SiCortex sticks to Summer supercomputer ship
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Ready to wow USENIX Tied to such a bizarre supercomputer design, SiCortex seemed certain to miss its product ship target. Not so, according to engineer Win Treese, who promised the boxes will arrive this Summer as planned, during a speech here at the Usenix conference.â¦
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NEC&#160;is selling what it says is the fastest vector supercomputer in the world. The SX-9 is based on a new processor developed by the Tokyo company that boasts a performance of over 100G Flops (floating point operations per second). Up to 16 of the chips can be fitted into a single node and up to 512 nodes can be built together to create what would likely be one of the most powerful computers in the world -- a computer with a theoretical peak processing power of 839T Flops (teraflops).NEC hasn&#39;t benchmarked the machine yet but estimates it would achieve a Linpack score of around 700T Flops, said Hiroshi Takahara, senior director of NEC&#39;s HPC marketing division. That&#39;s more than double the current fastest supercomputer in the world, the&#160;IBM BlueGene/L machine&#160;at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.The new machine, launched Thursday, is much more powerful than NEC&#39;s SX-8R, which it succeeds. To get the same processing power in one SX-9 node would require 13 SX-8R nodes so the new computer takes up 3.9 times less floor space and uses 3.6 times less electricity for the same power.Vector supercomputers are typically used in scientific applications and where large amounts of data needs to be processed. NEC has had some success selling previous systems to meteorological agencies in several nations and to universities, automakers and aerospace laboratories.The SX-9 is aimed at the same type of customer and will be offered on lease with prices starting at &#165;2.98 million ($26,000) per month for the entry-level system. NEC aims to sell about 700 systems over the next three years and already has its first users. Meteo France and Osaka University are among the first customers, said Takahara.With the new supercomputer NEC will again be challenging large U.S. computer makers like IBM and Cray. Five years ago the NEC-built Earth Simulator was ranked the world&#39;s fastest supercomputer but that machine was surpassed by an IBM computer and has dropped to 20th position in the current Top 500 supercomputer ranking.The SX-9, should a large configuration model be built, will have a good chance of restoring NEC&#39;s name back into the top positions of the influential ranking.The Japanese government is pushing to get the country back on top of the supercomputer ranking. It has awarded contracts to NEC, Fujitsu, and Hitachi&#160;for the design and construction of a 10P Flops (petaflops) supercomputer that is expected to be the world&#39;s fastest when it is completed in 2012.The machine will be built in Kobe in western Japan and operated by public research institute Riken. It will be mixed architecture with NEC and Hitachi designing the vector side and Fujitsu the scalar side. A budget of about &#165;115 billion ($1 billion) has been earmarked for the project.
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SiCortex investment will go toward development and marketing of Linux cluster machines; debut is set for November.
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DRESDEN, Germany, June 26  /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- International Supercomputing Conference (ISC) -- Sun Microsystems, Inc.  is demonstrating innovative High Performance Computing (HPC) solutions this week at the International Supercomputing Conference in Dresden, Germany.
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IBM (NYSE: IBM) announced at the start of the annual SC supercomputing show Saturday that it will now offer commercial configurations of its Blue Gene supercomputer, just days after its prototype configuration, which has been built for Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, took the high-performance computing crown with a speed of over 70 teraflops a second.
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The motherboard's components are changing, but the chipset will survive integration with CPU.
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At the SC2004 conferenceÂ  last week, IBM unveiled plans to build a commercial version of its Blue Gene supercomputer intended for businesses and for a number of scientific and research markets.
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The two-year reign of the massive Earth Simulator as the fastest supercomputer in the world appears to be nearing an end. IBM executives on Wednesday will announce that one of the new machines in its Blue
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IBM Corp. plans to announce today that it has built the world&#39;s fastest supercomputer at one of its facilities in Rochester, Minn.
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A competing chip from rival Advanced Micro Devices will likely arrive several months earlier.
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High-end chip likely will stay a step ahead of competitors in the multicore processor race. Also, the chip design could be done this year.
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Defense Dept. to buy second supercomputer for Naval Oceanographic Office.
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When the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) wanted to increase its computing capacity last year it considered a satellite datacenter or an extension to the existing building, but in the end it chose a faster and more novel approach: it ordered a datacenter in a box.The center, which does high-energy physics research for the U.S. Department of Energy, was one of the first customers for&#160;Sun Microsystems&#39; Project Blackbox, which takes standard shipping containers 20 feet by 8 feet by 8 feet (6.1m x 2.4m x 2.4m) and turns them into mini datacenters that can be delivered and operational in a few weeks, according to Sun.SLAC&#39;s Blackbox was delivered in July last year and was up and running by September. Aside from a few challenges -- like figuring out how to service the unit when it&#39;s raining -- the center is pleased with its choice and in the process of installing a second unit.It is one of four customers that Sun identified Tuesday to illustrate momentum for Project Blackbox. It also renamed the product the Sun Modular Datacenter, or Sun MD. The boxes start at $559,000 without the &quot;payload,&quot; or the computers inside, and Sun will ship them around the world for an extra fee. Delivery to Amsterdam by air, for example, costs about $15,000.SLAC turned to Project Blackbox because it needed to expand its compute capacity fairly quickly. &quot;The datacenter here was at its capacity, especially in terms of the electrical service to the building and the amount of heat we could take back out. And the experiments needed their next year&#39;s worth of computing,&quot; said Chuck Boeheim, SLAC&#39;s assistant director of computing services.Modifying its existing datacenter to accommodate another major electrical feed and &quot;chiller plant&quot; would have taken one to two years and cost several million dollars. &quot;We also looked at doing a satellite datacenter in a smaller building, but with the approvals and lead time that was a couple of years out as well. Blackbox was something we could do very quickly,&quot; Boeheim said.The raw shipping containers are customized by a subcontractor, and Sun typically installs the payload before delivery. SLAC&#39;s Blackbox arrived on a flat-bed truck last July, fitted with 252 Sun Fire X2200 rack-mount servers, the same type it uses in its datacenter. Sun had also wired the servers to a Cisco Catalyst 6509 switch that SLAC provided before delivery.Boeheim described the process in a white paper on his Web site, along with photos and time-lapse videos that show the box being hoisted into place by a crane.Customers can put other vendors&#39; hardware in the unit, but not all equipment will fit. SLAC bought some Dell PowerEdge 1950 servers that it wanted to put in its second Blackbox, but they were too long for the server racks. Instead it will move some existing Sun servers to the box from its datacenter, and put the Dell machines inside the building instead.The computing center already had a 4-megawatt substation serving its area of the site. &quot;So it was a fairly simple matter to put a 220-kilowatt power pane on the outside of that and bring up a fairly standard chiller unit and put that on a concrete pad next to the Blackbox. Both of those things could just be fork-lifted in and connected up,&quot; Boeheim said.SLAC wanted to do a rigorous installation that would last several years, so it spent a few weeks getting the unit hooked up. It had to reconnect about half the power cords which had shaken loose during the truck ride. Aside from that the installation went smoothly and the machines were turned on for batch work Sept. 25, about two months after delivery. The 60-ton chiller and the outside power unit were also delivered in that time.Servicing the unit has presented some challenges. &quot;We&#39;re trying to figure out how to do it on a day like today when it&#39;s pouring with rain,&quot; Boeheim said recently. &quot;The wind doesn&#39;t have to be blowing very hard for the rain to blow in the end, and you pretty much have to open both ends of the box to service it,&quot;It&#39;s quite cramped in the box, he said, and both ends need to be open so that a person can maneuver when a server rack is slid out into the narrow central aisle.&quot;Our stance right now is to wait for a clear day to open it up,&quot; he said. Two people are needed to service the box in case one gets trapped inside or injured, he wrote in the white paper on his Web site. SLAC put a phone in the box in case someone gets locked in.The first Blackbox gave the center a roughly 25 percent boost in computing capacity, and the servers have been running as smoothly as their counterparts inside the datacenter, Boeheim said. &quot;Once we got them turned on they just ran. We went a full 30 days not even opening the thing.&quot; He put rack servers in the box rather than storage gear, because storage gear tends to need servicing more often, he said.Sun&#39;s Blackbox won&#39;t be for everyone. Brookhaven National Laboratory, on Long Island, New York, considered a Blackbox but decided on a new wing for its datacenter instead, Boeheim said. SLAC&#39;s experience may have been easier than that of an average business because it is a federal government site located on county land. A business in a city may need more planning permissions and permits.A few other companies offer comparable products, such as the Ice Cube from Rackable Systems, and the Infrastructure Express from American Power Conversion.Sun said it is happy with the&#160;momentum for Blackbox, although it wouldn&#39;t say how many customers it has. The other three it named are Hansen Transmissions, a Belgian industrial manufacturer that is using one at a new plant in India; Mobile TeleSystems, Russia&#39;s largest mobile operator; and the Radboud University Nijmegen Medical Centre in the Netherlands.Most of the customers had no room to add capacity in their datacenters, said Darlene Yaplee, vice president for integrated platforms in Sun&#39;s systems marketing group. &quot;Half the customers are using it while they build extra datacenter capacity, and then it will remain for disaster recovery,&quot; she said.The next size up in standard shipping containers is 40 feet long. &quot;We could do 40 feet technically, but most people have been happy with 20 feet,&quot; Yaplee said. Boeheim said he&#39;d probably choose a wider box rather than a longer one, which would accommodate his Dell 1950 servers.
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&quot;It&#39;s one hell of a system,&quot; said Columbia project manager Bill Thigpen, who told TechNewsWorld the system is being submitted for a top spot on the upcoming Top500 Supercomputer list due next month.
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IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced that the company will work with the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California, San Diego on a substantial upgrade to the center's technical capabilities.
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US-based IBM claimed on Wednesday it is going to return to the US the title of supercomputer maker. Earlier, the world was hit by the news that Japanâs Earth Simulator is the new supercomputer maker.
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MOFFETT FIELD, CALIFORNIA - The space race may be over, but engineers at NASA's (the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's) Ames Research Center Tuesday staked their claim in another type of challenge: the never-ending contest to build the world's fastest supercomputer. At a ribbon-cutting ceremony at the NASA supercomputing facility in Moffett Field, California, the U.S. space agency unveiled its 10,240-processor Linux-based supercomputer, named Columbia, and cited benchmark numbers that show it performing faster than any other system.