Blog

The race to understand the human brain

May 22, 2013, 9:17 p.m.

International Supercomputing Conference (ISC) recently announced that it will be giving the Human Brain project, led by Henry Markram of EPFL, Switzerland, a platform at the annual event for the next 10 years to share their latest research findings . Their first talk, 'Supercomputing & the Human Brain Project – Following Brain Research & ICT on their 10-Year Quest', will be held on Tuesday, June 18.

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"No Exascale for You!" An Interview with Berkeley Lab's Horst Simon

May 21, 2013, 10:56 a.m.

Although Horst Simon was named Deputy Director of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, he maintains his strong ties to the scientific computing community as an editor of the TOP500 list and as an invited speaker at conferences. Twice during the week of May 6, Simon gave back-to-back presentations of a new talk on “Why We Need Exascale and Why We Won’t Get There by 2020.” Not only was the talk a hit with conference attendees, but it also made its way onto Slashdot.

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With Roadrunner's Retirement, Petascale Enters Middle Age

April 17, 2013, 4:19 p.m.

Maybe I'm getting old, but the petascale era of supercomputing still feels new to me. On the other hand, the recent decommissioning of IBM's Roadrunner, the world's first petaflopper, suggests otherwise. Roadrunner booted up at the Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory five years ago in 2008. Its retirement last week marks the approximate mid-point between the first petaflop system and the first exaflop one -- assuming, of course, you're an exascale optimist.

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TOP500 Systems and Exascalar Efficiency, Part II (Datacenter Knowledge)

Jan. 18, 2013, 3:58 a.m.

Intel’s Winston Saunders with Part II of his feature piece on how the most recent Top500 and Green500 machines stack up in terms of Exascalar, the “logarithmic distance” to 1018 flops in a 20 MegaWatt power envelope.

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Exascalar Results from November 2012: Part 1 (Datacenter Knowledge)

Jan. 3, 2013, 11:03 p.m.

With the recent publication of the Top500 and Green500 lists of the world’s most powerful and efficient supercomputers, Intel’s Winston Saunders pulls together another look at Exascalar. 

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About Bugs, Bidders and Batmen

Jan. 1, 2013, 10:27 p.m.

The new year begins like the old year ends: Delays with Windows tablets, bugs in hardware and software and glimpses of new – naturally much better – chips, like Nvidia's Wayne.

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About Possible Foundries and Impossible Processes

Dec. 17, 2012, midnight

The start of December is when the International Electron Devices Meeting IEDM traditionally takes place. Next to the presentation of numerous new designs (with and without silicon), its agenda always includes an overview of the latest process technology.

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The HPC Triple Crown [HPCWIRE]

Dec. 1, 2012, 2:45 a.m.

The semi-annual HPC "500 list" time and its attendant fall iron horse racing season are upon us. Thanks to the hard work of the list keepers, we currently enjoy three major ones to review, compare and contrast: TOP500, Green500 and Graph 500. Each focuses on a distinct aspect of HPC – number crunching, energy efficiency, and data crunching, respectively – and together they allow us to construct our own type of Triple Crown. Since new race results were recently announced, let's take a look at the current standings.

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TOP500 Slides from SC12 are now available

Nov. 14, 2012, 1:18 p.m.

The slides from the TOP500 BoF Session at SC12 in Salt Lake City, Utah are now available. Special for this year was the presentation by Horst Simon of all systems that made it to the top of the list in the last 20 years and a special presentation by Hans Meuer about sites entering the list for the first time. The TOP500 BoF session was held on November 13, 2012.

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Oak Ridge Claims No. 1 Position on Latest TOP500 List with Titan

Nov. 12, 2012, 8:32 a.m.

MANNHEIM, Germany; BERKELEY, Calif.; and KNOXVILLE, Tenn.—Advanced reports that Oak Ridge National Laboratory was fielding the world’s fastest supercomputer were proven correct when the 40th edition of the twice-yearly TOP500 List of the world’s top supercomputers was released today (Nov. 12, 2012). Titan, a Cray XK7 system installed at Oak Ridge, achieved 17.59 Petaflop/s (quadrillions of calculations per second) on the Linpack benchmark. Titan has 560,640 processors, including 261,632 NVIDIA K20x accelerator cores.

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