SAVE ME, NASA system builder, from my DEAD WORKSTATION [Thu Nov 27 2014]

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Your HPC newsletter from theregister.co.uk
for the week ending 27th November 2014


*** HPC News ***

NSF goes cloudy with US$16 million super funding
Facilities to come online in 2016
http://go.reg.cx/ml/9e7f3/549f47ff/fa29c43f/2djf

The fatter-than-fat connections provided by America's ESNet to its
research community are about to enable a more cloudy supercomputing
approach for researchers, with the National Science Foundation has
setting aside US$16 million to build new facilities in Indiana and
Texas.

According to the National Science Foundation (NSF) announcement, the
facilities – "Bridges" at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center and
"Jetstream", which will be split across Indiana University's Pervasive
Technology Institute and the University of Texas at Austin's Texas
Advanced Computing Center – are designed to "create a more inclusive
environment for science and engineering".

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Astro-boffins start opening universe simulation data
Got a supercomputer? Want to simulate a universe? Here you go
http://go.reg.cx/ml/9e7f3/549f47ff/fa29c43f/2dcg

The Illustris Project, a universe-scale simulation created in 2013 at
MIT and unveiled in May 2014, is now offering its first data products
as downloads for researchers.

The large-scale cosmological simulation of galaxy formation, as it
describes itself, has half a petabyte containing 12 billion resolution
points and in a full run will map the creation of 41,000 galaxies.

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IVEC's Magnus crashes Top 50
Pawsey pops the bubbles
http://go.reg.cx/ml/9e7f3/549f47ff/fa29c43f/2dc5

The Pawsey Supercomputing Centre is all smiles after the SC14
announcement that its upgraded Magnus iron has landed in the world's
top fifty supercomputers.

The 35,712-core Haswell-based Cray XC40 cracked 1,097 teraflops on the
Linpack benchmark, which put it at position 41 on the list.

At the end of September, the machine's managers allocated its first 90
million CPU-hours.

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Seagate and SGI buddy up to flog HPC bigness to big business
Another ClusterStor reseller appears
http://go.reg.cx/ml/9e7f3/549f47ff/fa29c43f/2db0

Seagate has signed up SGI to resell its ClusterStor supercomputing and
big data arrays.

SGI will now resell the ClusterStor 1500, 6000, and 9000 products and
the Secure Data Appliance (SDA) with its Kerberos network
authentication protocol to enable symmetric-key cryptography.

SGI competitor Cray OEMs ClusterStor arrays in its Sonexion range.

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HPC bods boogie to 68 new Top500 hits at New Orleans show
Intel, IBM and ARM flex flop-tastic muscles
http://go.reg.cx/ml/9e7f3/549f47ff/fa29c43f/2daP

The SC14 supercomputer show at New Orleans saw Intel getting its Xeon,
Phi and Lustre hooks into many suppliers, IBM pushing its POWER
credentials and ARM punching in there too.

There was nothing dramatic, exascale computing not yet having been
reached, but a lot of incremental improvements.

The November 2014 Top500 list has 68 new systems listed, with a total
of 23.144 million deployed cores, 11.7 per cent more than a year ago.
Total petafloppage is 308.9 petaflops, 23.5 per cent more than a year
ago, and 50 systems have more than 1 petaflop of performance (there
were just 37 a year ago).

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Multi-petabyte open sorcery: Spell-binding storage
Not just for academics anymore
http://go.reg.cx/ml/9e7f3/549f47ff/fa29c43f/2daH

Mixing petabytes of data and open-source storage used to be the realm
of cash-strapped academic boffins who didn't mind mucking in with
software wizardry.

The need to analyse millions, billions even, of records of business
events stored as unstructured information in multi-petabyte class
arrays makes ordinary storage seem like child's play. It also
dramatically increases storage costs, so much so that the software
needed to manage and access the data becomes hugely expensive too.

----

NASA launches new climate model at SC14
75 days of supercomputing later ...
http://go.reg.cx/ml/9e7f3/549f47ff/fa29c43f/2dam

After 75 days running on the 43,000-core, 1.21 petaflop Discover
supercomputer cluster at the Goddard Centre for Climate Simulation,
producing 4 PB of data, NASA has put together a global model showing
how atmospheric carbon dioxide – CO2 – gets distributed in air currents
around the world.

Youtube Video

----

Nvidia doubles Tesla grunt at SC14
2.9 teraflops, 4,992 cores: here comes the K80
http://go.reg.cx/ml/9e7f3/549f47ff/fa29c43f/2dae

Nvidia's SC14 eye-catcher is the next increment in its HPC GPU
accelerator, the Tesla K80.

The successor to the Tesla K40, the K80 is pitched as
double-your-everything: twice the performance and twice the memory
bandwidth. Unsurprisingly, the company reckons its target will be data
analytics and scientific computing applications (which apart from
Bitcoin mining are the plum targets for GPU-accelerated HPC).

----

The optic NERVE of it: Intel declares WAR on InfiniBand
Chipzilla emerges from ocean belching flames. Again
http://go.reg.cx/ml/9e7f3/549f47ff/fa29c43f/2dad

It's no surprise when Intel announces a new processor architecture –
that's its main game, after all. However, along with the Knight's
Bridge chips released at SC'14, the company seems to have declared war
on the HPC mainstream, announcing an optical comms architecture
designed to compete with InfiniBand.

----

HPC bod SGI racks UV brains, reaches 30 MEEELLION IOPS
UK 300 concept gets SSD supercharge
http://go.reg.cx/ml/9e7f3/549f47ff/fa29c43f/2d9R

How does 30 million IOPS from a 32-socket server grab you?

We've learnt SGI has taken its UV 300H server, used in its "UV for SAP
HANA" product, and boosted its performance with 64 Intel DC P3700 SSDs,
which use the NVMe interface.

The team working on this includes SGI's acquired Starboard Storage
engineers. Starboard was developing unified file/block hybrid storage
systems before it crashed and was scooped up by the HPC firm.

----

Cray heaves out even mightier, Lustre-ous Sonexion 2000
Met Office and Los Alamos bomb boffins are apparently among its fans
http://go.reg.cx/ml/9e7f3/549f47ff/fa29c43f/2d9z

Cray has updated its scale-out, parallel access, Lustre-using Sonexion
array with what it calls the "2000" product - providing 50 per cent
more capacity and performance than the previous 1600 product in the
same footprint.

The 2000 delivers in excess of 45GB/sec bandwidth to a Linux cluster
using Cray Cluster Connect, and has 2PB of usable capacity in one rack.
The individual SSUs can now store up to 360TB each using 6TB 7.2K SAS
disk drives.

----

SAVE ME, NASA system builder, from my DEAD WORKSTATION
Anal-retentive hardware nerd in paws-on workstation crisis
http://go.reg.cx/ml/9e7f3/549f47ff/fa29c43f/2d7k

As I walked past one of the booths on the GTC'14 trade show floor, I
suddenly had the nagging feeling that I had missed something. I
couldn't figure out why, but this particular booth was familiar.

On closer examination, I still didn't see anything to explain my
feeling. I didn't know either of the guys manning the booth, and the
products arrayed on their tables didn't spark any memories.

----



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