Over at The Register, Dan Olds looks at how IBM’s potential sale of their x86 business to Lenovo would affect Big Blue’s HPC business. As a share of IBM’s total sales to the Top500, typical x86 boxes are the largest segment in terms of system count at 33 per cent. These are IBM’s M3/M4 and other traditional rackmount “pizza box” systems. The vast majority are dual-socket Xeon-based servers that can be found in pretty much every data centre in the world. Interestingly enough, 43 out of 63 of these systems reside in China and are...

In this video from the HPC User Forum in Tucson, James Donaldson from NASA JPL presents: Engineering for the Mars Science Laboratory. Related posts:Video: NASA Advanced Computing Environment for Science and EngineeringDell Clusters Power Mars Landing SequenceVideo: Material Science Applications of HPCThe post Video: Engineering for the Mars Science Laboratory...

Disruptive changes often originate from science labs, says David Power, head of HPC at Boston LTD. Path-breaking findings coming from the pure sciences – new materials, chemical or physical properties, methods learnt from biological systems, etc. – often open up game-changing alternatives with the potential to disrupt the smooth flow of technological progress. And in the words of telecommunications expert and faculty at the Illinois Institute of Technology, Dr Suresh Borkar: “For continued progress, cross-disciplinary advances are needed in many areas including materials sciences, physical sciences, chemical sciences, biological sciences and mathematics.” 

  While many are looking at ARM-based processing as the future of energy-efficient HPC, it won’t get far without applications. Now, the Mont Blanc project has published a list of key scientific apps to be ported to the platform. The Mont Blanc project aims to assess the potential of low-power embedded components based clusters to address future Exascale HPC needs. Among other objectives, we...