I was commissioned by AMD and Sun to write a short ebook called
HPC For Dummies. While I could have written a much longer book, I think it delivers on the essentials. The book is available for free after registration. You do need Adobe® Digital Editions for Windows or Mac to view it (sigh, most HPC people, like me, use Linux). Update: Now it is available as PDF. Yea! Register to get it.
If there is interest in a longer book, either an extended HPC for Dummies or the completion of another book I started called
The Art of Linux HPC Clusters, please take the front page poll to the right. The survey is important because part of getting a publisher interested in a book is convincing them someone will buy it! So if you want more/better/updated HPC Cluster Books, please help me out. By the way, all our past polls are located here.
Lower power InfiniBand, Cool Opterons, CUDA+LAPACK, HPC in the Cloud, and more
Welcome back to work, the summer is almost over and here are some things that may have happened while you were on vacation. First, I should mention, it is August 31 and I'm not sure if the temperature is going to break 70 F today. I live in the northeast part of the US and typically at this time each year the lawns are brown, the air is thick with humidity, and thunderstorms usually role in each afternoon to cool off our 90+ degree days. Not today. It must be due to all the new low wattage green technology hitting the computer market.
The commodity cluster has changed the High Performance Computing (HPC) landscape in a significant way. Indeed, clusters have had a disruptive influence on many sectors of the IT market in addition to HPC. As with most disruptive technologies, clusters hit the market with a the promise of "faster, better, cheaper" computing. Marketing numbers from IDC, seem to support the perception that clusters are delivering on their promise. A deeper look, however, reveals that in reality some of the "cheaper" promise is due to shifting certain costs from the traditional HPC vendor to the customer.
A few things that caught my eye this July, industrial HPC, a new PGI compiler with GPU support, AMD Shanghai and Intel Nehalem smackdown, a smart optimizing GCC compiler, file system news, and of course a shameless plug.
Industrial HPC
I have always been interested in industrial HPC. While I love seeing large molecules docking or galaxies colliding, I also have a fascination with how HPC can create better products or improve manufacturing processes. If you share the interest, take a look at a recent
webcast (starts right away) sponsored by the
National Center for Manufacturing Sciences. There is a meeting in New Orleans this September called C3A (Compute & Collaborate for Competitive Advantage). Registration is here. BTW, I'm not sure what to make of their web page motif, check it out.
Second in a series of four articles about the TeraGrid
Navajo Technical College in New Mexico is a small tribal school hardly flush with research computing equipment, said Jason Arviso, director of the information technology office and National Science Foundation Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) grant program at Navajo Technical. Conversely, Clemson University in South Carolina went from zero to nearly 50 teraflops and the Top 500 supercomputers list in a few short months. “I know that eventually we won’t have enough nodes for everybody,” said Barr von Oehsen, director of computational science in the Cyberinfrastructure Technology Integration Group at Clemson.
Andy Jones has graciously agreed to share his presentation with you guys as well. Andy is a long time member of our community, currently helping out at NAG with HECToR and several other things, and he also does quite a bit of writing in our community as well.
Here is the abstract for his talk
This talk [...]
eWeek Europe is carrying an article today on IT startup Green Revolution Cooling’s innovative approach to cooling your HPC gear
Green Revolution Cooling (GRC) launched at the SC09 show in November, at the same time as UK company Iceotope launched a liquid-cooled server system, but GRC says its system is radically simpler, cheaper and easier to [...]
The team at NCSA’s Advanced Visualization Laboratory (where I spent a really fun summer doing some post-master’s course work under Polly Baker) has added another movie credit to their CV. This time the team has been hard at work visualizing parts of our universe for the film Hubble 3D
High-resolution 3D visualizations of galaxies, nebulae and [...]
Navajo Technical College in New Mexico is a small tribal school hardly flush with research computing equipment, said Jason Arviso, director of the information technology office and National Science Foundation Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) grant program at Navajo Technical. Conversely, Clemson University in South Carolina went from zero to nearly 50 teraflops and the Top 500 supercomputers list in a few short months. “I know that eventually we won’t have enough nodes for everybody,” said Barr von Oehsen, director of computational science in the Cyberinfrastructure Technology Integration Group at Clemson.
