In case you were not paying attention

I usually don't post things vendors send to ClusterMoney because we are not a big time news site (nor to I care for marketing piffle). I will at times summarize some important news and events with enough links to send you on your way to HPC enlightenment. Each Year NVidia sends me a year in review which is a good summary of Tesla HPC events -- complete with many URLs so readers can explore further. [A note to vendors: Company news (aka press releases) with URLs and good background and no jargon may get posted here.] The NVidia round-up begins below:

NVIDIA Tesla - 2009 Year in Review

A "tipping point" is defined as a level at which momentum for change becomes unstoppable - we genuinely believe that we are witnessing the tipping point for GPUs in the high performance computing space and the SC09 conference in Portland, Ore. in November cemented that belief.....but we'll come to that in due course :)

Did you hear that? Of course not, it is my cluster.

This project was originally started as a quest for a small and silent HTPC (Home Theater Personal Computer). We have constructed and built several of these boxes. The latest and best design can be seen further down the page in Figure One.

These HTPC systems are cooled passively in the sense that no fans are involved in the cooling of the CPU. The technique used for the cooling turned out to be rather efficient, that is, adequate cooling can be achieved without making the system significantly larger. For instance, the HTPC shown in Figure One (below) has the dimensions 29 x 27 x 10 cm (11.4 x 10.6 x 4 inches), and even if a fan were to be used it would not be trivial to build a smaller system with the chosen components. We will say more about the design principles as they apply to personal clusters later in the article.

Some conveniently late news (after SC09) for the HPC market

I may write more about SC09 in the next few weeks, but for now the video is starting to show up on at Linux Magazine and I already posted a SC09: Three Trends Worth Watching over at HPC Community. You can get a good feel for things from those two articles. I'll also be posting more video on Linux Magazine over the next several weeks.

The weeks after SC are usually quiet as the holidays approach. This year seems to be a little different. There have been more than a few interesting annoucements about the HPC market. I find it kid of interesting how all these show up after SC09. Perhaps these are the kind of announcements you don't want gobbled up by the press. In any case, I have collected the stories and added a little commentary to each. An interesting time in HPC to say the least.

The offcial video for the 2009 Beowulf Bash in Portland has hit the Internet. Check it out. Maybe you will see yourself or someone you know or someone you don't know and are glad you don't.

Of course I would be remiss if I did not mention the sponsors on last time; AMD, Econnectix, InsideHPC, Penguin, SICORP, Terascala, Xand Marketing, and of course ClusterMonkey.