high-performance computing

Intel to buy key assets from supercomputer maker Cray

Supercomputer maker Cray will sell its interconnect hardware development program and related intellectual property to Intel for $140 million in cash, the two companies announced today.

Up to 74 Cray employees will join Intel, Cray said. The company currently employs approximately 800 people worldwide.

"By broadening our relationship with Intel, we are positioned to further penetrate the [high-performance computing] market," said Peter Ungaro, president and CEO of Cray, in a statement.

Ungaro continued, "This agreement also dramatically strengthens our balance sheet and increases our options for further growth, profitability and creating shareholder value."

Cray said it … Read more

Microsoft flexes muscles on supercomputing jobs

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

Microsoft puts more oomph into technical computing

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

Pricey supercomputers sold well in 2009

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

Intel unveils supercomputer chip, NEC partnership

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

Needs of big firms foretell Intel, Nvidia battle

As Intel prepares to invade Nvidia turf, large companies at the Intel server chip rollout Monday stated--in some cases quite objectively--what graphics chip suppliers need to do to make this technology more palatable for high-performance computing.

Besides competing in the gaming graphics market, Intel is eying large high-performance computing customers such as Dreamworks Animation (whose "Monsters vs. Aliens" opened last weekend to large box office numbers) for its future Larrabee graphics chip.

Nvidia is already a player in the so-called General Purpose GPU space, which applies graphics processing units (GPUs) to high-performance computing. As described by Nvidia, high-performance … Read more

Dell brings up the 80-core chip

A Dell slide shown Tuesday was a reminder that a future 80-core processor is still in sight.

Flash back two years to the Intel Developer Forum when CEO Paul Otellini pledged to deliver an 80-core processor in five years.

Otellini said at the time that the chips will be capable of exchanging data at a terabyte a second and that the company hopes to have these chips ready for commercial production within a five-year window.

Michael Dell referred to a slide showing an 80-core chip Tuesday at SC08, a conference in Austin, Texas, focused on high-performance computing.

The trend of … Read more

Dell taps game box, Nvidia for supercomputing

Democratize IT. A banal catch phrase until you see off-the-shelf gaming boxes from PC maker Dell being used for visual supercomputing.

CEO Michael Dell showed the "Stallion" Visualization Cluster at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) running on standard Dell XPS gaming machines during his keynote Tuesday at SC08, a conference in Austin, Texas, focused on high-performance computing. (The keynote was streamed over the Web.)

The Stallion "visualization wall" uses XPS boxes to power 30-inch Dell displays. "The largest display of its kind in the world, at 307 million pixels," Michael Dell said.

"… Read more