Impress your friends, discover new things, solve problems, all in the comfort of your home or office.
For the past four years I have been bending, drilling, and swearing at
pieces of sheet metal. My goal? To create a personal cluster by cramming four MicroATX motherboards into
a single PC case with a single power supply. I also wanted a true desk side unit that was
low cost, cool, quiet, provided some serious FLOPS, and of course looked good.
Development efforts were successful and have spawned a commercial version
of the Limulus personal cluster. The current version achieved 200 GFLOPS running HPL (the Top500 linpack benchmark). Keep in mind, these are general purpose CPU FLOPS from off-the-shelf hardware and not GPU FLOPS.
There is plenty more to write about, but for now there are two important things to remember:
You can win a Limulus Personal Cluster! Enter here by filling out the survey.
You can find more technical information on the project site.
Hurry the drawling is on January 5th 2012. Update: the contest has been extended until January 20th, 2012. It was suggested to wait until
the spring semester starts at most colleges and universities. We hear you.
If you are heading out to SC11 this year don't forget to attend the best event at the show. That is right, the 2011 Beowulf Bash And Cephalopod Festival is back again this year -- bigger and better than last year.
Date and Time: Monday, November 14, 2011 - 9 p.m. Place: Seattle Aquarium 1483 Alaskan Way, Pier 59 Directions:see the invite
If you are attending SC11 and would like to a) eat a free breakfast, b) listen to experts answer questions and talk about exascale, c) try to win an ipad2 and, d) see what I actually look like in person, then please sign up for the Panasas and SICORP special event; The Road to Exascale Computing.
The event is sponsored by Panasas, the leader in high performance parallel storage, and SICORP, a Panasas Partner for implementing Panasas-based solutions. You are invited to a special breakfast event during SC11 where you can engage with industry luminaries who are on their way to making exascale computing a reality. Details below.
Expect Intel to be making some noise about their MIC Architecture at SC11 this year. If you want to read the best summary to date (not by Intel) have a look at Greg Pfister's latest Perils of Parallel blog entry called MIC and the Knights.
While you are reading blogs, have a gander at some of the recent titles I have posted over
at SICORP. Of course, you choose the topic that suits your mood or go for the grand prize and read them all*!
If you attend SC11 you will have the
opportunity to match wits in a game of Jeopardy!® with IBM's Watson computing system. Watson will be featured in a kiosk located on the 6th floor of the
convention and trade center, separate from the main IBM booth. The kiosk
is a version of the full IBM Power Systems-based Watson system that
competed on the game show. Background on Watson can be found in our coverage of the three day Jeopardy match (day 1, day 2, day 3).
In other interesting news, the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at The University of Texas at Austin today announced that it will deploy and support a world-class supercomputer with comprehensive computing and visualization capabilities for the open science community, which seems standard enough, however, they will be using the Intel Intel® Many Integrated Core (MIC) processor to help achieve 10 petaflops of performance. The new system, called Stampede, will be built by TACC in partnership with Dell and Intel.
By Robert Murphy The National High Performance Computing and Communications conference, scheduled this year for March 26-28 in Newport, Rhode Island, will bring together an elite gathering of industry insiders for its 26th annual conference. New this year is the focus on a global perspective of supercomputing along with emphasis on manufacturing and competitiveness. With [...]
Mexico’s Center for Research and Advanced Studies (CINVESTAV) has powered up Xiuhcoatl, a the country’s most powerful supercomputer at 25 Teraflops. Joining a three-way grid knows as Lancad, the system will be used to research such areas as Alzheimer’s, the Earth’s climate, tsunamis, and the formation of stars. According to Cinvestav chief Rene Asomoza, the [...]
Colfax International has published a new whitepaper by Stanford’s Andrey Vladimirov entitled: Terabyte RAM Servers: Memory Bandwidth Benchmark and How to Boost RAM Bandwidth by 20% with a Single Command. Colfax International produces servers capable of supporting up to 1 TB of RAM and up to 4 Intel Xeon CPUs. This paper reports the memory [...]
For the past four years I have been bending, drilling, and swearing at
pieces of sheet metal. My goal? To create a personal cluster by cramming four 
If you are heading out to 
If you are attending 
