supercomputing

China is stepping up its semiconductor manufacturing efforts and using domestic chips for its latest supercomputer. It's going to be interesting to see how fast China can close in on U.S. supercomputer processor makers Intel, AMD, and Nvidia.

The New York Times reported that a supercomputer called Sunway BlueLight MPP, was installed in September at the National Supercomputer Center in Jinan, China. The details emerged at a technical meeting. The real catch is that China used 8,700 ShenWei SW1600 chips.

Those semiconductors are homegrown and indicate that China is aiming to be a major chip player. The … Read more

A University of Texas of supercomputer will tap a future Intel chip that contains more than 50 processor cores--the first instance of Intel supplying this novel technology to a commercial computer.

The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) and University of Texas announced today that they will deploy a 10-Petaflop (or 10,000 trillion operations per second) supercomputer dubbed "Stampede."

When it arrives in early 2013, the supercomputer is expected to be among the world's most powerful computers for scientific and financial applications.

Inside will be an Intel chip design codenamed "Knights Corner," which will house … Read more

Too busy to keep up with today's tech news? Here are some of the more interesting stories from CNET for Monday, June 20.

New domains mean new trademark issues The Internet's overseers approve a plan to expand the number of top-level domains. That opens the door for .paris, .canon, .eco--and for a new era of trademark complications. More

Offline Google Docs playing peek-a-boo The offline version of Google's productivity suite has been spotted outside Google's firewall. With Chromebooks now launched, time is of the essence. More

Is Apple's declining stock cause for concern? Several pundits … Read more

For the first time since 2004, a supercomputer built in Japan can claim to be the fastest on earth.

That's according to the Top500 Supercomputing List, which is expected to be released today at the conference in Hamburg, Germany. The new leader, Japan's K Computer, makes its home in Kobe's RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational Science. K Computer sped to the front of the class by achieving more than 8 quadrillion calculations per second (petaflop/s), which pushed it ahead of last November's winner, the Tianhe-1A at the National Supercomputing Center in Tianjin, China, which in … Read more

China will install CPUs developed by government-backed research institutions into a test supercomputer by the end of 2011.

The Loongson microchips will underpin the Dawning 6000 high-performance computing system, which is scheduled to be available for tasks as early as summer, China's state-owned People's Daily Online publication reported.

The Dawning 6000 will use up to 10,000 Loongson microchips and will eventually have a computing speed of more than 1,000 trillion operations a second, according to the article. (1,000 trillion operations are equal to a petaflop.)

For perspective, the Chinese Tianhe-1A leads the Top500 list of … Read more

When you consider mashing up supercomputers and games, there's little doubt that many people think of IBM's Deep Blue Grand Challenge project--which beat world chess champion Garry Kasparov in a famous 1997 showdown--as the standard by which all future projects would be judged.

Now, IBM is trying to outdo itself with Watson, another supercomputer Grand Challenge that, this time, will attempt to beat the world's most successful players of the long-running hit TV game show "Jeopardy."

And while "Jeopardy" might not be the first game show to cross your mind as being worthy … Read more

Look at who's logging supercomputing time these days and you are likely to get a glimpse of some major innovations on the horizon.

The U.S. Department of Energy announced today it has just granted the largest award ever of the department's supercomputing time through it's Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) program, now in it's sixth year.

The large award, a total of 1.7 billion hours distributed over 57 projects, was partially attributed to the fact that the Energy Department has been expanding its supercomputing capacity, and, therefore, simply has the means to grant more time. But it also reflects a growing interest in using computer modeling now that it has increased in sophistication, according to the Energy Department.

The INCITE program is somewhat like the lottery in that everyone has a chance. The Energy Department has an open application process in which any scientist, whether working in the academic or commercial world, is welcome to submit a request to win supercomputing hours, and it's not restricted to energy-related science.

The winning hours are divided between two supercomputers, the IBM Blue Gene/P supercomputer at Argonne National Laboratory aka "Intrepid," and the Cray XT5 supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory aka "Jaguar," which recently lost its first place status to China's Tianhe-1A as the world's most powerful supercomputer.

Among these latest 57 recipients, are large companies like Boeing and General Electric that are going to use the time for sophisticated modeling of potential designs for jet engines and wind turbines, respectively. There are also the climate change and earthquake prediction simulation projects, as one might expect.

Most interesting to the energy sector perhaps is the Lithium/Air Battery Project led by Jack Wells, group leader of the Computational Nanotechnology Group at the Center for Engineering Science Advanced Research at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. His team will be running simulations of lithium/air battery reactions. A successful version of the air battery would be capable of storing 10 times the amount of energy as a lithium ion battery of the same weight. Such a battery might make electric cars more competitive compared to gas-powered cars since it would offer greater driving range on a single charge than current models.… Read more

Microsoft today unveiled its behind-the-scenes work on porting a popular suite of supercomputing software tools to its Azure cloud platform. It's work that culminated in an a test job that the company says would have cost an estimated $3 million if it had used traditional on-premises hardware, but it got the job done for a little more than $18,000 using a hybrid approach.

That job in particular, which is part of Microsoft's focus at Supercomputing 2010 conference in New Orleans, was done as a collaboration between Microsoft and the Seattle Children's Hospital. Together, the teams ran … Read more

The Jaguar has fallen from the top of the food chain.

When the Top 500 list of the world's most powerful supercomputers is released today, the Cray XT5 system at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and run by the University of Tennessee, called "Jaguar," will drop to No. 2 after a year of eating the lunch of every other supercomputer in the world. In its place will stand Tianhe-1A, a system built by China's National University of Defense Technology, located at the National Supercomputing Center in Tianjin.

Tianhe-1A achieved a performance level of 2.67 petaflop/s (… Read more