The SeekingAlpha.com posting was nothing more than an analysis of the recently updated TOP500 list.

The posting does mention how IBM's RoadRunner could do 1.02 petaflops, but that was late-May, early-June. In mid-June it was doing 1.144 petaflops.

[20 August 2008, top]

   "The UA's SGI Altix ICE system has just been ranked by 
    The Top500 Supercomputer Sites as the 237th most powerful 
    computer in the world. In addition, The Green500 List, run 
    by Top500, rates the UA system as the 50th greenest in the 
    world in electricity consumption." 

   "The system is actually comprised of two machines. The first, 
    a 628-core CPU SGI Altix 4700 'shared memory' system, was 
    installed in March 2007.  The rest of the supercomputing 
    budget was used to acquire an SGI Altix ICE, a lower-cost, 
    high-performance cluster, that went online on April 1 of 
    this year [2008]. This computer has 1,392 core processors, 
    but can also accommodate additional compute nodes provided 
    by researchers themselves."

   "Together the new high-performance system has increased 
    computing power from 0.6 trillion floating point operations 
    per second, or TeraFLOPS, to 19.4 TeraFLOPS, or about 32 times 
    the capacity of the nearly four-year-old system it replaced."

   "Currently there are 97 research groups spread across eight colleges 
    and 30 departments at the UA using the HPC facility. Nearly all 
    the research intensive groups on campus use it, including science, 
    engineering, medicine and optical sciences. Researchers in social 
    and behavioral sciences, especially psychology and linguistics, 
    also are among the users."

UANews.org::UA Computers Really Fast, and Green

[20 August 2008, top]

   "Quantum computing has the potential to fix problems that 
    would normally take millions of years to solve, much faster 
    than ordinary computers. For these quantum computers to work, 
    atoms need to be kept fixed in space, allowing them to move 
    in an undisturbed oscillating wave motion. This atomic quantum 
    wave holds much more information than a normal computer bit, 
    meaning the computer logic and programmes needed to crack a 
    code are more powerful, and therefore much faster."

Given what we're able to do with zeros and ones, given the ability to "hold much more information than a normal computer bit" is mind boggling.

   "We hope that this work will open up a new field of physics, 
    where quantum coherence can be explored in solid crystals, 
    but at the same time we have brought a scalable silicon 
    quantum computer a step nearer."--Professor Ben Murdin 

Surrey.AC.uk::Innovative research brings quantum computers one step closer

[09 August 2008, top]

UCI researcher Yong Xiao was quoted saying.

   "Fusion holds the promise of a revolutionary new energy source 
    for the world, and this important simulation has brought us one 
    step closer to making it a reality. Advances in high performance 
    computing are key to advancing the science associated with identifying 
    and developing alternative energy sources. The Cray XT4 system provided 
    the scale, reliability and sustained performance required to handle 
    the tremendous amount of data produced by complex fusion simulations."

The Cray press release indicated that fusion, the "power source of the stars and sun, could provide a cleaner, more abundant energy source with far fewer harmful emissions than fossil-fuel burning power plants and fewer problems associated with waste than current nuclear power reactors."

[04 August 2008, top]

With southern Texas saying "hello" to hurricane Dolly today [2008.07.23], this is a good time to highlight the power of supercomputing.

On 22 July 2008, Seattle-based Cray Inc. issued a press release stating that "researchers from the University of Oklahoma's Center for Analysis and Prediction Storms (CAPS) used a powerful Cray XT3 supercomputer housed at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC) to incorporate real-time radar data into their high-resolution thunderstorm forecasting model for the first time."

In a nutshell, cyber-infrastructure connected supercomputers with high-performance visualization systems help researchers "predict storms more accurately and with improved lead time" because they are able to "incorporate a greater and greater number of variables into their models to create increasingly accurate computer simulations and shed light on scientific phenomena that we can't explain today."

Bottom-line: Being able to better predict the actions of Mother Nature saves lives.

[Extra] Today, 4 August 2008, tropical storm Edouard is approaching Texas.

[04 August 2008, top]

Anderson quoted Peter Norvig, Google's research director, stating: "All models are wrong, and increasingly you can succeed without them."

Anderson might be correct when he wrote: "But faced with massive data, this approach to science -- hypothesize, model, test -- is becoming obsolete."

Being a Google fan, I enjoyed how Anderson ended his essay: "There's no reason to cling to our old ways. It's time to ask: What can science learn from Google?"

Wired.com::The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete

[21 July 2008, top]

Phoenix-based TGen announced that the NIH has awarded it with a $1.99 million grant to "enhance its supercomputing capabilities."

Ed Suh, TGen's CIO, was quoted in the TGen press release saying:

   "In today's genomic research environment, high-throughput 
    instruments allow scientists to collect increasingly large 
    amounts of data. This scalable computing system will allow 
    TGen and ASU scientists to explore those large volumes of 
    complex data more thoroughly and at an accelerated pace."

Dan Stanzione, Director of ASU's High Performance Computing Initiative, was quoted in the TGen press release saying:

   "The success of TGen and ASU scientists to date has come at 
    the sacrifice of time. However, individuals affected with 
    disease do not have the luxury of time. The parallel 
    cluster-computing system will optimize TGen and ASU 
    researchers' ability to meet their data analyses and 
    systems modeling needs, and hopefully accelerate timely 
    and effective discovery toward improved human health"

Happy supercomputing to TGen and ASU!

TGen.org::TGen Awarded $1.99 Million Grant to Advance Highly Parallel Supercomputing

[17 July 2008, top]

   "Supercomputers around the world are running on SUSE 
    Linux Enterprise Server from Novell®. According 
    to TOP500, a project that tracks and detects trends 
    in high-performance computing, SUSE Linux Enterprise 
    is the Linux of choice on the world's largest HPC 
    supercomputers today. Of the top 50 supercomputers 
    worldwide, 40 percent are running on SUSE Linux Enterprise, 
    including the top three -- IBM eServer Blue Gene at the 
    Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, IBM eServer 
    BlueGene/P (JUGENE) at the Juelich Research Center 
    and SGI Altix 8200 at the New Mexico Computing 
    Applications Center."

Novell's name dropping continued...

   "Customers such as Audi, MTU Aero Engines, NASA Advanced 
    Supercomputing Division, Porsche Informatik, Seoul National 
    University, Swinburne University of Technology, Tokyo Institute 
    of Technology and Wehmeyer are running supercomputers and 
    computer clusters on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server to handle 
    mission-critical workloads with minimal downtime."

Keep up the good work Novell!

[Extra] The openSUSE® Project announced that "openSUSE 11.0 is available for download at openSUSE.org. openSUSE 11.0 is the latest release of the community Linux distribution. [...] openSUSE 11.0 includes everything you need to get started with Linux on the desktop and server. The openSUSE distribution provides the foundation for Novell's award-winning SUSE® Linux Enterprise products."

[05 July 2008, top]

   "ASU is using its supercomputing capabilities to aid 
    humanitarian organizations attempting to provide disaster 
    relief to victims of Cyclone Nargis that hit the Southeast 
    Asian country of Myanmar May 2."

Keep up the great effort!

ASU.edu::Supercomputing experts guide Myanmar relief efforts

[24 June 2008, top]

   "In the Top500 list, a twice-annual ranking of the world's 
    most powerful supercomputers, IBM not only took the top 
    three spots for the fastest computers in the world, but 
    also got credit for five of the top 10 fastest machines. 
    All told, the Armonk, N.Y., company had 210 computers on 
    the list--more than any other company."

There's lots of competition in the supercomputing world, but at least IBM, HP, Sun Microsystems, Cray are all American companies.

Forbes.com::IBM Vs. HP: Supercomputer Showdown

[18 June 2008, top]

   "At next week's International Supercomputing Conference in 
    Dresden, Germany, Jack Dongarra, a professor of computer 
    science at University of Tennessee and a distinguished 
    research staff member at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, 
    will be giving a presentation on exaflop systems 
    'in the year 2019.'"

   "'The projection is very clear; in 11 years we will have an 
     exaflop,' said Dongarra, who believes by then every system 
    on the Top 500 computing list will be at least a petaflop."

ComputerWorld.com::All hail Roadrunner's petaflop record; now, what about the exaflop?

[16 June 2008, top]

   "To put the performance of the machine in perspective, 
    Thomas P. D'Agostino, the administrator of the National 
    Nuclear Security Administration, said that if all six 
    billion people on earth used hand calculators and performed 
    calculations 24 hours a day and seven days a week, it would 
    take them 46 years to do what the Roadrunner can in one day."

Jack Dongarra, a computer scientist at the University of Tennessee, was quoted saying: "This is equivalent to the four-minute mile of supercomputing."

NYTimes.com::Military Supercomputer Sets Record

[09 June 2008, top]

   "A handful of engineers at a lab in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., 
    have assembled what they expect will become--at least 
    for a while--the world's most powerful computer. The 
    IBM Roadrunner likely will go down in history as the 
    first computer to consistently crank out 1 petaflops
    --a quadrillion floating-point operations per second."

I am frequently asked what are supercomputers good for and there are probably more than a quadrillion responses; however, to date these supercomputers are grossly under utilized.

   "Once fully tested by IBM, the system will be packed up 
    and shipped to Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, 
    where it will be used to run classified physics experiments 
    as part of the U.S. nuclear missile program."

The IEEE article ended with the following about Japan extending its Earth Simulator supercomputer.

   "Japan has announced a follow-on project called the 
    Life Simulator, targeted at achieving 10 Pflops of 
    sustained performance. But it is not expected to 
    be ready until 2011."

EETimes.com::Pflops; now what?

[02 June 2008, top]

The following was announced on 24 March 2008.

   "Yahoo! and Computational Research Laboratories (CRL), 
    a wholly owned subsidiary of Tata Sons Limited, announced 
    an agreement to jointly support cloud computing research."

Granting supercomputing capabilities to Yahoo!'s talented researchers is major deal for Yahoo!

   "As part of the agreement, CRL will make available to researchers 
    one of the world's top five supercomputers that has substantially 
    more processors than any supercomputer currently available for 
    cloud computing research."

I had not heard of "Hadoop" before, but I'll be looking into it sooner rather than later.

   "The Yahoo!/CRL effort is intended to leverage CRL's expertise in 
    high performance computing and Yahoo!'s technical leadership in 
    Apache Hadoop, an open source distributed computing project of 
    the Apache Software Foundation, to enable scientists to perform 
    data-intensive computing research on a 14,400 processor supercomputer."

CRL's supercomputer is indeed super.

   "Called the EKA, CRL's supercomputer is ranked the fourth fastest 
    supercomputer in the world -- it has 14,400 processors, 28 terabytes 
    of memory, 140 terabytes of disks, a peak performance of 180 trillion 
    calculations per second (180 teraflops), and sustained computation 
    capacity of 120 teraflops for the LINPACK benchmark."

Shareholder.com::Yahoo! and CRL to Collaborate on Cloud Computing Research

[03 May 2008, top]

   "A scholar at the Discovery Institute (yes, that Discovery Institute), 
    Brett Swanson, kicked off the current round of debate about Internet 
    capacity with a piece in the Wall Street Journal. Swanson warned that 
    the rise in online voice and video were threatening the Internet, 
    especially at its 'edges,' those last-mile connections to consumers 
    and businesses where bandwidth is least available. 'Without many tens 
    of billions of dollars worth of new fiber optic networks,' he wrote, 
    'thousands of new business plans in communications, medicine, 
    education, security, remote sensing, computing, the military 
    and every mundane task that could soon move to the Internet 
    will be frustrated. All the innovations on the edge will die.'"

   "What we are facing is nothing less than a 'coming Exaflood.'" 

ARStechnica.com:: The coming exaflood, and why it won't drown the Internet

[16 April 2008, top]

I am consistently asked "what are supercomputers used for?" At the UT (and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory) it will initially be used for the following.

   + provide a boost to climate scientists in their efforts to predict
     extreme weather such as hurricanes and tornadoes as well as long-term
     climate changes and the effects of pollution,
   + permit astrophysicists to conduct more realistic simulations of
     supernova formation, galaxy evolution, and black hole mergers
   + enable earth scientists to perform high-resolution simulations 
     of the Earth's interior and enhance our understanding of the 
     planet's evolution.

The UT supercomputer is planned to be doing "near" petascale computing sometime in 2009.

Cray.com::Cray to Provide One of World's Fastest Supercomputers to University of Tennessee

[03 April 2008, top]

Sun.com:: Sun Microsystems Awarded $44 Million Department of Defense Contract to Develop Microchip Interconnect System

[24 March 2008, top]

HPC stands for High Performance Computing; however, these days the 'P' in HPC stands for many things.

High performance computing is a highly pervasive computing environment that enables highly productive computing via a highly persistent cyber-infrastructure that exploits highly parallel computing to provide highly powerful computation.

Or... HPC is a HPC environment that enables HPC via a HPCI that exploits HPC to provide HPC.

Or... HPPPPPPC stands for High Performance, Productivity, Pervasive, Persistent, Parallel, Powerful Computing. In the 20th century HPPPPPPC would be H6PC, but in the exponential growth world of the 21st century we write HP^6C (or HP⁶C).

[11 March 2008, top]

Top500.org:: Operating system Family Share for 11/2007

[04 March 2008, top]

High-Performance Computing is highly-parallel computing.

   "For pioneering contributions to the theory and practice of 
    optimizing compiler techniques that laid the foundation for 
    modern optimizing compilers and automatic parallel execution."

Awards.ACM.org:: Frances Allen

[Extra] SGI lives... SGI.com:: SGI Acquires Assets of Linux Networx, a Leader in Clustered HPC

[25 February 2008, top]

New Mexico's governor, Bill Richardson, said he "foresees the system fostering statewide water modeling projects, forest fire simulations, city planning and the development of new products."

SantaFeMexican.com:: State's supercomputer a catalyst for research, education, economy

[Extra]

An exaflop is a 1000 times faster than a petaflop.

   "Preparing groundwork for an exascale computer is the mission 
    of the new Institute for Advanced Architectures, launched 
    jointly at Sandia and Oak Ridge national laboratories."

Sandia.gov:: One million trillion flops targeted by new Institute for Advanced Architectures

[22 February 2008, top]

In a nutshell, the UA-led iPlant Collaborative will "develop a centralized database of research information on plant biology and offer researchers the tools needed to solve the major science problems they face."

The NSF grant is for 5-years with UA getting 79% of the $50 million and ASU getting 4%. One item that shouldn't be ignored is that 16% of the grant goes to the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York. This is a great "connection" for the state of Arizona.

Arizona's governor was quoted saying.

   "Arizona's future lies in innovation in areas like the biosciences, 
    and we are tremendously proud that the National Science Foundation 
    has chosen Arizona to chart a new course in plant science research." 

Again, "Kudos" to BIO5 at the University of the Arizona.

[Extra] Here are a couple quotes from Dan Stanzione, Director of ASU's High Performance Computing Initiative.

   "Our role is to support the plant scientists in implementing 
    their vision for the iPlant cyberinfrastructure. We are 
    providing the large-scale storage, high-end computing power 
    and expertise in applying supercomputing as part of the 
    cyberinfrastructure."

   "Deepening our knowledge in plant science is critically important 
    in confronting many of our global challenges. Food production, 
    energy production, environmental sustainability, the development 
    of biofuels and more effective medicines, dealing with climate 
    change -- all of these hinge on making new discoveries in
    plant biology."

Fulton.ASU.edu:: Creating cyber tools for one of nation's major scientific endeavors

[03 February 2008, top]

Seattle, WA-based Cray Inc. announced the "appointment of Jill Hopper to the position of vice president responsible for government programs." Hopper said: "Cray's highly scalable and innovative systems have been used to tackle some of the most complex problems we face today, including supporting key government missions and improving everything from airplane safety and fuel efficiency to medical treatments and storm prediction."

In the press release, Cray CEO/President Peter Ungaro said: "High performance computing enables the scientific breakthroughs and industry advancements that contribute to our country's continued scientific and technical leadership, economic competitiveness and national security. It's an important time in the HPC industry with an increased need for supercomputers with more computational capability that simultaneously operate with maximum application, power and cost efficiency."

If Jill is 10% the woman Grace was, then Cray Inc. made a great move.

[17 January 2008, top]

	Professor Jacek Gondzio at the University of Edinburgh plans 
	to use HECToR to model financial markets. He is working on 
	finding the safest and most profitable investment strategies 
	for pension funds, based on uncertain information about the 
	future of the world economy.

	"Uncertainty needs to be modelled by multiple scenarios and 
	 in order to reflect reality this automatically expands 
	 problems to large sizes."

It has cost £5.6m less than the £65m estimate to build, but its annual running costs have jumped from the £5.4m estimate to £8.2m. Trew said this was because electricity prices in the UK had nearly doubled since the planning stages. "I think the initial estimates for power costs were unrealistically low, but power does cost an awful lot more today than it did five or six years ago."

USD to GBP 0.5064

Guardian.co.uk:: Inside the UK's fastest machine

[14 January 2008, top]

Nevering deleting anything from your computer will end up using lots of bytes of memory.

   "In the private sector alone electronic archives will take 
    up 27,000 petabytes (27 billion gigabytes) by 2010."

The following comment was made to the Slashdot posting.

   "In other words, 27 Exabytes?

    Note to science and tech journalists: please stop stringing 
    together 'millions' and 'billions' in an attempt to make the 
    numbers seem large, impressive, and incomprehensible. Scientific 
    notation and SI exist for a reason."

Hardware.Slashdot.org:: 27 Billion Gigabytes to be Archived by 2010

[03 January 2008, top]

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[01 January 2008, top]