ScaleMP uses its vSMP aggregation hypervisor and cheap skinny nodes to boost main memory Over at The Register, Timothy Prickett-Morgan writes that ScaleMP has cooked up some new ways to build big memory machines for less money. In the example above, the workload in question only needs a four-socket Xeon E5-4600 or Xeon E7-4800 in terms of the processing capacity, but the 48 to 64 memory sticks in this box do not offer enough main memory capacity, and moreover, the fat memory needed to build up terabytes of memory space are very expensive. So instead of buying an eight-socket box to get...

Over at the Intel Datastack Blog, Winston Saunders writes considering the rapidly expanding efficiency and performance capability of supercomputing systems, it may be time to upgrade just for the electricity savings alone. You can see system-level annualized energy costs in the Figure. From this point it is pretty straight forward to...

Scientific Computing is featuring an interview with Bill Dally, Nvidia’s Chief Scientist and Senior Vice President of Research. Dally will keynote ISC’13 with a talk entitled “Future Challenges of Large-Scale Computing.” The biggest impediment to innovation is legacy software. Many innovations are held back by the need for backward compatibility...

Today Cray introduced the Cray XC30-AC supercomputer as an air-cooled addition to its series of Cray XC30 (Cascade) systems. Shipping now, the new Cray XC30-AC supercomputer includes all of the advanced HPC technologies offered in the Cray XC30 system, and features aggressive price points intended to attract a new a class of HPC users – the technical enterprise. Innovation is not limited to Fortune 100 companies. There are many Fortune 1000 companies, and even departments within Fortune 100 companies, with a growing need for a supercomputing system that provides a critical tool for taking advantage...