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IBM Still Dominating Green500 List

Paul Lilly — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 07:02:14 -0600

Who would've guessed that 18 of the top 20 most energy efficient supercomputers on the planet are built with IBM hardware? Let's be honest, who wouldn't have guessed it? This isn't the first time IBM has dominated the Green500 list, which includes a range of energy efficient supercomputers all around the globe, but it's hard not to be impressed that the company holds 69 of the top 100 positions on the list.

"Supercomputers can no longer focus only on raw performance. The era of simply adding more processors is coming to a close," said David Turek, vice president, deep computing, IBM. "Clients need to be able to run supercomputers anywhere, not only places that have cheap power. As the Green500 proves, IBM has focused on this issue for some time and is well positioned to usher in performance breakthroughs along with efficiency gains."

IBM also claims the most energy efficient system in the world with a supercomputer built at the Julich supercoming center in Germany. The machine is capable of producing more than 732 Mflops per watt of energy.

Intel Announces New Supercomputer Chip, Partnership with NEC

Ryan Whitwam — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 21:04:50 -0600

Intel has announced a new version of its Nehalem-EX series CPUs for use in supercomputers. The chips are part of the Xeon family and are optimized for use in supercomputers. The new six-core chips will run at higher clock speed than the current eight-core versions. A single computer will be capable of running 256 of the new CPUs. The new Nehalem-EX chips should be available next year.

Intel also made it known that they were partnering with NEC to develop new supercomputing technologies. In a joint statement, the two tech giants said they would, “push the boundaries of supercomputing performance.” Initially, the two companies will focus on boosting memory speed and scalability.

NEC plans to use advances gleaned from their work with Intel in future supercomputers that utilize Advanced Vector Extensions (AVX), an extension of the x86 architecture. A vector processor design is capable of processing multiple operations simultaneously. Current Xeon chips have strong scalar processing, meaning they run operations one at a time. AVX will also be used in Intel’s Sandy Bridge microarchitecture expected in 2011.

Cray Takes Back Supercomputer Crown

Paul Lilly — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 11:45:19 -0600

IBM's Roadrunner system at the U.S. Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico is no longer the planet's most powerful supercomputer. That distinction now belongs to a Cray supercomputer named "Jaguar" at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which regained the performance crown over the weekend, ComputerWorld reports.

Jaguar, which benefited from a few recent upgrades, is now capable of 1,759 petaflops per second courtesy of 224,162 processor cores. That's enough to jump ahead of IBM's Roadrunner, which dropped to 1,042 petaflops per second after it was repartitioned.

Number three on the list of supercomputers is Kraken at the National Institute for Computational Sciences at the University of Tennessee. Kraken is capable of churning out 832 teraflops per second and was ranked No. 6 in June.

One of the more interesting supercomputers belongs to China. The hybrid Intel-AMD Tianhe-1 in the city of Tianjin pushes out 563 teraflops per second, putting it in fifth place. China's supercomputer combines Intel's Xeon processors with AMD-brand GPUs as accelerators. Each node contains two Xeon chips attached to two AMD GPUs.

Image Credit: knoxnews.com

British Weather Supercomputer Clinches "Worst Polluter" Crown

Pulkit Chandna — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 09:55:49 -0500

The British Met Office is in possession of the country’s most powerful supercomputer, which it uses to better predict the possible impact of climate change on Britain. The weather supercomputer, installed in its headquarters, is now being lambasted for having such an embarrassingly large carbon footprint that the facility holding it has been labeled the worst public building in the UK in terms of pollution.

According to the Department of Communities and Local Government, which compiled the list, the Met Office’s HQ owes 75% of its carbon footprint to the mean machine, capable of 1,000 billion calculations every second. The supercomputer hogs 1.2 megawatts of energy. 'We would be throwing ourselves back into the dark ages of weather forecasting if we withdrew our reliance on supercomputing, it's as simple as that,' a spokesman for the Met Office said, justifying the use of the £30million ($48 million) supercomputer.

Image Credit: Dailymail

Fujitsu Releases 128 GigaFLOP "Venus" Processor for Supercomputers

Paul Lilly — Fri, 15 May 2009 08:38:03 -0500

Fujitsu this week laid a humdinger on Intel by unveiling the world's fastest CPU. The new chip is thought to be about 2.5 times faster than anything Intel has in its lineup, while also consuming two-thirds less power.

You can put any grandiose ideas of picking one up and setting new benchmarking records to rest, as the 'Venus' chip, or otherwise known as the SPARC64 VIIIfx, is designed for supercomputers. As such, Fujitsu claims the new CPU can process a mind boggling 128 billion computations per second, making Fujitsu the first Japanese firm in a decade to wear the raw CPU performance crown.

Built on a 45nm manufacturing process, Venus comes with eight cores and an integrated memory controller spread across two square centimeters. Fujitsu says it will take several years to come up with practical applications for the new chip, but that it could see use in pharmaceutical research, astronomy, weather prediction, scientific researching, and Folding@Home while running Crysis (we may have added the last two on our own).

Image Credit: PC Watch

Dell "Personal Supercomputers" Now Available With Nvidia Tesla GPUs

Andy Salisbury — Thu, 07 May 2009 16:27:48 -0500

To those looking for another venue to get their very own supercomputer, you’re in luck! Nvidia has recently announced that their CUDA-based Tesla C1060 GPU is available in Dell’s Precision R5400, T5500 and T7500 workstations effective immediately.

If you’re worried that just one of these GPUs isn’t enough to handle your hardcore needs, worry not – just one C1060 has enough power to control the main system of the European Extremely Large Telescope project (reportedly the world’s largest). According to Jeff Meisel with National Instruments, a workstation “equipped with a single Tesla C1060 can achieve near real-time control of the mirror simulation and controller, which before wouldn't be possible in a single machine without the computational density offered by GPUs."

Image Credit: Nvidia

Nvidia to Sell Preconfigured Tesla Clusters

Andy Salisbury — Wed, 06 May 2009 17:34:35 -0500

Nvidia recently announced the immediate availability of their ready to use Tesla GPU Preconfigured Cluster, aimed at the scientists, engineers and researchers of the world.

According to Nvidia the Tesla Cluster will provide up to 30 times the performance of a CPU-only cluster, while using only a fraction of the power. One example that they provide to drive this point home is that of BNP Paribas’ (a French Bank) Corporate and Investment Banking division, which recently replaced 500 CPUs that consumed 25kW of power with smaller CPU clusters and two Tesla S1070 1U systems, which only consumed 2kW of power. And, along with the lowered power expenditure, they received better performance.

According to Andy Keane, Nvidia’s Tesla General Manager, “There are 15 to 20 million engineers, scientists and researchers around the world struggling for time on supercomputers, which has led to a huge pent-up demand for computation. With the launch of the Tesla Preconfigured Cluster, every one of them can easily deploy a GPU-powered supercomputing cluster that dramatically reduces their power consumption while still advancing the pace of their work.”

Image Credit: Nvidia

IBM Bringing Petaflop Supercomputing to Europe

Paul Lilly — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 09:27:53 -0600

With IBM having recently announced it was building a supercomputer with 1.6 million cores capable of 20 petaflops of computing power, its hard to get too jazzed over a single petaflop. But for Europe, breaking the petaflop barrier is something that hasn't been done, but soon will be.

IBM and German research center Forschungszentrum Juelich are collaborating to build a new Blue Gene/P System supercomputer for Europe. It will mark the first time that a supercomputer capable of delivering petaflops of performance will be located outside of the U.S.

"With speeds over a Petaflop, this new Juelich-based supercomputer offers the processing ability of more than 200,000 laptop computers," explains Professor Thomas Lippert, lead scientist of the Juelich supercomputing center. "In addition to raw power, this new system will be among the most energy efficient in the world."

The Blue Gene/P System will house 294,912 processor, 144TB of memory, and 6PB of hard drive storage contained within 72 server racks. Adding to the historical significance, it will also be IBM's first watercooled supercomputer. IBM says the use of watercooling will result in a 91 percent reduction in air conditioning units that otherwise would have been required to cool the data center.

Image Credit: Forschungszentrum Juelich