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The shameless self promotion is at the end

The following news items have hit my radar screen recently. I'm sure I missed a lot of other important news, but here are some stories I found interesting. As always, there are plenty of links from which to explore further.

Speaking of HPC news, Jeff Squyres, fearless Open MPI Maven, has posted an interesting blog post called Unexpected Linux memory migration. Might want to read this one.

Speaking of MPI, Open MPI has released Open MPI v1.5.2. Note that the "v1.5.x" series is the "feature development" series for Open MPI. They consider it fairly stable, but it has not been as time-tested as the mature v1.4.x series. Production sites may wish to stay with v1.4.x until the v1.5 series transitions to its "mature" counterpart (i.e., the v1.6 series). Otherwise, you cluster cowboys and cowgirls out there may want to dump v1.5.2 into the mix.

Speaking further of MPI, NVidia Cuda 4.0 has a new feature that allows modified MPI implementations to automatically move data from and to the GPU memory over Infiniband when an application does an MPI send or receive call.

Speaking of NVidia, they have planted the Supercomputing flag a little deeper into the ground and have also released the above mentioned CUDA 4.0. The new version offers unified virtual addressing, GPU-to-GPU communication and enhanced C++ template libraries. Currently, CUDA 4.0 is available to registered developers.

Speaking of CUDA, The Portland Group has released PGI 2011 HPC Compilers and Development Tools which includes include CUDA Fortran and CUDA language extensions for Fortran and C (more to come on this topic).

Speaking of Chinese supercomputers that use Nvidia GPUs, (what, who was talking about Chinese supercomputers), the Chinese have announced future supercomputers will be using homemade chips. They expect to beat current champ Tianhe-1A. (Although at 55% peak efficiency, some optimization may help Tianhe-1A)

Speaking of supercomputers, I recommend watching this video presentation on Re-Configurable EXASCALE Computing by Steven J Wallach. Interesting presentation.

And finally, speaking of self promotion, I have been blogging over at the Sicorp site. It also seems my recent Linux Magazine column got front page status at Slashdot. And of course your can follow me on Twitter where I pretty much don't say much of anything.