The Reg HPC: Researchers break records with MILLION-CORE calculation [ Thu Feb 7 2013]

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Your HPC newsletter from theregister.co.uk
for the week ending 7th February 2013


*** HPC News ***

Day of the Trifid: VPAC fires up new HPC cluster
$AU1.2m buy adds 45+ TFLOPS
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/02/04/vpac_fires_up_new_clustern/

The Victorian Partnership for Advanced Computing (VPAC), a consortium
of Australian universities, has flipped the switch on 45.9 Teraflops of
a new $1.22 million HP-based cluster to cope with rising workloads from
partners La Trobe University and RMIT, and its other customers.

The Reg understands the 180-node, 2,880 core machine at VPAC is based
on HP SL230 modules with DL380 standalone units as the login and
management nodes.

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World's 'most green' supercomputer in red-hot battle between Intel,
Nvidia
Uni boffins demand more bang for their watt
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/02/04/cineca_intel_v_nvidia_battle/

Non-profit consortium CINECA has deployed what may be the greenest
supercomputer in the world at its Bologna centre in Italy. Called
Eurora, the new machine claims it can perform 3,150 megaflops per watt,
compared to the 2,499.44 achieved by Green-500 king the Beacon
supercomputer at the National Institute for Computational Sciences and
University of Tennessee.

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Euro boffins plan supercomputer to SIMULATE HUMAN BRAIN
€1.19b for in-silico experiments to build robots driven by simulated
people
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/02/04/human_brain_project/

The European Commission has selected the Human Brain Project (HBP) as
one of its Future and Emerging Technologies and will send it up to
€1.19b over ten years so it can build a supercomputer capable of
simulating the human brain.

The HBP wants to build a simulated brain because we don't know enough
about our grey matter. The project's web site says we lack even a
"casual understanding of the way [brain] events … produce cognition and
behaviour," while more than a century of research has yielded little
understanding of "how changes in the synapses between neurons help us
to remember important events in our past".

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Italian 'Eurora' supercomputer pushes the green envelope
Besting Cray and IBM in the energy efficiency game
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/01/31/nvidia_eurotech_eurora_supercomputer/

The "Eurora" supercomputer that was just fired up in Italy may not be
large, but it has taken the lead in energy efficiency over designs from
big HPC vendors like Cray and IBM.

The new machine was built by Eurotech, a server maker with HPC
expertise that is based on Amaro, Italy, in conjunction with graphics
chip and GPU coprocessor maker Nvidia. Based on initial tests Linpack
Fortran benchmark tests, it would be more energy efficient than either
IBM's massively parallel Power-based BlueGene/Q machine or the hybrid
ceepie-geepie XK7 machine from Cray.

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Power-mad HPC fans told: No exascale for you - for at least 8 years
And here's why...
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/01/31/exascale_when/

I recently stumbled upon a transcript from a very recent interview with
HPC luminaries Jack Dongarra (University of Tennessee, Oak Ridge,
Top500 list) and Horst Simon (deputy director at Lawrence Berkeley
National Lab.) The topic? Nothing less than the future of
supercomputers. These are pretty good guys to ask, since they're both
intimately involved with designing, building, and using some of the
largest supercomputers to ever walk the earth.

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Company you never heard of builds 3.4 petaflops super for DOE
The Wizards of Phi follow the yellow brick road to Pacific Northwest
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/01/30/atipa_pnnl_hpcs_4a_supercomputer/

Nature abhors a vacuum as well as an oligopoly, which is why upstart
supercomputer maker Atipa Technologies may find itself having an easier
time getting its foot into the data center door now that Cray has eaten
supercomputer-maker Appro International.

The company you've never heard of is Atipa, a division of PC and server
maker Microtech Computers, based in Lawrence, Kansas. Microtech was
founded in 1986 to build PCs and servers for the local Midwest market,
and it was one of many PC makers who made a decent living peddling to
local businesses before the industry massively consolidated. The
company did so well in the pre-consolidation era that it expanded
across the US up until the 1990s.

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Researchers break records with MILLION-CORE calculation
One app, million cores – but it wasn't Crysis...
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/01/29/million_core_milestone/

Stanford's Engineering Center for Turbulence Research (SECTR) has
claimed a new record in computer science by running a fluid dynamics
problem using a code named CharLES that utilised more than one million
cores in the hulking great IBM Sequoia at once.

According to the Stanford researchers, it's the first time this many
cores have been devoted to a fluid simulation. In this case, the
boffins were modeling jet engine exhaust in an attempt to reduce the
noise during takeoffs and landings.

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Stanford super runs million-core calculation
'Sequoia' focuses its attention on fluid dynamics problem
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/01/28/stanford_uni_million_core_calculation/

Stanford University engineers are claiming a record for the year-old
Sequoia supercomputer, after running up a calculation that used more
than a million of the machine's cores at once.

The work was conducted by the university's Centre for Turbulence
Research, seeking to get a model for supersonic jet noise that's more
sophisticated than "wow, that's loud". The predictive simulations the
centre conducts contribute to designing quieter engines by providing
input into components such as nozzle shape.

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