High performance - News, Features, and Slideshows

News

• Cray acquires Gnodal research staff and IP in Europe

  Supercomputer maker Cray has hired the founders and key engineers of Gnodal who will be working to develop new technology.

• U.S. supercomputers haven't been affected by gov't shutdown -- yet

  The U.S. government shutdown has taken some government Web sites offline, including data.gov. But the nation's most powerful supercomputers continue to operate -- for now, at least.

• The America's Cup: nerves, skill and a lot of computers

  This year's America's Cup will be remembered for Oracle Team USA's jaw-dropping comeback against Emirates New Zealand, but it should also be remembered for the huge role computers have come to play in the competition.

• IBM hopes to Power cloud, analytics with $1 billion Linux investment

  IBM will invest US$1 billion to promote Linux development over the next five years as it tries to adapt Power mainframes and servers to handle cloud and big data applications in distributed computing environments.

• Low-end systems saved HPC market in Q2

  Increasing sales of cheaper systems helped fuel growth in the high-performance computing (HPC) sector during the second quarter, while interest in high-end supercomputers cooled.

• IBM's new Power8 doubles performance of Watson chip

  IBM for the first time revealed details on Monday of its 12-core Power8 chip, which is twice as fast as the Power7 chip used in the Watson supercomputer.

• Intel to customise chips for Big Data applications

  Intel, increasingly customising server chips for customers, is now tuning chips for workloads in Big Data.

• Cray to deploy petaflop supercomputer in UK this year

  Cray is building a supercomputer for the University of Edinburgh in Scotland that will deliver petaflops of performance, which could put it on a future list of top supercomputers.

• Move over, Linpack: Supercomputers get new performance test

  The developer of the most widely used test for ranking the performance of supercomputers has said his metric is out of date and proposed a new test that will be introduced starting in November.

• Ellison and Benioff bury the hatchet and make nice

  Larry Ellison and Marc Benioff's long-running public feud appears to be over, with the CEOs of Oracle and Salesforce.com making a joint appearance Thursday to extol the virtues of a new partnership they describe as financially sensible and strategically pragmatic.

• China trounces US in TOP500 supercomputer race

  The supercomputing arms race is heating up again between the United States and China, as China retakes the top spot in the 41st Top500 listing of the world's most powerful supercomputers with Tianhe-2, an updated system that was able to execute 33.86 petaflops, or 33.86 thousand trillion floating point operations per second.

• Smartphone chips to power prototype supercomputer

  Smartphone and tablet chips are now making their way into high-performance computers, providing an energy-efficient alternative to the power-hungry server chips used in the world's fastest supercomputers.

• What China's supercomputing push means for the U.S.

  China isn't downloading software off the Web to build its systems, it has design teams writing its software, says Argonne's Peter Beckman, who heads the DOE's exascale initiative.

• Smartphone chips could replace server processors in HPC, researchers say

  Looking at historical trends and performance benchmarks, a team of researchers in Spain have concluded that smartphone chips could one day replace the more expensive and power-hungry x86 processors used in most of the world's top supercomputers.

• Cray offers a more modest supercomputer for the enterprise

  Supercomputer manufacturer Cray has expanded its portfolio of systems for the technical enterprise market.