SC18: Beowulf Video and Other Cool Stuff

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Written by Number Six

Published: 31 October 2018

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Entire Beowulf cluster to be built start to finish during Supercomputing using 3D printing.

Dallas, Texas, October 31 2018 — The Beowulf community will be featured prominently in the SC 30th Anniversary Exhibit at SC18 in Dallas November 12–15 to celebrate 30 years of SC and 25 years of the Beowulf Project. Beowulf is a methodology that uses open software to connect a local cluster of commodity-grade hardware into a single processing element. What began as a disruptive idea in 1993 has fundamentally changed the trajectory of supercomputing, and its influence has filtered down into nearly every aspect of High Performance Computing (HPC) today.

JuliaCon 2018 Summary Report

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Written by John Hearns

Published: 15 August 2018

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[Editors Note: Thanks to John for reporting in from JuliaCon 2018.]

Julia Con 2018 took place at London University College and the Microsoft Reactor space in Hoxton last week. The conference saw the release of the 1.0 version of the language.

My main impression is that Julia is being used in production for a wide range of uses. What follows is a small selection of keynotes and talks which impressed me. All of the conference talks are available in this YouTube playlist .

Breathe Easy: The Red Hat Acquisition by IBM Was Always a Goal

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Written by Douglas Eadline

Published: 29 October 2018

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Over the weekend it was announced IBM was buying Red Hat. A lot of gasps in the community. Personally, I'm not surprised and some other strategic moves may follow. My guess is Canonical's phone is ringing today. I sometimes think these acquisitions are forty percent about the technology/people and sixty percent about keeping it out of the hands of competitors. In this case, I believe it is about renting remote servers, sorry, cloud computing.

Happy Birthday Julia

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Written by John Hearns

Published: 10 August 2018

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The Julia language reached the important milestone of a 1.0 release on Wednesday (August 8th). During a party in the rather swish Institute for Engineering and Technology overlooking the Thames in London, the founders of the Julia language performed a live push of the 1.0 version to Gitbub.

The significance is that the Julia language has often been criticized for changing the language in ways which break old code at minor version number changes. The recent 0.7 version was intended as a preview of 1.0, i.e. there would be no breaking changes between 0.7 and 1.0. Version 0.7 lasted around a month, and there was a lot of traffic on the Julia discussion board on how packages are being slowly updated to 0.7 compatibility. Now with version 1.0 we can look forward to a stable language - so if you have not looked at Julia yet this is the ideal time to try it.

[Note: check out the official Julia 1.0 Blog post]