HPC roundup

It’s been quite some time, I haven’t blogged much. I’m currently comitted in a project where we’re deploying a couple of new components at a german Telco; a new cluster, a new Network Management System and some kind of Layer-7 Proxy. This keeps me busy, I apologize to my regular readers for the lack of upgrades. So, here a little roundup of things which happened in the last 6 weeks or so.

OK, let’s get started; first there was SC06, which was quite some happening I’ve missed this year. Interesting hardware was the Intel SR1530 systems for example; eight bloody cores in one 1HU-case. Nifty! SiCortex announced a 5832 MIPS-core system for the masses – the SC5832 offers 5.8 TFLOPS (peak) at just 20 kW of power-consumption trough using power-ompitzed MIPS64 cores. Nvidia showed of with CUDA, a library for offloading computing to the GPU and Dell annouced systems with quad-core Opterons. And there was news about IBM’s 1350 hybrid CBE-blade-system.

Considering the HPC/SC-business there wasn’t much in my opinion. First, NEC announced a cooperation with SUN, which I already covered earlier. Unfortunately NEC still didn’t comment on my questions, maybe I’m not worthy enough. Cray fortified it’s DARPA-commitments through getting another 250-million-USD contract with it’s Adaptive Supercomputing Initiative. Bull sold another 43 TFLOPS supercomputer to the french (CCRT). Yeah, and there was that nifty supercomputer in a chapel, Mare Nostrum in Spain. Quite some location for a supercomputer!

On the software-front we had the annoucement from SUN for a new SUN Grid Engine 6.1; XenSource unveils a couple of new virtualization-products.

Conference related stuff: ISC 2007 issued it’s call for papers. Top500.org released it’s BOF-session slides.

So how was the year 2006 for the HPC-business? HPC-wire has a round-up.

OK, that’s it for now; merry belated christmas, a happy new year – your’s truly,
Alexander Janßen.

BOINC: ‘Returning Results Immediately’ considered harmful

Via Romworld:

Rom Walton from the UCB BOINC-Team wrote an article about the impact of the “return results immediately” ("-return_results_immediately") setting of the BOINC-client. His point is that this setting puts a high and unnecessary load onto the project’s servers. He claims that leaving it up to BOINC when to send the results is about 70% more effective than sending them immediately because less database-queries are needed.

His figures make sense so i agree with him. So please don’t use that feature in your BOINC-client, especially considering the problems on some project’s servers in the past.

Thank you for your cooperation :-)

Tech Tags: BOINC

Sharks with lasers on their heads!

Via Boing Boing, via Defense Tech, via BU:

The Warheads at DARPA funded a project which is about “modding” a shark in a way that their smell-center in the brain is stimulated in a way that the shark can be remote-controlled. They basically follow the odor of their “prey” which isn’t one because those naughty scientists are fooling him. Poor boy. Another splendid weapon for the war against terror, drugs, MP3-freeloaders and movie-pirates.

Quote from BU:

DARPA turned to Jelle Atema, a College of Arts and Sciences professor of biology at the Boston University Marine Program, who for many years has been researching how marine animals use their sense of smell. Atema proposed that because sharks are expert at tracking odors over very long distances, the key to steering a shark was to follow its nose. With more than a year of DARPA funding, which ended last year, Atema was able to use electrical stimulation of a shark’s brain, mimicking odor, to guide the shark around a large tank.

Tech Tags: Dr.Evil