The Reg HPC: My other supercomputer is a Lenovo: What IBM System x sale means for HPC [Thu Feb 6 2014]

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*** HPC News ***

OCP gets Ethernet silicon interface
Mellanox kicks in another swag of code
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/02/05/ocp_gets_ethernet_silicon_interface/

HPC interconnect specialist Mellanox has added an Ethernet switch SDK
to its contribution to the Facebook-led Open Compute Project.

The SDK follows contributions dating back to 2013 to the OCP's
networking sub-project, an effort which also attracted participants
like Broadcom, Cumulus Networks, and Intel. For that project, Mellanox
contributed a top-of-rack switch spec. At January's OCP summit, the
company also lobbed a 40G bps Ethernet NIC into the project.

----

Boffins say D-Wave machine could be a classic*
*Classical computer, that is
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/02/04/boffins_say_dwave_machine_could_be_a_classic/

First, the world thought that D-Wave hadn't built a quantum computer;
then, it thought there was a quantum computer in the box; next, there
was disappointment that the D-Wave machine didn't speed things up (but
might still be quantum); and now, it starts to look like it's not
quantum after all.

In the latest instalment in the duelling papers battle at Arxiv,
researchers from IBM and UC Berkeley (including quantum computing
pioneer Umesh Vazirani) tip-toe the fine line between academic
debunking and professional courtesy: rather than saying outright "this
is not a quantum computer" (which is how the results are being
headlined in some quarters), they state with more restraint that
"classical models for the D-Wave machine are not ruled out."

----

HPCaaS experiment becomes commercial service
UberCloud Marketplace goes live
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/02/04/hpcaas_experiment_becomes_commercial_service/

After 18 months of experimentation, UberCloud has launched a commercial
service to help academic HPC users find cloud-accessible resources for
their projects: a kind of HPC-as-a-service matchmaker.

The project follows two lines of thought: although there's plenty of
compute cycles already sitting on the cloud courtesy of Amazon et al,
more specialised workloads work better on optimised machines; and
second, that someone with a project like fluid dynamics also needs to
call on experts to get their project running on one of those
specialised machines.

----

My other supercomputer is a Lenovo: What IBM System x sale means for
HPC
Will this make Lenovo super... or just high performance?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/01/31/hpc_implications_lenovo_ibm_system_x/

Back in May 2013, when IBM was first rumoured to be selling part of its
System x division to Lenovo, I wrote a story looking at how this might
impact IBM's position in the HPC market. It's a good time to revisit
that analysis and see what the picture looks like now.

As I noted in the prior story, it's damned hard to get solid market
share and sales figures for HPC systems. Some of this is due to the
general fogginess when it comes to measuring overall system sales. But
it's mostly because it's so difficult to divide "HPC systems" from
"non-HPC systems", since the true definition of HPC should include not
only traditional research applications, but also compute-intensive
enterprise workloads like predictive analytics and many Big Data
related tasks.

----

King Kong's dangling cluster cut loose
Supercomputer used to animate Peter Jackson pic donated to Kiwi
university
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/01/24/king_kong_cluster_donation/

The supercomputer used to animate Peter Jackson's 2005 version of King
Kong has been donated to New Zealand's Auckland University of
Technology (AUT).

The supercomputer comprises 200 IBM HS20 Blade servers, a piece of kit
Big Blue sold back in 2005 and a couple of preceding years. IBM's page
for the HS20 suggests the machines packed 3.6 GHz Xeon CPUs that ran at
2.8 GHz in low voltage mode. Might that have been this SL84W Xeon
launched in March 2005? Intel's page doesn't mention performance in
low-voltage mode, but does say SpeedStep is available.

----


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