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for the week ending 28th November 2013
*** HPC News ***
Meet the Cluster teams: Colorado and Texas
Colorado launches Mars probe, Texas stylin' and profilin'
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/11/28/student_cluster_teams_colorado_texas/
Exciting times at the SC13 Student Cluster Competition in Denver this
year. Time to take an up close and personal look at two of the most
experienced teams in the competition, Colorado and Texas.
These teams have distinctly different personas. Colorado teams are
usually reserved and businesslike, while Texas teams tend to be a bit
more exhuberent. These teams do have one major thing in common - a long
term sponsor support from Dell.
----
Mini-cluster competitor configs revealed
$2,500 limit is no bar to student imaginations
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/11/28/minicluster_competitor_configs_revealed/
The students in the Commodity Track of the SC13 Student Cluster
Competition in Denver faced quite a challenge last week. They had to
build at least a dual-node HPC cluster, but could only spend a total of
$2,500 on it.
There are lots of ways to go. You can get the smallest/cheapest
motherboards possible and string a bunch of them together - like
harnessing a bunch of gerbils to pull your wagon. Or you could opt for
two much more powerful PC-like nodes, which would be more like using
two medium sized dogs to drag the load.
----
BIG IRON cluster warriors put pedal to HOT METAL
We node you like those accelerators
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/11/26/big_iron_cluster_warrior_battle_jitneys_unveiled/
We saw an interesting assortment of gear from the teams competing in
the SC13 Standard (Big Iron) Track of the Student Cluster Competition.
As you can see on the handy table below, the teams had a lot in common
on the surface. They all ran some variety of Intel Xeon as their base
CPU, most were using Mellanox Infiniband interconnects, and every team
had some sort of accelerator or co-processor.
----
US govt cuts squeeze crucial computer science, shoot country in foot
Budget slashing ruins education, ruins science, ruins HPC, ruins planet
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/11/22/us_feds_clamp_down_on_computing_research_cash_shoot_country_in_foot/
The US is shooting itself in the return-on-investment foot by
tightening the screws on support for research on advanced computing
systems.
That was the message expressed loud and clear by a trio of HPC
heavyweights during a "Retrospective on Supercomputing Technologies"
session celebrating the 25th anniversary of the SC13 supercomputing
conference in Denver, Colorado, on Thursday evening.
----
Intel pulls up SoCs, reveals 'integrated' memory on CPUs
In future will stack memory atop the cores
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/11/21/intel_converging_memory_and_cpus/
Intel said it was working on stacking a layer of memory on its Xeon
processors to run memory-bound workloads faster.
It said this in a pitch at the Denver-based Supercomputing Conference
(SC13) which is running from 17 to 22 Nov.
According to an EE Times report, Intel's Rajeeb Hazra, a VP and general
manager of its data centre group, said Intel would customise high-end
Xeon processors and Xeon Phi co-processors by closely integrating
memory, both by adding memory dies to a processor package and, at a
later date, integrating layers of memory dies into the processor along
with optical fabrics and switches.
----
Green supercomputer benchmarks make boffins see red, check blueprints
Top 10 use GPU brawn, but has anyone any bright ideas on better juicy
tests?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/11/21/gpu_accelerators_overrun_green500_list_of_energyefficient_hpc_systems/
The biannual Green500 list of the most energy-efficient supercomputers
has broken new ground in two important ways: for the first time an HPC
system broke the 4 gigaflops per watt barrier, and also for the first
time all the top 10 systems benefitted from GPU acceleration. Then
there's a third bit of note: the benchmarks are rubbish.
----
Nvidia to Intel: 'Which HPC chip brain will win? Let the people decide'
Easy to say when you have the lion's share of the market already,
Little Green
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/11/20/nvidia_tesla_man_focuses_on_market_share_in_competition_with_intel/
Nvidia is of the opinion that in the tussle with Intel as to whether
Nvidia's Tesla GPU accelerators or Chipzilla's Xeon Phi many-core CPU
coprocessors will dominate the supercomputing market, the HPC community
has already voted with its checkbooks.
"This community continues to invest in GPU computing – GPU-based
accelerated computing – and that actually is the proof in the pudding,"
Sumit Gupta, general manager of Nvidia's HPC-focused Tesla biz, told
The Register when we sat down with him on Wednesday morning at the SC13
supercomputing conference in Denver, Colorado.
----
Micron takes on Intel with 'breakthrough' processor for streaming data
Automata processor cuts through NP-hard problems like they're butter
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/11/19/micron_automata_processor_launch/
Memory specialist Micron has announced a new accelerator processor that
it claims outperforms Intel's chips when it comes to dealing with
streaming data.
The "Automata Processor" was announced by the company on Monday and
billed as a device that uses the inherent parallelism of memory
architectures to speed the ingestion and processing of large data sets.
----
Decades ago, computing was saved by CMOS. Today, no hero is in sight
HPC headman sees the future – and it ain't pretty
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/11/19/decades_ago_computing_was_saved_by_cmos_today_no_hero_is_in_sight/
The general chair of the SC13 supercomputing conference thinks the
semiconducting industry has reached a tipping point more radical – and
uncertain – than it has gone through in decades.
"We've reached the end of a technological era where we had a very
stable technology," Bill Gropp, Thomas M. Siebel Chair in Computer
Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, told a group of
reporters at the conference in Denver, Colorado, on Monday.
----
Why not build a cluster out of WORKSTATIONS?
Oz chap explains how he powered 27,320 x 3072 pixel super-display
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/11/19/why_not_build_a_cluster_out_of_workstations/
Australia's Monash University has just opened an amazing visualisation
facility called Cave 2.
The facility offers an eight-metre long, 320-degree wall comprised of
80 3D monitors with a combined resolution of 27320 x 3072 pixels.
"We spend millions of dollars building supercomputers and then look at
the results they produce on a $200 monitor," Dr David Barnes of the
university's Life Sciences and Computation Centre. Cave 2 is an attempt
to give researchers a much better look at the results their efforts and
supercomputers' muscle produce.
----
Nvidia, AMD tout 12GB GPUs for supers ... But ONE question remains
Can they run Crysis?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/11/18/nvidia_amd_12gb_gpu_accelerator_hpc/
The battle of the big-memory GPU cards targeted at HPC and the data
center is now well underway, with AMD having unveiled its FirePro
S10000 12GB Edition card, and Nvidia announcing its 12GB Tesla K40 GPU
accelerator card today.
Nvidia Tesla K40 ... Double your pleasure, double your GDDR5 memory
(click to enlarge)
----
Top500: 'Sky River 2' still rules as graphics tech leaves HPC applecart
largely untouched
Where IS that 'ceepie-geepie' takeover?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/11/18/top500_supercomputing_coprocessor_revolution_takes_a_breather/
The Top500 ranking of the world's fastest supercomputers has been
released, and the list of the top five systems could very well be
simply a Xerox copy of the previous list, which came out back in
summer.
In the June rankings, the number one spot was taken by the massively
parallel Tianhe-2 (Milky Way-2) at China's National Super Computer
Center. Number two was Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Titan, a Cray
XK7 system; the third spot was the Lawrence Livermore National
Laboratory's Sequoia, an IBM BlueGene/Q system; fourth was Fujitsu's K
computer at Japan's RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational Science;
and fifth was a second BlueGene/Q system, Mira, at the Argonne National
Laboratory.
----
IBM and Nvidia: We'll build your data center like a SUPERCOMPUTER
Big Blue to standardize on Tesla GPUs
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/11/18/ibm_nvidia_partner_to_build_nextgen_hpc_boxes_and_enterprise_software/
IBM and Nvidia have announced a partnership to "bring supercomputer
performance to the corporate data center," in the words of Nvidia's
accelerated computing honcho Ian Buck, with systems based on Nvidia
Tesla GPUs and IBM Power8 CPUs, and to accelerate IBM enterprise
software using Nvidia GPUs.
"This is the biggest technology endorsement that we've received," said
Sumit Gupta, the general manager of Nvidia's HPC-focused Tesla biz, to
The Register. "It is definitely going to give us a lot of wind behind
our backs to add to all the other momentum we have."
----
Nvidia reveals CUDA 6, joins CPU-GPU shared memory party
Tesla headman: 'Biggest pain point' for developers – memory management
– is now history
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/11/16/nvidia_reveals_cuda_6_joins_cpugpu_shared_memory_party/
Nvidia has announced the latest version of its GPU programming
language, CUDA 6, which adds a "Unified Memory" capability that, as its
name implies, relieves programmers from the trials and tribulations of
having to manually copy data back and forth between separate CPU and
GPU memory spaces.
CUDA 6 fools a system's CPU and GPU into thinking they're dipping into
the same shared memory bank
----
IBM. HUMAN-crushing SUPERCOMPUTER Watson. The Cloud. You know where
THIS is going
Cognitive-app writers wanted
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/11/14/ibm_opens_watson_to_internet/
IBM is exposing the super computer brain that crushed puny humans in a
TV quiz show to the entire internet.
Big Blue announced its IBM Watson Developers Cloud on Thursday,
inviting all comers to build big data apps that tap the cognitive
powers of its Watson super computer. The idea is to tempt application
authors keen on writing cognitive software apps.
----
*** Whitepaper ***
Big Data Demands Big Changes to Legacy Backup
View the Storage Switzerland report on backup software licensing placing undue burden on enterprises and the new era of licensing to improve efficiencies and costs.
http://whitepapers.theregister.co.uk/d/b68/9e7f3/688/8852b39f?td=week_sec_e
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