supercomputer

In Foldit, gamers take on protein challenges

Since computer scientists and biochemists at the University of Washington launched a project in 2008 that taps into the brainpower of computer gamers to fold proteins, almost 60,000 people around the world have taken on the challenge.

In the process, Foldit players have been able to best computers on problems that require radical moves, risks, and long-term vision, according to results being published on Thursday, in the journal Nature.

"The really fundamental question in most scientists' minds was, 'What can it produce, in terms of results? Is there any evidence that it's doing something useful?'" says … Read more

Open-source Lustre gets supercomputing nod

A new start-up called Whamcloud is coming out of stealth mode Wednesday with $10 million in private funding and a notion to disrupt the often academic world of supercomputing by leveraging the Lustre open-source project.

According to CEO Brent Gorda, the company is targeting the need for high-performance storage solutions based on the popular combination of Linux and Lustre for application and data storage environments. The company plans to offer support and services initially, with an eye toward a turnkey supercomputing setup with hardware and software components, in the future.

For those less familiar with supercomputing technologies, Lustre is a … Read more

Amazon opens supercomputing service

A new option for Amazon Web Services has arrived: the raw computing power of supercomputing clusters now widely used in research circles.

The service, called Cluster Compute, is a variation of one of the earliest services Amazon offered, EC2, or Elastic Compute Cloud. Compared with the standard EC2, Cluster Compute offers more processing power and faster network connections among the cluster's computing nodes for better communications, Amazon said Tuesday. The service retains the same general philosophy, though: customers pay as they go, with more usage incurring more fees.

The cluster service, which is available with Linux and a customer'… Read more

China duels U.S. on supercomputer speed list

The U.S. Department of Energy's Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility and its Jaguar system kept the No. 1 spot on the Top500 list of fastest supercomputers, but China's new Nebulae is close behind at No. 2.

The Top500 list was presented June 31 at the ISC'10 Conference held in Hamburg, Germany. The rankings are compiled by Hans Meuer of the University of Mannheim, Germany; Erich Strohmaier and Horst Simon of NERSC/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; and Jack Dongarra of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

Nebulae, which emerged late last year as China's big entry into … Read more

Intel to lay out supercomputing chip plans

Intel on Tuesday provided more color to its plans for supercomputing chips that would eventually compete with offerings from Nvidia. Intel said it will provide further details next week at a supercomputing conference.

In the wake of Intel's cancelation of the "Larrabee" graphics chip project in December of last year, Intel is now focusing on an analogous project targeted at supercomputers, a market that is generally referred to as high-performance computing or HPC.

"We are...executing on a business opportunity derived from the Larrabee program and Intel research in many-core chips," Bill Kircos, an Intel … Read more

IBM supercomputer mixes Intel, Nvidia chips

IBM announced on Tuesday a hybrid high-performance computer that combines Intel and Nvidia processors--a first for IBM.

The IBM iDataPlex Dx360 M3 is powered by both Intel Xeon central processing units (CPUs) and Nvidia Tesla graphics processing units (GPUs) and is designed to be clustered with other Dx360 M3 modular servers to form a supercomputer.

This is the first time a major computer company has adopted Nvidia GPUs for a supercomputer that can be marketed worldwide.

"Now customers will have access to everything IBM brings to the table in high-performance computing," Sumit Gupta, senior manager of Nvidia's … Read more

IBM liquid-cooled supercomputer heats building

An IBM supercomputer is doubling as a space heater via a technique that reduces energy use by 40 percent and dramatically lowers the overall carbon footprint.

Based at Swiss university ETH Zurich and dubbed Aquasar, the liquid-cooled supercomputer went live on Thursday and started analyzing fluid dynamics while simultaneously providing heat for the building. In a typical data center, about half of the energy is used for cooling.

Researchers at IBM and ETH Zurich will monitor the system, which consists of two IBM BladeCenter servers in one rack, able to compute six teraflops. They will be gathering data on energy … Read more

Inside NASA's world-class supercomputer center

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--If you're a materials scientist at NASA's Glenn Research Center, or an engineer at the Johnson or Marshall Space Centers studying Space Shuttle flow-control valves, or any one of countless others in the agency needing a supercomputer, there's really just one place to go.

That place is the advanced supercomputing facility at the Ames Research Center here, the home of Pleiades, NASA's flagship computer, a monster of a machine that, with a current rating of 973 teraflops--or 973 trillion floating point operations per second--is today ranked the sixth-most powerful supercomputer on Earth.

The … Read more

Pricey supercomputers sold well in 2009

Though most of us had to watch our wallets last year, some didn't mind spending $3 million or more for a new supercomputer.

The overall market for high-performance computers (HPCs) and servers fell last year, bringing in sales of $8.6 billion, an 11.6 percent drop from $9.7 billion in 2008, according to the "Worldwide High Performance Technical Server QView" report released Wednesday by IDC. Shipments were down 40 percent from the prior year.

But one segment unfazed by the recession was the supercomputer. Sales of HPCs costing more than $3 million jumped by 65 … Read more

The new optimizations for capability computing

This is the time of year to take stock in where high-performance computing (HPC) sits and where it is headed. That's because the SC09 conference is taking place in Portland, Ore., this week and it's the biggest HPC conference around.

SC is an odd duck as conferences go. Last year it had more than 10,000 attendees and, yet, it's a largely volunteer-organized event in a world where trade shows of this scope are packaged by conference specialists or some specific corporation. Think the much-renamed LinuxWorld (run by IDG) or VMworld (run by VMware).

"SC&… Read more