HP and Microsoft take supercomputing mass-market
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Clusters for everyone HP and Microsoft have agreed to continue cooperating on plans to take supercomputing to the mass enterprise and mid-sized markets.â¦
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Ever since computer giant IBM announced earlier this week that they had developed the world&#39;s fastest computer, the whole nation seems to be abuzz about supercomputers.
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(InfoWorld) - IBM still operates the fastest supercomputer in the industry, but rival Hewlett-PackardÂ has more of them in operation, according to a closely watched global survey released Wednesday. HP has passed IBM in the number of supercomputers in operation and enjoys the largest market share, according to a list of the Top 500 supercomputers that was compiled by university computer researchers in the U.S. and Germany. ButÂ IBM's Blue Gene/L supercomputer, installed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California,Â ranked first on the listÂ and IBM claims it is the market share leader when vendors are ranked by combined computing performance. The biannual list is being released Wednesday to coincide with the International Supercomputing Conference in Dresden, Germany. HP grew its market share to 40.4 percent with 202 systems, while IBM's share fell to 38.4 percent with 192 systems. In the previous report in November 2006, IBM's share was 47.2 percent with 236 systems, to HP's 31.6 percent with 158 systems. IBM said it holds a 42 percent share of the supercomputer market when it's based on the combined processing power of each vendor's equipment. Its Blue Gene/L took the No. 1 spot with a "sustained performance" of 280.6 trillion operations per second, or teraflops. Flops is an acronym for "floating point operations per second," a measure of computing performance. On Tuesday IBM announced a new supercomputer, Blue Gene/P, which will have three times the processing power of the Blue Gene/L. A two-rack test model of the P made it into the top 30 on the list, achieving 20.86 teraflops (T flops), although IBM said that properly configured, the P may be able to hit 3 petaflops (P flops), or 1,000 trillion calculations per second. Sun Microsystems, which held only a 1.4 percent share with only seven systems deployed, is making a concerted effort to pursue the supercomputer market. Sun announced Tuesday it is building a supercomputer, codenamed "Constellation," which is designed to reach 1P flops. It is building Constellation at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at the University of Texas at Austin. Sun received $29.6 million of a total $59 million National Science Foundation grant to build Constellation, while the balance of $29.4 million will go towards operational costs, said Faith Singer, a TACC spokeswoman. The Top Five Supercomputer systems in the latest survey, their manufacturer, the number of processors and the user are as follows: 1. IBM, 131,072, US. Department of Energy-Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. 2. IBM, 40,960, IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center. 3. IBM, 12,208 , DOE/Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. 4. Silicon Graphics Inc., 10,160, NASA Ames Research Center. 5. Bull S.A., 8,704, Commissariat a l'Energie Atomique (CEA) in France
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International Business Machines Corp (IBM) said it created the world&#39;s fastest supercomputer and is using it as the model for smaller, less costly systems due next year that can handle trillions of calculations a second.
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If you need a supercomputer on your desktop, Orion Multisystems has a machine for you. Aiming at scientists and engineers who need to do serious data crunching, the Santa Clara start-up will
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Massively parallel processor to 'change the world', apparently
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European research institutes are  linking together four supercomputers to create the world's  fourth most powerful megacomputer, without having to spend the  money it would normally cost to build such a monster.
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European researchers can now use a new supercomputing network to help them in their work. &quot;We have just completed testing,&quot; said David Henty with the Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre, a member
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(InfoWorld) - What if your desktop computer could run 100 times faster than a PC and were simple enough for a high school student to program? That's not an idle question. Researchers at the University of Maryland have built a prototype of a "desktop supercomputer" that can do just that. The new computer is at least three years from reaching commercial markets, but it could have a big effect in industries that process large loads of data. They include the pharmaceutical, aerospace, military and entertainment industries, for applications such as drug modeling, computer-aided design, and digital content creation. The Explicit Multi-Threading (XMT) computer combines the decades-old philosophy of using parallel computing algorithms with the huge number of transistors in modern processors. The machine uses three field-programmable gate array chips from Xilinx to represent a network of 64 ARM processors that control dozens of threads of simultaneous computation, says Uzi Vishkin, a professor at theÂ A. James Clark School of EngineeringÂ who built the machine with his graduate students. The team is now trying to shrink the prototype, a license-plate-size board running at 75 MHz, down to a fingernail-size version running between 1GHz and 2GHz. Team members took the first step toward that goal this summer by commissioning IBM to manufacture a CMOS silicon application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) with an on-chip data interconnect network. The venture is funded with a grant from the U.S. Department of Defense, Vishkin says. A kid could do it Even if they succeed in building a smaller version of the prototype, the researchers will face the challenge of teaching programmers how to write software for a multithreaded system. Many commercial software companies are already puzzling over a similar problem today as they try to adapt to the latest dual- and quad-core processors from Intel and Advanced Micro Devices. However, Vishkin says his system will be easier to program than applications for commercial multicore chips because the XMT algorithms appear to the operating system to be a single thread. "If you build it in a way that people cannot program it, it remains in the ivory tower of theory," he says. To prove his point, before the end of this year, Vishkin is planning to teach a class of high school students how to program the XMT using a version of the C programming language. He will teach college students to program the prototype in the first quarter of 2008. User wish list A desktop supercomputer would be a godsend for students and artists who rely on computers to process huge amounts of data in the creation of high-resolution digital pictures and movies, says Jon Stiles, director of campus technology at the Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design in Denver. "That would absolutely revolutionize our animation department," Stiles says, adding that currently, students at the college often have to wait for nine or 10 hours while their PCs process the data in a new design. "We're constantly looking for ways to eliminate bottlenecks in production," he says. Stiles warns, however, that a parallel supercomputer would have to meet three conditions before the college could use it. It would have to offer vast data storage, be capable of running standard commercial software such as Adobe Systems' Creative Suite 3 and consume the same amount of energy as current computers. If those conditions were met, Stiles says, "my campus IT support manager would do back flips." Energy use shouldn't be a problem, says Vishkin. "Based on back-of-the-envelope calculations, we believe that each cluster we have will consume not much more power than a standard core," he says. "So we will be competitive on power draw with the same generation of multicore chips."
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NEW YORK, September 29  - International Business Machines Corporation (IBM.NYS) has claimed to have developed the world&#39;s fastest supercomputer.
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Two dual-processor models flesh out HP's Itanium-based Integrity line, and new HP-UX boosts software performance.
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DRESDEN, Germany, June 27  /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Fresh off the revelation that Microsoft(R) high-performance computing (HPC) technologies are being widely adopted by customers, software and hardware partners, a technical leader from Microsoft Corp.
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Vector supercomputers, the original giant machines for massive computing tasks, have largely been replaced in recent years by cheaper cluster models. But the vector's maker and many researchers want a comeback.  By Nancy Gohring.
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By Brad Hem, Houston Chronicle  Feb. 18--An engineering team at HP had figured out how to squeeze a faster and more powerful computer server into one-third the traditional space. That was supposed to be the hard part.
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By Anonymous  A revolution in high performance computing (HPC) for the masses: Microsoft's release last month of Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 is as significant as that.
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HP and Microsoft combine forces to deliver some user-friendly features that take this early Windows Home Server box beyond mere network-attached storage.
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Sun Microsystems and the University of Texas at Austin are set to flip the switch on a unique supercomputer that will vastly speed up massive data analysis and visualisation to tackle time-critical problems such as weather