Features

as published in HPCwire. “It is my privilege to welcome you to the dedication of Frontier, the supercomputer that broke the exascale barrier.” That was the introduction by Oak Ridge National Laboratory Director Thomas Zacharia, at a small, public event on August 17 to officially dedicate the supercomputer, which in May became the first system…

as published in HPCwire. The second annual Winter Classic Student Cluster Competition will begin in earnest on Monday, February 7. This competition is unique in that it exclusively features student teams from Historically Black Universities (HBUs) and Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSIs). Organized by Intersect360 Research, the competition has a radically different architecture than other cluster…

as published in HPCwire. HPC is all about scalability. The most powerful systems. The biggest data sets. The most cores, the most bytes, the most flops, the most bandwidth. HPC scales! Notwithstanding a few recurring arguments over the last twenty years about scaling up versus scaling out, the definition of scalability hasn’t changed much. Give…

As published in HPCWire. You’ve heard this one before: HPC has the potential to transcend science and engineering to transform commercial applications in the enterprise. Won’t it be grand when HPC is no longer the exclusive domain of national labs and ivory tower research? I’ve followed this trend throughout my career as an HPC analyst.…

Tabor Research surveyed the High Productivity Computing user community to complete its first Site Budget Allocation Map, a look at how HPC users divide and spend their HPC budgets. We surveyed users on their spending in seven top-level categories: hardware, software, facilities, staffing, services, utility computing, and other. Each category was further divided into constituent…

As published in InsideHPC General Business Supercomputing<br />Google’s Acquisition of PeakStream Provides Evidence of the New HPC It’s an increasingly common pattern in HPC. A small company bursts onto the scene with an innovative technology that improves productivity for a category of applications. Seeking to lock out competitors by tying up the boost in price/performance…

AHPCRC Heads West: Who Wins, Who Loses? After 17 years in partnership with the University of Minnesota (and others), the Army High Performance Computing Research Center has relocated to Stanford. Tabor Research analyzes the decisions behind the move as we look at AHPCRC’s westward journey. A university-industry-government consortium led by Stanford University recently won a…

Buy on Rumor, Sell on News (or Speculate on Rumor, Analyze on News) French website Capital.fr reported on July 26 that HP had entered negotiations to acquire Groupe Bull for about $990 million. This report was not confirmed by either company, and no sources were mentioned, thus we have a classic case of an unconfirmed…

In describing the HPC industry’s adoption of clusters, my friend and colleague Chris Willard recently said, “The revolution is over. The revolutionaries won.” That’s pretty much right. It’s almost to the point where “HPC cluster” is redundant. Most systems – unless they are very small – are run as clusters. Major vendors switched over their…

As published in HPCWire Simpson Strong-Tie, Tabor Research’s current featured user site, is a leading designer and manufacturer of construction products and a relatively new user of High Productivity Computing (HPC) products. Though new to HPC, Simpson has managed to leverage a small Linux Networx cluster (5 nodes, 56 GB of memory) in ways that…