These are Not the Watts You Are Looking For
- Details
- Written by Douglas Eadline
- Hits: 2536
From the What's Watts Dept.
Some Clarity around TDP ratings
Managing power usage on multi-core processors has become an important aspect with modern computing systems. At the same time, finding an accurate specification of actual power usage has become more difficult. Knowing power usage is important in many areas and particularly when considering the efficiency of High Performance Computing (HPC) systems. In almost all modern CPUs and GPUs the only number that seems to give a hint about power usage is Thermal Design Power or TDP.According to Wikipedia Thermal Design Power is defined as follows:
... is the maximum amount of heat generated by a computer chip or component (often a CPU, GPU or system on a chip) that the cooling system in a computer is designed to dissipate under any workload.
Some sources state that the peak power rating for a microprocessor is usually 1.5 times the TDP rating
Jack Dongarra Likes Julia (the language)
- Details
- Written by Douglas Eadline
- Hits: 371

From the "What We Have Been Saying Dept"
Fresh from Julia Computing is a short note about HPC maven Jack Dongarra had to say about Julia.
2021 Turing Award Winner Jack Dongarra Says Julia Is ‘Much Better’ Than Other Languages and Should Perhaps Take Over: The winner of the 2021 Turing Award, often referred to as the ‘Nobel Prize of Computing’, is Jack Dongarra. Dongarra says Julia is ‘much better’ than other languages and should perhaps take over. According to ZDNet:
“While hardware speeds up matrix multiplication, [Jack] Dongarra is, again, mindful of the needs of the scientists and the software writer. ‘I grew up writing FORTRAN, and today we have much better mechanisms’ such as the Julia programming language and Jupyter Notebooks. What's needed now, he said, are more ways to ‘express those computations in an easy way,’ meaning linear algebra computations such as matrix multiplications. Specifically, more tools are needed to abstract the details. ‘Making the scientist more productive is the right way to go,’ he said. Asked what software programming paradigm should perhaps take over, Dongarra suggested the Julia language is one good candidate …”
Of course some forward looking sites, (cough, cough) have been highlighting Julia for ten years,
2021 Hybrid Beowulf Bash and PID Game
- Details
- Written by Douglas Eadline
- Hits: 544

- Composable Computing - Will the next generation of HPC computing be built-to-order at run time? Dynamic infrastructure represents a new way provision just the right amount of bare-metal hardware for your application. This panel will discuss the concept of composable computing and how it can used in HPC.
- RISC-V For HPC Open ISA RISC-V processors are beginning to arrive in many different vertical markets. What are the latest designs and roadmaps to this the new processor for HPC?
- Benchmarking For HPC Since the beginning of HPC, benchmarks, like the Top500, have been historically important. This panel will discuss modern benchmarking strategies and resources in today's changing HPC landscape.
Disrupt Forward: Announcing the Beowulf Foundation
- Details
- Written by Douglas Eadline
- Hits: 1230

From the self reference department
The Beowulf Foundation was announced by Douglas Eadline and Lara Kisielewska at the SC 2021 Beowulf Bash in St Louis. The idea for a “Foundation” emerged from the continued discussion amongst the Beowulf community about the supporting the “Beowulf Ethos,” that began with the Beowulf Project at NASA using commodity hardware and open source software to build high-performance systems at low cost. Initially considered an anomaly, the “wrong ideas” demonstrated by the Beowulf Project changed the face of modern supercomputing.
The goal of the Beowulf Foundation is not to relive the past, but to support the “wrong” ideas of the future that may lead to further breakthroughs in high performance computing. As stated by Eadline:
Open, Scalable, and Portable 3D Data Visualization
- Details
- Written by Number Six
- Hits: 3236
A new open source, portable, and scalable 3D visualization standard is in the works. Announced by Khronos Group ANARI (Analytic Rendering Interface) 1.0 Provisional Specification for scientific visualization and scalable 3D Data visualization. ANARI will enable users to quickly and easily build a scene description and create 3D images. Most importantly, ANARI doesn’t specify the rendering details; the rendering gets left to the backend engine which provides a simplified way to develop a visualization application with cross-vendor portability including ray tracing. From the announcement:
"The scientific visualization ecosystem includes key visualization application vendors such as VMD, VTK/ParaView, and VisIt that have actively participated in ANARI’s design. There are also early ANARI implementations in development by AMD, Intel and NVIDIA that will provide access to their Radeon ProRender, OSPRay, and VisRTX rendering engines respectively".
The specification is provisional and a full version 1 should be released soon (there is an open SDK available). There is also a good (and short) Overview Video that explains the benefits of ANARI.
Search
Login And Newsletter
Feedburner
Who's Online
We have 235 guests and no members online
Latest Stories/News
Popular
InsideHPC
-
@HPCpodcast: At the HPC User Forum — A Frontier Visit, the State of Quantum and Supercomputing Center Staffing Woes
Jun 30, 2022 | 23:12 pm
-
Kathryn Kelley Joins CASC as Executive Director
Jun 30, 2022 | 21:15 pm
-
Atos Opens Life Sciences Centre of Excellence for Drug Development and Precision Health in UK
Jun 30, 2022 | 14:45 pm
Phoronix
-
AMD Rembrandt SoC Support For Coreboot In Place - Based Off Existing "Sabrina" Code
Jul 4, 2022 | 18:55 pm
-
Linux 5.20 To Fix Some TUXEDO/Clevo Laptops With Touchpad/Keyboard Issues After Suspend
Jul 4, 2022 | 13:14 pm
-
Ubuntu's Chromium Snap Finally Seeing Progress On Supporting VA-API GPU Acceleration
Jul 4, 2022 | 11:40 am