supercomputer

You may not need to use the 42nd fastest supercomputer on Earth, but if you want to, you can for just $1,279 per hour.

As reported by Wired, Amazon Web Services latest salvo into the computing on demand landscape is a platform known as the Elastic Cloud Computer, which at $1279 per hour, or $11 million a year if run full time, is probably on par in comparison to the time, effort and expense of procuring the same level of compute power in your own data center.

Amazon's virtual super computer is capable of running 240 trillion calculations … Read more

The petabytes of data being generated at the Large Hadron Collider and other research bodies are facing a physical bottleneck: the network.

A team of physicists, computer scientists, and network engineers have demonstrated a network capable of blasting 186 gigabits per second of data between two supercomputers. They call this new bandwidth record a crucial tool for scientific inquiry and a signal of where commercial networking products are going.

During the SuperComputing conference 2011 last month, researchers installed high-end servers and 100-gigabit-per-second networking gear to connect a supercomputer at the conference in Seattle to another in Victoria, British Columbia.

They … Read more

It's a thumb drive with the size and power of a supercomputer.

The San Diego Supercomputer Center in January will start the engines on Gordon, a supercomputer that uses flash memory extensively to handle massive amounts of data. Using flash as an integral building block means the supercomputer will crank through data-intensive problems, such as analyzing human genomes, 10 times faster than traditional designs.

The idea for using flash memory was shunned by commercial companies, San Diego Supercomputer Center officials told Wired. But they were able to convince the National Science Foundation about three years ago to invest the $… Read more

Nvidia chips are now in three of the five fastest supercomputers in the world. How did Nvidia get there so fast?

I spoke with Steve Scott, chief technology officer at Nvidia's Tesla products group, to find out.

First, a quick primer on Tesla and graphics chip-based supercomputing. Tesla processors are basically graphics processing units (GPUs) that have been redesigned for supercomputers. The results are impressive enough that some of the most important supercomputing sites have signed on. The U.S. Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory, probably the premier U.S. supercomputing site, will use Tesla processors in its next supercomputer,… Read more

After IBM's Watson computing system defeated two human competitors on Jeopardy this year, it partnered with the nonprofit Scripps Research Institute to direct the tournament prize money toward finding a cure for drug-resistant malaria.

Now all the team is asking for is a little help from around the globe. It's using the World Community Grid, described as a "supercomputer of the people," to use spare computing power from volunteered PCs.

Since the Grid was set up seven years ago, some 575,000 people in more than 80 countries have donated spare computing power from nearly 2 … Read more

When it comes to imagining the future of computing, the biggest constraint is electrical power rather than raw computing horsepower.

During a keynote talk today at the SC11 conference on supercomputing in Seattle, Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang said that the graphics processor company now thinks in terms of "power limits" as it designs future products because power has become a limiting factor.

The company makes graphic processing units (GPUs) for video game consoles and professional workstations but its processors are also being used in high-performance computing. One of the primary reasons the Barcelona Supercomputing Center chose to build its system with Nvidia's GPUs and ARM-based CPUs … Read more

Now that's some serious bandwidth.

The Department of Energy today is scheduled to officially unveil the Advanced Networking Initiative, a network that will connect three supercomputer centers at 100 gigabits per second.

The network, which the DOE says is 10 times faster than commercial Internet speeds, will allow for collaborative research in a variety fields, including mining data from the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, predicting changes in the climate, and genetics. Linking the the first three supercomputers at DOE national labs will be announced today at the SC11 supercomputer conference going on this week in Seattle.

Energy Secretary … Read more

The rankings of the 10 fastest machines didn't change at all on today's new version of the Top500 supercomputer list, but the top dog cleared the notable performance hurdle of 10 petaflops.

"Flops" stands for floating-point operations per second and is a measure of how fast a supercomputer can perform mathematical calculations using the Linpack benchmark. The K Computer, at the Riken Advanced Institute for Computational Science in Japan, moved up from 8.16 petaflops, the score it used to reach the top of the twice-yearly supercomputer ranking last June, to 10.51 petaflops.

It reached … Read more

Nvidia's Tegra chips will for the first time power a supercomputer--more evidence that ARM is movin' on up into Intel territory.

The chipmaker said today the Barcelona Supercomputing Center is developing a new hybrid supercomputer that, for the first time, combines energy-efficient Nvidia Tegra CPUs (central processing units), based on the ARM chip architecture, with Nvidia's graphics processing units (GPUs).

The supercomputing center plans to develop a system that is two to five times more energy-efficient compared with today's efficient high-performance computing systems. Most of today's supercomputers use Intel processors.

"In most current systems, CPUs … Read more