High performance - News, Features, and Slideshows

News

• IBM's Jeopardy strategy: Divide and conquer

  When it comes tackling a challenge as tough as answering a human question, the best computational approach may be to break the job down into multiple parts and run them all in parallel, IBM is betting.

• Microsoft's Dryad technology to take on Google's MapReduce

  Addressing the growing market for tools that handle very large data sets, Microsoft has released a beta set of technologies, called Dryad, to manage and analyze large amounts of information across a cluster of Windows Servers.

• Oracle burnishes its Lustre

  While a number of small companies have been ramping up support for a file system called Lustre that Oracle acquired in its Sun Microsystems purchase earlier this year, Oracle itself has no plans to abandon the technology, a company executive told the IDG News Service in an interview.

• IBM to build 3 petaflop supercomputer for Germany

  The global race for supercomputing power continues unabated: Germany's Bavarian Academy of Science has announced that it has contracted IBM to build a supercomputer that, when completed in 2012, will be able to execute up to 3 petaflops, potentially making it the world's most powerful supercomputer.

• MIT: Light speed now a bottleneck in fastest networks

  With global networks carrying complex time-sensitive data, the speed of light is actually becoming a significant source of latency, researchers have found.

• IBM chip breakthrough may lead to exascale supercomputers

  IBM researchers have made a breakthrough in using pulses of light to accelerate data transfer between chips, something they say could boost the performance of supercomputers by more than a thousand times.

• Scientist talks US exascale supercomputer plan

  There is an international race to build an exascale supercomputer, and one of the people leading it is Peter Beckman, a top computer scientist at the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory.

• IBM tops Green500 list

  While China can take pride in topping the list of the world's most powerful supercomputers, IBM has been given another recognition: building the world's most energy-efficient supercomputer.

• Supercomputing Top500 brews discontent

  Like Hollywood's Academy Awards, the Top500 list of supercomputers is dutifully watched by high-performance computing (HPC) participants and observers, even as they vocally doubt its fidelity to excellence.

• Nvidia chief scientist: CPUs slowed by legacy design

  When it comes to power-efficient computing, CPUs are weighed down by too many legacy features to outperform GPUs (graphics processing units) in executing common tasks in parallel, said the chief scientist for the GPU vendor Nvidia.

• China rocks Top 500 supercomputer list

  A new supercomputer installation in China has rocketed to the top of the twice-annual ranking of the world's most powerful supercomputers.

• Hopkins to build data analysis super machine

  Disregarding the supercomputing community's insatiable thirst for FLOPS (floating point operations per second), the Baltimore-based Johns Hopkins University is configuring its new machine to achieve the maximum number of IOPS (I/O operations per second) instead.

• Lustre settles into post-Oracle life

  Despite reassurances from Oracle, advocates of yet another ex-Sun Microsystems technology are voicing concern about the future of their software. In this latest case, the technology is Lustre, a file system widely used across the supercomputing community.

• Microsoft new HPC Server adds SETI-like capabilities

  Microsoft today released an updated version of its Windows HPC Server 2008 R2 that can tap into compute resources throughout an enterprise as well as a cloud computing system.

• Purdue app slows servers when cooling fails

  While chip manufacturers continue to make their processors ever more powerful, at least one customer has found it useful to slow these chips down, at least long enough to keep them running when the data center air conditioning falters.