| News digest 28 June 2009 |
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| TOP500 |
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| Voltaire strengthens InfiniBand leadership on new TOP500 List |
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Voltaire Ltd.'s switches now power more than 50 percent of the InfiniBand deployments - more than double the share of any other InfiniBand systems vendor - on the 33rd edition of the TOP500 list of the world's most powerful supercomputers. InfiniBand is the only industry-standard clustered interconnect that continues to increase share on the TOP500 list with a 25 percent growth rate compared to June 2008.
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| Applications |
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| Hybrid prototyping enables engineers to combine simulation with physical prototyping |
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Uwe Woessner from HLRS Stuttgart offered a clear view on the process of combining virtual and augmented reality to create hybrid prototypes in the HPC and Visualization Session at ISC'09. There are three phases in prototyping: planning, development and production. Uwe Woessner was focusing on the development phase during his talk. He also showed a little demo at the end of his presentation.
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| University of Utah to host comprehensive visualization facility |
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Dr. Chuck Hansen from the University of Utah gave an overview of the manifold possibilities at the Visualization and Analytics Center for Enabling Technology (VACET) located at his university. There are three research cores which are HPC, Visualization and Image Analysis. To the question of how to enable petascale science, he responded with the fishing analogy. First you have to have good fishing equipment, i.e. new algorithm techniques and production-quality parallel capable software. Second, you have to teach others to fish by creating partnerships with stakeholders and help transition communities to new technologies, outreach and training. Third, you have to catch big fish by applying the right techniques.
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| KAUST Visualization team wants you! |
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Some nice things are happening in Saudi Arabia. A whole new campus is being built and bound to open on September 5, 2009 featuring a large visualization facility. If you love a hot climate and you're found of coral reef diving, then a job at KAUST might be something for you. Dr. Steve Cutchin, Head of the Advanced Visualization Facility, is recruiting die hard fans of innovative technology to come and work in his team at KAUST to give body to the new Visualization Laboratory that is being built from the ground up.
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| The Grid |
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| Why is high energy physics needing a Grid? |
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Ian Bird from CERN was giving the floor on the last day of ISC'09 to talk about the performance of the LHC Grid Service as a virtual supercomputer. It turns out to be that of course the WCLG is not a supercomputer. It is a super-computing system though and today it sustains about 2 Petaflop and has over 50 Pbyte of storage. WCLG will grow in the future but it is not useful for tightly coupled applications.
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| IBM extends social networking software through Cloud computing with LotusLive Connections |
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IBM has launched its newest Cloud service - LotusLive Connections - which combines business social networking with collaboration tools. Part of IBM's Cloud service portfolio, LotusLive, LotusLive Connections extends IBM's reach further into new markets.
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| HP introduces Cloud consulting services for enterprise IT organisations |
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HP has launched new consulting services to help enterprise customers consider incorporating the Cloud as part of their broader IT strategy. The new offerings, including the HP Cloud Discovery Workshop and HP Cloud Roadmap Service, are part of a larger portfolio of HP consulting services for enterprise customers who are looking to efficiently drive business benefits from the Cloud.
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| Oracle delivers world record multi-node result with SPECjAppServer2004 Benchmark |
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Oracle achieved world record multi-node SPECjAppServer2004 benchmark results for Oracle Fusion Middleware.
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| Voltaire announces general availability of 40 Gb/s InfiniBand Director Switch and Unified Fabric Manager software |
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Voltaire Ltd. has made available the Grid Director 4700, a 40 Gb/s InfiniBand director switch which offers the lowest latency in the industry. Combined with Voltaire's Unified Fabric Manager (UFM) software, the solution provides blazing performance, scalability and ease-of-use for large, high-performance scale-out data centres.
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| Company news |
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| NEC to prepare its comeback to the HPC market |
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During the NEC Hot Seat Session Dr. Rudolf Fischer was given the chance to explain what NEC is up to with regard to high performance computing after the somewhat worrying news that recently came up about NEC pulling out of the Japanese National Project. Dr. Fischer acknowledged the problems NEC is facing due to the economical crisis but promised that his company will not leave the HPC market and is making plans for a big return. Details however will only be published at SC09 in Portland, Oregon, this autumn. NEC still needs some time to define a new HPC roadmap.
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| Myricom to generate increased network bandwidth to address the multi-core problem |
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At the ISC'09 Exhibition as well as during the Myricom Hot Seat Session, Dr. Markus Fischer presented the fourth generation of Myricom products, a convergence at 10-Gigabit/s data rates of Myrinet with Ethernet. The most significant new developments at Myricom over the past year have been in the fast-growing 10-Gigabit Ethernet NIC business. With 32 cores and more on the horizon there is another level of I/O performance to be solved. First of all it is the task of the CPU vendor to solve the internal memory access when all cores are accessing main memory but eventually these cores want to communicate - still via MPI - to the outside world. It's clear that for this purpose an increase in bandwidth is desired.
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| Cray is looking in the rear view mirror for petascale computing |
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Jaguar is the world's most powerful computer when it comes to real application power according to Cray. The system is designed for science from the ground up. It has set 8 application world records in its first week and two have exceeded the 1 Tflops barrier. Cray's Steven Scott clearly saw the Hot Seat Session as an excellent opportunity to dot the i's with regard to the Jaguar system.
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| TotalView Technologies announces Marketing Teaming Agreement with IBM for TotalView on Blue Gene/P |
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TotalView Technologies, a provider of interactive analysis and debugging tools for serial and parallel codes, has signed a strategic Teaming Agreement with IBM to jointly market the TotalView debugger on the IBM Blue Gene/P platform. Having worked together since 1995, the companies will promote the use of the TotalView debugger on the Blue Gene/P platform through collaboration in marketing activities. TotalView Technologies will provide IBM with sales training on the benefits of debugging with TotalView.
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| Foxwoods Resort Casino hits the data connectivity jackpot with DataDirect Technologies |
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Foxwoods Resort Casino is using DataDirect Connect for ODBC database drivers within its Hospitality Systems' applications to connect business analytics data on UNIX to Windows-based data sources. With secure, reliable and stable access to heterogeneous data sources Foxwoods has gained immediate visibility into the non-gaming activity of its guests to aid with marketing efforts, special events and promotions.
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| IBM and ETH Zurich unveil plan to build new kind of water-cooled supercomputer |
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The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH), and IBM are planning to build a water-cooled supercomputer that will directly re-purpose excess heat for the university buildings. The innovative system, dubbed Aquasar, is expected to decrease the carbon footprint of the system by up to 85% and estimated to save up to 30 tons of CO2 per year, compared to a similar system using today's cooling technologies.
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| Bull's Extreme Computing strategy and offerings examined in new white paper from IDC |
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Just a few days after the launch of the new bullx supercomputer, industry analysts IDC have given their assessment of Bull's strategy and offerings in Extreme Computing. Having reviewed Bull's initial moves in Extreme Computing, IDC goes on to explore the reasons behind Bull's rapid ascent in this area, and makes an impartial assessment of the challenges and opportunities that the Group faces in its ambition to be among the three world leaders in this domain, and number one in Europe.
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| ParaStationV5 Cluster Operating and Management Software propelled the JuRoPA cluster at Juelich Supercomputer Centre to an impressive performance of 274,8 Teraflops at an efficiency of 91,6% |
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In parallel to the release of this year's TOP500 list during the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC'09) in Hamburg, ParTec's own developed ParaStationV5 cluster operating system combined with ParaStationMPI propelled the Juropa cluster to an impressive 274,8 trillion floating point operations/second to rank no. 10 of this year's Top 500 list of the worldwide fastest supercomputers.
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| Voltaire introduces Open MPI Accelerator software |
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Voltaire has introduced Open MPI Accelerator (OMA) software that significantly increases the performance of Open MPI-based applications in server and storage environments by nearly 30 percent. Voltaire OMA works transparently over any interconnect technology that works with Open MPI, including InfiniBand and 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE).
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