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News

• Dell working on ARM supercomputer prototypes

  Not fazed by a takeover battle looming on the sidelines, members of Dell's research division are putting together the pieces for prototype ARM supercomputers that could be deployed in the future.

• Swiss supercomputer aims to predict mountain weather with help of GPUs

  The Swiss National Supercomputing Center (CSCS) is going to upgrade its supercomputer with Nvidia GPUs to more accurately predict the weather in the steep mountains of the Swiss Alps.

• IBM: Watson will eventually fit on a smartphone, diagnose illness

  IBM executives who are working with healthcare systems to perfect supercomputer Watson's ability to diagnose and suggest treatments. And by 2020, Watson could fit on a smartphone.

• Supercomputers face growing resilience problems

  As supercomputers grow more powerful, they'll also grow more vulnerable to failure, thanks to the increased amount of built-in componentry. A few researchers at the recent SC12 conference, held last week in Salt Lake City, offered possible solutions to this growing problem.

• World's most powerful big data machines charted on Graph 500

  The Top500 is no longer the only ranking game in town: make way for the Graph 500, which tracks how well supercomputers handle big-data-styled workloads.

• SC2012: Top500 expects exascale computing by 2020

  If the increase in supercomputer speeds continue at their current pace, we will see the first exascale machine by 2020, estimated the maintainers of the Top500 compilation of the world's fastest systems.

• Cray bumps IBM from Top500 supercomputer top spot

  The U.S. Department of Energy Oak Ridge National Laboratory's newly installed Titan system, a Cray XK7, has been anointed as the world's fastest supercomputer in the newly released 40th edition of the Top500 compilation of the world's fastest supercomputers.

• Nvidia, AMD release graphics processors for supercomputing

  Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices on Monday announced high-performance graphics chips for supercomputers.

• Intel ships 60-core Xeon Phi processor

  Intel hopes to deliver performance and power-efficiency breakthroughs to servers with the new Xeon Phi family of processors, the first model of which is now shipping to customers, the company said on Monday.

• Cray's next supercomputer has speedy interconnect

  For its next generation of supercomputers, Cray has focused on radically improving the I/O (input/output) of individual nodes. The new XC30 supercomputer will feature a new interconnect, called Aries, and a new routing topology that together promise to dramatically improve internal bandwidth.

• China us building a 100-petaflop supercomputer

  As the U.S. launched what's expected to be the world's fastest supercomputer at 20 petaflops, China is building a machine that is intended to be five times faster when it is deployed in 2015.

• ORNL boosts U.S. supercomputing power with 20-petaflop Titan

  The U.S. Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory on Monday completed the deployment of a 20-petaflop supercomputer called Titan, which the lab hopes will give the U.S. an edge over China and Japan in the race to build the world's fastest computers.

• Nvidia: Gaming systems to reach 'tens of teraflops' by 2019

  Graphics processor maker Nvidia expects gaming systems will reach a performance of "tens of teraflops" by the end of the decade, and be capable of displaying real-time visuals as good as the pre-rendered cut scenes found in games today, according to company CEO Jen-Hsun Huang.

• U.S. HPC Lead in Danger

  The SC11 supercomputing conference in Seattle last month saw an almost obsessive focus on the development of an exascale computing system -- one that would be roughly 1,000 times more powerful than any existing system -- <a href="http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9221883/Exascale_computing_seen_in_this_decade">before the end of the decade</a> .

• Intel pushes 50-core chip, mulls exascale computing

  Intel is drumming up support for its latest 50-core Knights Corner and Xeon E5 server chips, which are key elements in the company's plans to scale performance while reducing power consumption moving toward an exascale supercomputer by 2018.