Last week we talked about the upcoming release of Intel’s Xeon E5 processor family. This week, we have some even more important announcements regarding Intel MIC and the strategic direction that Intel is headed regarding high performance computing.
Die shot of 'Aubrey Isle,' the silicon chip included in the Intel MIC 'Knights Ferry' development platform
We hope everyone has thus far had a great start to 2012! To help launch us further into the new year, we are running a special “social servers” campaign through the end of February to help bring everyone together for fantastic savings! The Stellar Deal on our 5017C-MTF 1U Single Xeon E3 “Sandy Bridge” server takes the form of social shopping for servers where a special discount of 20% will be applied if the campaign goal of 50 servers is met. If we reach our campaign goal, everyone gets the deal and benefits! If we don’t meet the goal, you won’t be charged but nobody gets the deal.
This is a continuation of our look at future trends in high performance computing. In part 1 we covered the first five of the top ten trends. In this installment we’ll wrap up with the remaining five.
As we near the end of 2011, we take a moment to reflect on the past year. It’s been a busy year for IT across virtually all verticals, from mobile and search to enterprise servers and cloud computing. When we attended HPC360 a few weeks ago, we had the pleasure to attend a keynote presentation by Addison Snell, CEO of Intersect Research in which he discussed the most important trends in high performance computing (HPC).
HPC is an exciting and growing industry that ICC has been moving into the past couple years. The traditional HPC space revolved around high-end research facilities particularly in science and engineering. However, with each year technological innovations and tailored systems such as our Supermicro GPU Simcluster have brought the realm of HPC closer to reality for many small/medium-sized business and organizations.
In this 2-part series we will look at the top 10 future trends in HPC from Intersect360′s research, coupled with our own analysis and thoughts. No better way for us computer nerds to close the year right? Let’s get started.
We just returned from R Systems HPC360, a conference on high performance computing down in Champaign, Illinois which brought together leading industry professionals, academics, scientists, and enthusiasts.
The conference was titled HPC360 “Innovation through Modeling and Simulation”. The event took place at the i Hotel and Conference Center in Champaign, hosted by R Systems and sponsored by a number of companies including Dell, AMD, Intel, and yours truly, ICC!
As power consumption eats away at the environment and company budgets, many organizations constantly look for ways that they can harness renewable energy to cut down costs and improve their image with regard to the environment.
Facebook’s first data center in Europe, based in Lulea, Sweden, is a good example of the possibilities of this: Continue reading
On June 24, President Obama announced the Advanced Manufacturing Partnership (AMP) between the federal government, academia, and businesses to help stimulate the manufacturing sector of the U.S. economy. We have been following the so-called “Missing Middle” of small- to medium-sized manufacturers (SMMs) on this blog, and I’d like to describe some of the recent initiatives to engage this high-potential segment of our economy.
Speaking at Carnegie Mellon University, Obama described that AMP would allocate $500 million of federal money to help make U.S. manufacturing more competitive around the world.
Inspired by a report drafted by the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), which found that there are market failures in the advanced manufacturing space that need to be overcome by government intervention, AMP will focus on five initiatives:
HPCwire recently ran a great article describing in a nutshell the potential that high-performance computing (HPC) can have in increasing the competitiveness of US manufacturing.
Despite what media coverage about the ailing manufacturing sector may lead one to believe, the US still leads the world in manufacturing output. In 2009, as Michael Feldman of HPCwire describes, the US accounted for 20% of the world’s manufacturing output and was 45% more productive in this area than China. Nevertheless, there are challenges ahead; the US is only fourth in manufacturing competitiveness worldwide according to one study.
Why is manufacturing such an important part of the US economy even though it employs only 10% of the national workforce? Feldman writes:
The real value of the US manufacturing sector is that it’s at the heart of much of the science and engineering innovation on which the remainder of the economy rests. Today US manufacturers employ more than a third of the country’s engineers and account for 60 percent of all private sector R&D. As such, it creates products that are used by the more lucrative service industries. Think, for example, of all the myriad services that are dependent on the production of computer chips and other electronic devices. Manufacturing, like agriculture before it, is a foundational activity that acts as a catalyst to other business sectors.
As we’ve been following on this blog, this great potential for reinvigorating the foundational sector of the US economy has been taken up as a cause by various organizations ranging from the federal government to the National Center for Manufacturing Sciences (NCMS) to universities to system integrators like us. Continue reading
A storage solution that we developed for NCSA that will eventually become part of an HPC cluster was featured in an LSI case study this week. There are two cool things about the case study: the fact that the cluster will eventually be used to test some of Einstein’s theories about the universe, and the way the storage system gets around the I/O bottleneck problem. I’ll provide a brief overview here (see the case study for greater detail).
The prototype storage system will become a tool for the Dark Energy Survey, which seeks to answer one of the most fundamental questions in astrophysics today: why is the expansion of the universe speeding up? This is what we have observed with our telescopes, but Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity, which is our best description of the rules of physics to date, predicts a slowing down of the expansion of our universe. Scientists in the Americas and in Europe will seek to answer why our observations don’t match our theories so that we can better understand the heavens.
The prototype storage system that we developed for the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) is designed around the latest LSI MegaRAID CacheCade technology, which allows solid-state drives (SSDs) to be used as RAID controller cache. This helps overcome the I/O bottleneck plaguing storage technology today so that DES can transfer the approximately 400GB of data that will be generated each day by the new telescope in Chile to storage systems in the United States. The plan is to eventually add more than one controller per node so that the controllers can also pool their SSD-based cache. Initial tests showed significant performance gains. Read more here.
Miles south of Chicago, amid the wind-swept flatlands of central Illinois, is the home of perhaps the world’s next fastest supercomputer. The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, which is co-developing the Blue Waters supercomputer, is today at the forefront of petascale computing. But 25 years ago, when the Center revved up its first machine, the computing world looked much different.
This article looks back at the highlights in NCSA’s 25-year history, which illustrate well how far computing technology has come in such a short span of time and the various innovations that supercomputers have made possible that we now take for granted. These highlights are based on the slideshow posted on NCSA’s website. (In the interest of full disclosure, ICC works with NCSA on the Dark Energy Survey, so we’re a little biased).
The first supercomputer at NCSA, which went operational in 1986, was a dual-processor machine that performed at about 400 megaflops. In comparison, the upcoming Blue Waters supercomputer will have 300,000 CPUs and a peak performance of 10 petaflops (that’s 25 million times faster than NCSA’s first supercomputer).
In 1998, NCSA came out with its first “cluster”, which connected 128 workstations together and was known as the NT Supercluster. This aggregation of towers looks somewhat comical today, and it wasn’t long before rack servers replaced these bulky form factors. Continue reading