It's Big, it's Blue... it's simply FABLESS! IBM's chip-free future [ Thu Oct 30 2014]

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for the week ending 30th October 2014


*** HPC News ***

IBM, backing away from hardware? NEVER!
Don't be so sure, so-surers
http://go.reg.cx/ml/9e7f3/547a5dff/1360db8a/2cU9

So, it looks like IBM has moved its chipworks over to Globalfoundries,
as described by Reg hack Tim Worstall here. But what are the
implications for IBM's systems business?

I agree that the brutal and implacable economics of the chip business
forced IBM's hand here. Manufacturing microprocessors is a hugely
capital intensive undertaking, with massive fixed costs for the
buildings and equipment necessary to churn out shiny new CPUs. It also
costs a lot of dough to acquire and hold onto the highly specialized
people who can design and build cutting edge silicon.

----

Cray-cray Met Office spaffs £97m on VERY AVERAGE HPC box
Only 250th most powerful in the world? Bring back Michael Fish
http://go.reg.cx/ml/9e7f3/547a5dff/1360db8a/2cRF

The UK's Met Office has settled on Cray as the vendor for its next
supercomputer, with a 16 petaflop XC40 machine* to be shared between
the Met Office and Exeter Science Park.

The £97m HPC box will give the Met Office 13 times more supercomputing
muscle than it is currently able to flex.

The weathermen want to improve the detail of their forecasting,
particularly for flooding, strong winds, fog and heavy snowfall.

----

It's Big, it's Blue... it's simply FABLESS! IBM's chip-free future
Or why the reversal of globalisation ain't gonna 'appen
http://go.reg.cx/ml/9e7f3/547a5dff/1360db8a/2cMq

IBM has coughed up $1.5bn to get Global Foundries to take its chip
manufacturing arm off its hands as reported here at El Reg.

There are a number of economic implications to all of this, perhaps the
most important of which is why the eco-lunatic fantasy that we could
reverse globalisation is simply nonsense (of course, whether it is
desirable to do so is highly debatable).

----

HPC Wales stretches its reach to Northern Ireland
Selling cycles across the Irish Sea
http://go.reg.cx/ml/9e7f3/547a5dff/1360db8a/2cMj

Northern Ireland is to get what's touted as its first HPC service,
courtesy of a deal between Fujitsu and HPC Wales.

Extending a collaboration that's been in place since 2012, HPC Wales
says the vendor will sling £1.1 million towards the service, and seek
collaborations from Irish business and academic partners. HPC Wales has
spent £3.5 million developing its supercomputing network, which has its
main hubs in Cardiff and Swansea.

----

Vote for us: We're slinging cash at supercomputers!
Australian election campaign features cash-for-cores promise
http://go.reg.cx/ml/9e7f3/547a5dff/1360db8a/2cLg

The government of the Australian State of Victoria has slung AU$6.65
million in the direction of the Victorian Life Sciences Computation
Initiative (VLCSI), deeming the investment a vote-winner in upcoming
elections .

The VLCSI, one of Australia's leading HPC facilities, is operated in
collaboration with IBM and serves campuses of the University of
Melbourne, Monash University, and LaTrobe University. Back in 2011, the
Victorian government's auditor-general said among other things that IBM
had an advantage over competitors because Big Blue had both an intimate
knowledge of the requirements of the University of Melbourne, which
championed the project, as well as input into the supercomputer's
design.

----

'Urika': Cray unveils new 1,500-core big data crunching monster
6TB of DRAM, 38TB of SSD flash and 120TB of disk storage
http://go.reg.cx/ml/9e7f3/547a5dff/1360db8a/2cHB

Big data analytics people are constantly panning for nuggets of gold,
and Cray has just the machine for them — its Urika-XA.

Said to be a single-platform entity, consolidating a wide range of
analytics workloads previously needing separate systems, its design has
been optimised for compute- and memory-intensive and latency-sensitive
workloads.

----


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