshop and Consortium Meeting to take place March 13-17 in Aachen, Germany |
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Together with the Sun HPC Consortium, the RWTH Aachen University Center for Computing and Communication organises the combined Sun HPC Workshop and Consortium Meeting from March 13 till 17, 2006.
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| Blade.org bladeserver community organised by large number of IT companies |
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More than 40 technology experts including IBM and Intel have officially formed Blade.org, an open community that will develop and advance next-generation technologies for blades. The Blade.org community will initially focus on solution design guidance, compliance and interoperability testing, industry events and marketplace education.
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| IBM unveils Cell Broadband Engine computer |
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IBM has introduced a blade computing system based on the Cell Broadband Engine (Cell BE). The IBM branded Cell BE-based system is designed for businesses that need the dense computing power and unique capabilities of the Cell BE processor to tackle tasks involving graphic-intensive, numeric applications.
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| Georgia Institute of Technology accelerates drug discovery with new IBM supercomputing cluster |
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One of the world's most powerful supercomputing clusters will anchor Georgia Tech's new Center for the Study of Systems Biology. The Center will use IBM technologies to advance research into new drugs for the treatment of some of today's most life-threatening diseases, including cancer. The Center's research will be headed by one of the world's leading systems biologists, Dr. Jeffrey Skolnick, the Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar in Computational Systems Biology.
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| NSF names Daniel Atkins to head new Office of Cyberinfrastructure |
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The National Science Foundation (NSF) in the USA has named distinguished computer scientist Dr. Daniel E. Atkins to head its newly created Office of Cyberinfrastructure. Dr. Atkins, a professor in the School of Information and in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, has made major contributions to high-performance computer architecture, and led or participated in the design and construction of seven experimental machines including some of the earliest parallel computers.
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| Mitrionics enhances FPGA supercomputing platform with diagnostics and optimization features |
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Mitrionics, an expert in programming FPGAs (Field Programmable Gate Arrays) for supercomputing software acceleration, has introduced new diagnostics and optimization features for its Mitrion Software Development Kit to facilitate even faster development times by troubleshooting, debugging and optimizing Mitrion Processor designs before FPGA synthesis.
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| IBM introduces new high performance POWER5+ server |
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IBM has introduced eight new System p5 servers, including several based on the fastest POWER 5+ processors available, including the breakthrough Quad-Core Module technology.
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| Linux Networx announces record orders and growth in 2005 |
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Linux Networx has performed record orders and growth in 2005. The company achieved three consecutive quarters of record growth in orders in Q2, Q3 and Q4 and finished the year with a bookings backlog that increased 300% over 2004. During 2005, one of every three Linux Networx supercomputing systems was sold to a new customer, expanding the company’s customer base to over 165 supercomputing customers. New customers during 2005 included Audi, BMW, Caterpillar, DaimlerChrysler, EADS Eurocopter, Glaxo SmithKline, Harley-Davidson, Magna Intier and Magna Seating, Motorola, and Thomson Industries.
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| Terra Soft offers Xserve bioinformatics cluster |
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Terra Soft Solutions, a developer of integrated Power Architecture Linux solutions, has released a mobile, pre-configured 8-node Xserve bioinformatics cluster.
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| ClusterVision reports another record year |
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ClusterVision, specialist in Linux supercomputer clusters, has had another record year as a supplier of Linux supercomputer clusters in Europe. The number of clusters installed in 2005 was more than double that in 2004. ClusterVision also built upon market share with new customer wins in addition to considerable repeat business from existing customers.
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| New Maui patch improves integration & compatibility |
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Cluster Resources has released Maui 3.4.6p14, the advanced open source cluster scheduler. Maui is a highly configurable tool capable of supporting an array of scheduling policies, dynamic priorities, extensive reservations and fairshare capabilities. The new patch includes several contributions made by the user community.
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| 18 million hours of supercomputing time awarded to 15 teams for large-scale scientific computing |
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US DOE's Office of Science has awarded a total of 18.2 million hours of computing time on some of the world's most powerful supercomputers to help researchers in government labs, universities, and industry working on projects ranging from designing more efficient engines to better understanding Parkinson's disease.
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| New IBM Blade computers |
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IBM has introduced new blade computing systems that enable data to travel up to 10 times faster than previously possible across corporate networks. The new high-performance systems, called IBM BladeCenter H, increase the bandwidth of tiny blade computers, providing businesses up to 10 times the capacity to move data across their networks. The processing breakthrough, made possible by IBM Research, increases the internal capability of the new system by delivering more than 40 Gigabits (Gb) of I/O bandwidth to every blade server.
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| Bioinformatics Consortium at the University of Missouri adds SGI technology for large-scale computational life sciences research |
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The Bioinformatics Consortium at the University of Missouri recently purchased high-performance computing technology from Silicon Graphics and an SGI InfiniteStorage storage area network (SAN) with 8TB of capacity.
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| Biodesign and TGen form joint Center for Systems and Computational Biology |
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To help usher in a new era of molecular diagnostics and personalized medicine, Arizona State University's (ASU) Biodesign Institute and the Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen) have teamed up to establish the Center for Systems and Computational Biology. One of the first of its kind in the USA, the new centre will accelerate the pace of biomedical research, directly impact patient care and provide new funding opportunities for both TGen and ASU.
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| Altair Engineering announces establishment of Trans-National European and Asia/Pacific operations |
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Altair Engineering opened tow new trans-national support and marketing organisations - one based in Boeblingen, Germany, and another in Bangalore, India - will be responsible for Altair operations in Europe and Asia/Pacific, respectively.
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| Dr. Iwao Toda to join Liquid Computing as Asia-Pacific Strategic Advisor |
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Liquid Computing Corp., a developer of a new class of scalable server for high performance computing, has appointed Dr. Iwao Toda as Asia-Pacific Strategic Advisor. With over three decades of product development and executive management experience, Dr. Toda will help Liquid Computing expand its global presence.
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| Dennis McKenna to succeed Bob Bishop as Chairman and CEO at SGI |
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Dennis McKenna has been named chairman of the board, chief executive officer and president, effective immediately. Dennis McKenna succeeds Robert Bishop, who will remain on the board of directors and serve as vice chairman.
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| February 28 deadline for submitting Birds-of-a-Feather proposals for ISC2006 |
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Tuesday, February 28, is the deadline for submitting Birds-of-a-Feather proposals for the 2006 International Supercomputer Conference to be held June 27-30 in Dresden. Birds-of-a-Feather (BoF) sessions are informal discussion forums where a number of participants gather to talk about a specific HPC topic of mutual interest. This is the first year BoFs are being planned as part of the ISC2006 programme and the sessions are open to all conference attendees, including exhibitors.
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| Sun spotlights growing momentum with world-record setting performance for new Sun Fire server line running UltraSPARC IV+ processors |
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Sun Microsystems has achieved strong market momentum for the UltraSPARC IV+ processor-based Sun Fire server family: five new record-breaking performance benchmarks and rapid customer adoption. Customers are upgraing quickly to the recently-announced server line, which offers an up to five times performance increase over UltraSPARC III servers and double the performance over previous UltraSPARC generations at the same power consumption in the same footprint and for the same price.
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| ProCurve Networking by HP expands functionality at Network Edge with new intelligent switches |
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ProCurve Networking by HP has introduced a set of Layer 3/4 LAN switches that feature wirespeed performance and integrated Gigabit Power over Ethernet (PoE). Both switch series further sharpen ProCurve's Adaptive EDGE Architecture by delivering advanced functionality to the network edge to meet the evolving needs of security, mobility and convergence applications.
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| Oracle sets world record in performance on Bull NovaScale server for a 32 CPU system with TPC-H One Terabyte benchmark |
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Bull and Oracle have achieved a new record-setting TPC-H One Terabyte (TB) benchmark for a 32 processor system running Oracle Database 10g Release 2 on Linux and using the Xyratex RS-1600-FC2 storage enclosures. Running on a Bull NovaScale 6320, with 32 Intel Itanium 2 1.6 GHz 6 MB L3 Cache processors on Linux, Oracle Database 10g Release 2 achieved record performance and price-performance for a 32 CPU system of 34,987.50 QphH@1000GB, $38.41/QphH@1000GB.
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| Dell delivers advanced Blade server connectivity |
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Dell has made enhancements to its blade server offerings with the introduction of the Cisco Catalyst Blade Switch 3030 for the Dell PowerEdge Blade Server Enclosure.
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| Sun plans to put the UltraSPARC T1 processor in the upcoming Netra AdvancedTCA Blades |
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Sun Microsystems wiil put the UltraSPARC T1 processor with CoolThreads technology to network equipment providers (NEPs) and carriers in its upcoming Netra Advanced Telecom Computer Architecture (ATCA) blade and carrier-grade rack servers later this year.
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| Sony DADC streamlines disc production with SGI storage technology |
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Sony DADC, a producer of optical disc media, has purchased a SGI InfiniteStorage SAN solution to increase throughput, ensure scalability, and improve data management in the automated mastering facility at its Terre Haute, Indiana plant. The plant, which is the flagship Sony disc production facility for the U.S., produces 2.4 million music CDs, DVDs, and UMD game discs in a typical day and provides services that range from postproduction to distribution.
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| Dot Hill introduces Green Storage system for the enterprise |
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Dot Hill, a provider of flexible storage offerings and responsive service and support to OEMs and system integrators, has launched its new SANnet II FC-G (Green) storage array. SANnet II FC-G is an upgrade to its current SANnet II Fibre Channel (FC) technology with support for new environmental standards.
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| HP outships all other server vendors worldwide for 15th consecutive quarter |
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For the 15th consecutive quarter, HP has outshipped all other major vendors in the worldwide server market while taking share in total server revenue, according to fourth quarter 2005 figures released today by IDC.
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| HP enhances storage portfolio to further customer IT consolidation |
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HP has introduced hardware, software and services enhancements to its HP StorageWorks portfolio that help customers consolidate their storage environments.
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| Lustre users worldwide confirm exceptional file system stability |
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Cluster File Systems is celebrating the third year of general availability of its open-source Lustre technology by reporting widespread file system stability and robust customer implementations on five continents.
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| Industry
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The Grid |
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| 4th Story integrates Digipede Grid processing technology |
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Digipede Technologies, a provider of distributed computing solutions for the Microsoft Windows platform, and 4th Story, a developer of software for trading analytics, have integrated 4th Story's trading strategy analytics with the Digipede Network for greatly increased scalability and performance.
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| SOA is the past, SOKU is the future for Grid computing |
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The European Commission has published a report: "Future for European Grids: Grids and Service Oriented Knowledge Utilities - Vision and Research Directions 2010 and Beyond". The report has been written by the Next Generation Grids Expert Group, and is the third report of the group. The report introduces the Service Oriented Knowledge Utilities (SOKU) vision and recommends a structured and coherent approach to future research in Grid technologies, Service Oriented Architectures and Utility Services aiming at realising that vision. The report defines the approach in the relation to the most recent advances in adjacent areas such as distributed operating systems, software and services engineering, agents, peer-to-peer (P2P) architecture, knowledge and security technologies, and building on cross-disciplinary synergies and emerging European strengths.
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