I'm at the NVIDIA GPU conference and yesterday they announced their next generation GPU called Fermi. Here are the key points:

• C++, complementing existing support for C, Fortran, Java, Python, OpenCL and DirectCompute.
• ECC, a critical requirement for datacenters and supercomputing centers deploying GPUs on a large scale
• 512 CUDA Cores™ featuring the new IEEE 754-2008 floating-point standard, surpassing even the most advanced CPUs
• 8x the peak double precision arithmetic performance over NVIDIA’s last generation GPU. Double precision is critical for high-performance computing (HPC) applications such as linear algebra, numerical simulation, and quantum chemistry
• NVIDIA Parallel DataCache™ - the world’s first true cache hierarchy in a GPU that speeds up algorithms such as physics solvers, raytracing, and sparse matrix multiplication where data addresses are not known beforehand
• NVIDIA GigaThread™ Engine with support for concurrent kernel execution, where different kernels of the same application context can execute on the GPU at the same time (eg: PhysX® fluid and rigid body solvers)

To get the full technical story, grab the Fermi White Paper. The bottom line, NVIDIA is paying attention to HPC in a BIG way.

From the shameless plug department

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.

What you may not know can cost you

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.