This week the Italian E4 Computer Engineering group launched the CARMA Cluster, a low-power HPC appliance that pairs an ARM processor with a Nvidia GPU. We felt an immediate connection with SECO in terms of experimentation and innovation,” said Simone Tinti, HPC Team Leader of E4 Computer Engineering. 

It's already no secret that Linux tends to dominate as the operating system of choice on the world's fastest supercomputers, but the release on Monday of the 40th edition of the twice-yearly Top500 List of the world’s top supercomputers made that connection more clear than ever.

As covered here on insideHPC, one of the biggest surprises of the new TOP500 list was not about who topped the list, but the fact that NCSA decided that getting on with the business of real supercomputing was more important than beating their chest. In a candid blog post this week, NCSA’s Bill Kramer describes exactly why his team decided not to submit a LINPACK result for Blue Waters, a recently installed massive Cray supercomputer that would certainly rank among the fastest machines in the world in anyone’s book.

This week Nvidia announced that 70 more widely used applications have added support for GPU acceleration so far this year, bringing the total number available to researchers, engineers and designers to more than 200. GPU computing first gained momentum among researchers who could download CUDA to accelerate their own applications for scientific discovery and research,” said Addison Snell, chief executive officer of Intersect360 Research. “We are now in a new era where more commercial software is GPU-optimized, providing accelerated options across the full spectrum of engineering and business computing.”