http://sun.systemnews.com HPC http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/127/1/HPC/20539 Sun, long a proponent of open source technology, has joined the MTConnect Technical Adviosory Group (MTAG), expanding its advocacy of open communication to the area of manufacturing technology, as reported in Market Watch. MTConnect, is an open manufacturing technology standard using royalty free Internet communications technologies as its basis to encourage and enable manufacturing technology vendors and customers to safely and easily communicate. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/126/4/HPC/20480 Aaron Dubrow reports on the work of Rob Farber and Harold Trease, both with the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), using Ranger at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) to demonstrate the ability to create searchable databases based on image recognition with massive amounts of data rather than text tagging. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/126/4/HPC/20479 "Towards Cloud Computing with Sun Grid Engine 6.2" is a podcast in which Sun Product Line Manager Miha Ahronovitz interviews Sun Grid Architect Daniel Templeton. The result is a clarification of the scope and meaning of cloud computing and a demonstration of how easy it is to get started with Sun Grid Engine 6.2. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/126/3/HPC/20477 In episode #6 of the Radio HPC podcast, host Tony Warner interviews David Maples from Allinea, and guest Brian Huynh fills listeners in on Sun's newest x86 server, the Sun Fire x2250, based on the Intel Xeon architecture. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/126/3/HPC/20478 Tabor Research has new report on the other HPC - High Productivity Computing. "Tabor Research believes that new technologies, methodologies, and applications are emerging outside of the traditional HPC markets that have the essential characteristics of high productivity computing. These requirements include: leading edge capabilities, incorporating, testing, and perfecting of new technologies and methodologies, and market creation and expansion. This HPC market segment is generating a "new edge" by leveraging major technological advances to enable application growth in non-traditional markets. This new area, which we cleverly call Edge HPC (or eHPC), leverages the experience and technologies of the traditional HPC market, while introducing new areas for innovation. Most importantly we believe that eHPC is at the cusp of significant market generation and growth." "Supercomputing at the Edge: Non-Traditional High Productivity Computing Segment Definitions" was written by Christopher G. Willard, Ph.D., Debra Goldfarb, and Addison Snell. (7 pages) http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/126/2/HPC/20435 This is an exiting time for the HPC marketplace. In this Gartner video/webcast see why. Learn from a Gartner analyst, a Sun HPC specialist and a major commercial HPC ISV as they talk about the HPC market and how they expect it to evolve. Speakers: Carl Claunch, VP Distinguished Analyst Garter (11 minutes) Dave Teszler, America's HPC Manager, Sun Microsystems (10 minutes) Jeffrey M. Brennan, VP of Software, Altair Software (10 minutes) Brief registration is required to view this webcast. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/126/2/HPC/20436 The latest preview release of Sun's compiler and tools suite for C, C++, and FORTRAN users is now available for free download. Called Sun Studio Express 07/08, this release of Sun Studio marks an important advance for HPC customers and for any customer interested in extracting high performance from today's multi-threaded and multi-core processors. In addition to numerous compiler performance enhancements, the release includes beta-level support for the latest OpenMP standard, OpenMP 3.0. It also includes some nice Performance Analyzer enhancements that support simple and intuitive performance analysis of MPI jobs. More detail on both of these below. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/126/1/HPC/20383 In this video, Sun's Prasad Pai presents the Sun xVM Ops Center system management software and how it can be used to automate the management life-cycle of HPC clusters. This video recorded at the Sun HPC Consortium in Dresden,Germany on June 16, 2008. The agenda is: Sun Cluster Portfolio Sun xVM Portfolio Life-cycle Management Sun xVM Ops Center (Capabilities; Value Proposition; Integration) Futures Prasad observes that Sun's management solution for HPC clusters is for multiple platforms and is an integral part of Sun's complete cluster portfolio. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/126/1/HPC/20386 This presentation reviews the highlights of the last year in High Performance Computing considering advances in hardware technologies and systems as well as progress in software development and other key accomplishments. This may prove to be the last year before the inauguration of the Petaflops era with at least one machine demonstrating half a Petaflops peak capability and a number of such systems within 10% of that long awaited milestone. Even as the world awaits the deployment of real Petaflops computers some 14 years after they were first conceived in 1994, experts have convened in two separate studies to investigate the potential impact and most promising approaches to achieving a thousand times that before the end of the next decade. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/125/5/HPC/20281 Among the presenters at the Sun HPC Consortium in Dresden, Germany, on June 15, 2008, was Peter Bojanic of Sun who provided an update on the Lustre Roadmap. Bojanic explains that Lustre is a parallel, scalable shared POSIX file system whose key benefits include: Petabytes of storage with one name space Tens of thousands of clients High performance heterogeneous networking and routing High availability Open source, multi-platform and multi-vendor Object-based architecture Bojanic's talk is available as both a video and as a downloadable pdf.