IBM

Building The MareNostrum COTS Supercomputer 187

Posted by timothy from the available-at-every-pharmacy dept.
karvind writes "IBM Power Architecture Community Newsletter has a story about making a supercomputer (Number 4 on top 500 list) from easily available components (like BladeCenter and TotalStorage servers, 970FX PowerPC processors, and Linux 2.6). A joint venture between IBM and the Spanish government, it is named MareNostrum: the Latin term meaning 'our sea.' Peaking at 40 TFlops, the beast consists of 2,282 IBM eServer BladeCenter JS20 blade servers housed in 163 BladeCenter chassis, 4,564 64-bit IBM PowerPC 970FX processors, and 140 TB of IBM TotalStorage DS4100 storage servers."
Space

Simulating the Universe with a zBox 192

Posted by michael from the simgalaxy dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Scientists at the University of Zurich predict that our galaxy is filled with a quadrillion clouds of dark matter with the mass of the Earth and size of the solar system. The results in this weeks journal Nature, also covered in Astronomy magazine, were made using a six month calculation on hundreds of processors of a self-built supercomputer, the zBox. This novel machine is a high density cube of processors cooled by a central airflow system. I like the initial back of an envelope design. Apparently, one of these ghostly dark matter haloes passes through the solar system every few thousand years leaving a trail of high energy gamma ray photons."
Networking (Apple)

Colocate Your Mac mini 164

Posted by michael from the first-to-market dept.
Pfhreak writes "Pure Static is already offering a service to colocate your Mac mini into a rack for those who want to set up a server on the cheap. Unfortunately, according to their FAQ, they're not planning on creating a Mini supercomputer. Which could be good news for those of you that are working towards being the first to set up such a cluster who have purchased a couple pallets of Minis, but haven't had time to finish setting up the cluster."
Hardware

Supercomputers - Does the Cabling Matter? 95

Posted by Cliff from the behold-the-rat's-nest dept.
papaia asks: "Having watched, for a while, the development in the area of high-density server hardware solutions (i.e. blade servers), like IBM's 'top gun', and their increased presence in Data Centers, I have been wondering if anybody has had any experience (thus comments) in regards to how important - in such highly priced solutions - is (or could be) the [always neglected] cabling, connecting the servers. One such comment caught my attention, in this regard. Slashdot, how important is the server cabling infrastructure in your Data Centers, and how do you resolve the cable management aspect of it?"
Hardware

Formula One Racing Just a Matter of Crunching the Numbers 377

Posted by michael from the ticket-to-ride dept.
Si24601 writes "Sauber Petronas Formula 1 team have launched Albert, their new supercomputer. With aerodynamics contributing a claimed 75% of the performance of the current bread of cars, Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) calculations have become increasingly important. Dalco's 530 AMD Opteron processor, 2.3 Tflop/s Supercomputer, with 1 TB RAM and 11 TB of storage, may just be up to the task." Other readers submitted links to stories on F1 Live and Formula1.com.
Hardware

A Private Home For Retired Supercomputers 164

Posted by timothy from the they-rest-for-a-bit dept.
Steve writes "Every geek has wanted to play with a Cray supercomputer. Hexus.net had the rare opportunity to meet up with a man who has something of a fetish for collecting them! They got a look at some of the amazing kit Armari - a systems integration company - have in their possession. Ever wanted to see inside a Cray T3D MPP, or maybe the gargantuan machine that is the T90? Now is your chance!"
Technology (Apple)

Earth Simulator, G5 Cluster Drop In 'Top 500' List 343

Posted by timothy from the win-some-lose-some-send-me-some dept.
daveschroeder writes "The November Top 500 supercomputer list has been published at SC2004. Topping the charts is IBM and the US Department of Energy's 'BlueGene/L DD2' beta system, at 70.72 TFlops, followed by NASA's 'Columbia' at 51.87.TFlops. For the first time in several publications of this list, Japan's Earth Simulator is no longer in the number one slot, falling to third. Virginia Tech's 'System X' Xserve G5 cluster, while 20% faster than the original cluster that debuted at number 3 last November, has fallen to number 7 due to the new entries, but remains the fastest supercomputer at an academic institution. Here's an excellent cost comparison (Google cache) of the top machines ('System X' is significantly cheaper than anything else in the top 20, not to mention cheaper than many things far below it in performance)."
Silicon Graphics

SGI & NASA Build World's Fastest Supercomputer 417

Posted by timothy from the but-does-it-run-windows dept.
GarethSwan writes "SGI and NASA have just rolled-out the new world number one fastest supercomputer. Its performance test (LINPACK) result of 42.7 teraflops easily outclasses the previous mark set by Japan's Earth Simulator of 35.86 teraflops AND that set by IBM's new BlueGene/L experiment of 36.01 teraflops. What's even more awesome is that each of the 20 512-processor systems run a single Linux image, AND Columbia was installed in only 15 weeks. Imagine having your own 20-machine cluster?"
Apple

Virginia Tech Supercomputer Up To 12.25 Teraflops 215

Posted by timothy from the changing-blacksburg's-climate dept.
gonknet writes "According to CNET news and various other news outlets, the 1150-node Hokie supercomputer rebuilt with new 2.3 GHz Xserves now runs at 12.25 Teraflops. The computer, the fastest computer owned by an academic institution, should still be in the top 5 when the new rankings come out in November."
Software

The War Of The Virtual Worlds 366

Posted by timothy from the attn-chris-dibona dept.
man_ls writes "The University of Southern California Information Sciences Institute is working with the U.S. Joint Forces Command to harness supercomputer power, to simulate a virtual continent for use in urban battlefield situations. The simulation, set in the year 2015, involves 100,000 entities to simulate, although the system can support more than a million."
Networking (Apple)

InfiniBand Drivers Released for Xserve G5 Clusters 134

Posted by pudge from the insert-grunting-noise-here dept.
A user writes, "A company called Small Tree just announced the release of InfiniBand drivers for the Mac, for more supercomputing speed. People have already been making supercomputer clusters for the Mac, including Virginia Tech's third-fastest supercomputer in the world, but InfiniBand is supposed to make the latency drop. A lot. Voltaire also makes some sort of Apple InfiniBand products, though it's not clear whether they make the drivers or hardware."
IBM

IBM Sets Supercomputer Speed Record 308

Posted by timothy from the hi-gene dept.
T.Hobbes writes "IBM's BlueGene/L has set a new speed record at 36.01 TFlops, beating the Earth Simulator's 35.86 TFlops, according to internal IBM testing. 'This is notable because of the fixation everyone has had on the Earth Simulator,' said Dave Turek, I.B.M.'s vice president for the high-performance computing division. The AP story is here; the NY Times' story is here."
The Internet

Weta Digital Supercomputer For Hire 184

Posted by timothy from the hey-sailor dept.
sushi writes "NZ's Stuff news site is reporting: 'Peter Jackson's special effects shop Weta Digital has teamed ... to establish a world-class supercomputing facility in Wellington which will be rented out to clients worldwide.' Currently comprising 504 IBM blade servers, each of which contains two 2.8 Gigahertz Intel Xeon processors, 6 Gigabytes of memory and 40 Gigabytes of storage, and ranked 80th in the top 500 supercomputers, they are intending to upgrade into the top 10. Also covered at the Australian Financial Review."
Linux Business

NASA Powers Up With Linux Supercomputer 8

Posted by michael from the 80000-fps-in-doom3 dept.
ChaosTangent writes "BBC News reports that NASA is to boost its computing by 10 times with a new supercomputer that is Linux based. The articles claims it to be the "biggest" Linux based supercomputer with over 500 terabytes of storage and 1000 gigabytes of memory per Altix node. Dubbed 'Project Columbia', the new supercomputer will allow NASA to model complex scenarios (such as gravity simulations) more accurately than before." We had another story about this a week or so ago.
Sun Microsystems

Sun Working to Obsolete Motherboards 228

Posted by CowboyNeal from the look-ma-no-solder dept.
perl_camel_jockey writes "Sun is developing a new technology that promises to increase computing power by eliminating the need for physical, soldered chip-to-chip connections on the motherboard. Called 'proximity communications', it portends the ability for chips to talk to one another wirelessly just by being next to each other. Potential applications in computer design abound. Apparently this is part of Sun's Hero program, recipient of a $50 million grant from DARPA's High Productivity Computing Systems program to rejuvenate supercomputing in the US and regain the lead lost to Japan, in particular to NEC's Earth Simulator, ranked as the most powerful supercomputer in the world."
United States

On the Supercomputer Technology Crisis 347

Posted by simoniker from the superprocessor-to-the-rescue dept.
scoobrs writes "Experts claim America has been eating our 'supercomputer feed corn' by developing clusters rather than new supercomputer processors and interconnects. Forbes says America is playing catch-up and that the new federal budget items are too little too late. Cray is laying people off due to decreased federal spending and claims lower margin products have forced them to create products based on commodity parts. Red Storm, one of their new Linux-based products, is being delayed to next year."
Technology

TeraGrid v. Distributed Computing 124

Posted by timothy from the lots-of-pieces dept.
Nevyan writes "After three years of development and nearly a hundred million dollars the TeraGrid has been running at or above most peoples expectations for such a daunting project. On January 23, 2004 the system came online and provided 4.5 teraflops of computing power to scientists across the country. However, the waiting list for TeraGrid is long, including a bidding process through the National Science Foundations (NSF's) Partnerships for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (PACI) and many scientists with little funding but bright ideas are being left behind. While the list of supercomputer sites and peak power is growing how is the world of Distributed Computing faring? "

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