I had the pleasure to be little bit involved in the creation of the fastest supercomputer in Asia, and the second fastest supercomputer in the world – the Dawning “Nebulae” Petaflop Supercomputer at SIAT. If we look on the peak flops capacity of the system – nearly 3 Petaflops, it is the largest supercomputer in [...]
In the introduction for the “Paving the road to Exascale” series of posts (part 1), one of the items I mentioned was the “many many cores, CPU or GPUs”. The basic performance of a given system is being measured by flops. Each CPU/GPU is capable for X amount of flops (which can be calculated as [...]
Published twice a year, the Top500 supercomputers list ranks the world fastest supercomputers and provides a great indication for HPC market trends, usage models and a tool for future predictions. The 35th release of the Top500 list was just published and according to the new results InfiniBand has become the de-facto interconnect technology for high [...]
1996 was the year when the world saw the first Teraflops system. 12 years after, the first Petaflop system was built. It took the HPC world 12 years to increase the performance by a factor of 1000. Exascale computing, another performance jump by a factor of 1000 will not take another 12 years. Expectations indicate [...]
InfiniBand and Ethernet are the leading interconnect solutions for connecting servers and storage systems in high-performance computing and in enterprise (virtualized or not) data centers. Recently, the HPC Advisory Council has put together the most comprehensive database for high-performance computing applications to help users understand the performance, productivity, efficiency and scalability differences between InfiniBand and [...]
High-performance computing provides an invaluable role in research, product development and education. It helps accelerate time to market, and provides significant cost reductions in product development and tremendous flexibility. One strength in high-performance computing is the ability to achieve best sustained performance by driving the CPU performance towards its limits. Over the past decade, high-performance [...]
On Tuesday, May 26, the Research Center Jülich reached a significant milestone of German and European supercomputing with the inauguration of two new supercomputers: the supercomputer JUROPA and the fusion machine HPC FF. The symbolic start of the systems were triggered by the German Federal Minister for Education and Research, Prof. Dr. Annette Schavan, the [...]
This week I presented in the LS-DYNA user conference. LS-DYNA is one of the most used applications for automotive related computer simulations – simulations that are being used throughout the vehicle design process and decreases the need to build expensive physical prototypes. Computer simulation usage has decreased the vehicle design cycle from years to month, [...]
High-performance clusters bring many advantages to the end user, including flexibility and efficiency. With the increasing number of applications being served by high-performance systems, new systems need to serve multiple users and applications. Traditional high-performance systems typically served a single application at a given time, but to maintain maximum flexibility a new concept of “HPC [...]
The industry has been talking about it for a long time, but on March 30th, it was officially announced. The new Xeon 5500 “Nehalem” platform from Intel has introduced a totally new concept of server architecture for Intel-based platforms. The memory has moved from being connected to the chipset to be connected directly to the CPU, [...]
