Supercomputer SC09 Conference Highlights

HPCWire highlights of SC09

* 15 of 60 press releases were GPU related
* China’s GPU-CPU “Tianhe” supercomputer making it into the number 5 position on the TOP500
* Japan’s 3 petaflop TSUBAME 2.0 Fermi-equipped super scheduled for deployment in October 2010
* announcement of a new GPU computing collaboration network.
* HPC-capable Fermi GPUs from NVIDIA coming online in 2010
* 10 Gigabit Ethernet and Infiniband networking progressing
* continued InfiniBand dominance in high performance computing.
* more applications that oil and gas modelling and stock trading

* Virtualized HPC: The popularity of commodity hardware in HPC has encouraged a growing cadre of vendors to employ virtualization schemes to create big powerful machines from industry-standard building blocks. Unlike traditional virtualization, which splits a server for multiple OS environments, the model in HPC virtualization is to aggregate CPU, memory, and I/O across a cluster to create a unified resource under a single OS. The goal is to provide an alternative to the expense of the SMP mainframe and the complexity of a compute cluster, while at the same time offering the ability to reconfigure hardware dynamically.
* ScaleMP and 3Leaf, aggregate CPUs and memory for up to 16 cluster nodes, making them appear as an SMP machine to the application. RNA networks and NextIO focus on virtualized memory and I/O, respectively.