HPC

Microsoft today unveiled its behind-the-scenes work on porting a popular suite of supercomputing software tools to its Azure cloud platform. It's work that culminated in an a test job that the company says would have cost an estimated $3 million if it had used traditional on-premises hardware, but it got the job done for a little more than $18,000 using a hybrid approach.

That job in particular, which is part of Microsoft's focus at Supercomputing 2010 conference in New Orleans, was done as a collaboration between Microsoft and the Seattle Children's Hospital. Together, the teams ran … Read more

These days, the Top500 list of the world's most powerful supercomputers is dominated by cluster designs assembled from many independent computing nodes. But there's still a place in the world for an earlier approach, as evidenced by a new machine called Blacklight at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center.

Blacklight is a mammoth $2.8 million shared-memory machine built by SGI for the center. The system comes in two halves, each with 16 terabytes of shared memory. Either half would be the largest such amount of memory so far built, PSC said, and with a bit more programming effort, the … Read more

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

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

Microsoft on Monday launched an expanded push into technical computing that it says is needed to solve ever more complex scientific challenges.

"Recent world events clearly demonstrated our inability to process vast amounts of information and variables that would have helped to more accurately predict the behavior of global financial markets or the occurrence and impact of a volcano eruption in Iceland," Bob Muglia, president of Microsoft's Server and Tools unit, said in a statement.

The software maker said a new team will focus on a number of key technical computing challenges such as shifting high-end computing … Read more

Microsoft said on Wednesday that it is ready with an updated test version of the next compute cluster version of Windows Server.

The company released Beta 2 of Windows HPC Server 2008 R2, the version aimed at the kind of computing clusters used in education, the life sciences, finance and other areas. Among the features in the new beta is the ability to use Windows 7-based desktops as nodes within a compute cluster and take advantage of the processing power of graphics chips within a cluster. Microsoft is also adding broader support for Excel with a set of high-performance computing … Read more

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

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

Intel on Monday disclosed a version of its Xeon processor line optimized for supercomputers and announced a partnership with NEC to develop future supercomputers.

At Supercomputing 2009 in Portland, Ore., Intel unveiled a future version of its "Nehalem-EX" processor optimized for supercomputers. The six-core chip will run at higher speeds than eight-core versions of the Nehalem-EX processors and will offer advantages for supercomputer specific tasks, Intel said in a statement. Intel also refers to supercomputing as high-performance computing, or HPC.

The chip architecture will offer greater memory speeds and capacity and will allow customers to build single computers … Read more