This week, Scientific Computing is featuring an interview with Jack Dongarra from the University of Tennessee. Dongarra discusses the origin of the LINPACK benchmark and why multidimensional barriers to Exascale computing will force a disruptive change in the form, function and interoperability of future software infrastructure components. As a number of recent studies make clear, technology trends over the next decade...

Hierarchical storage management is not new to the HPC crowd, but the idea of optimizing NAS may just be a new concept to many. This week Avere Systems announced that the company’s new FXT 3800 hybrid storage appliance can now automatically tier data across four media types: RAM, SSD, SAS and SATA HDDs, delivering maximum performance for the hottest files. At the same time, the device moves...

Over at the Xcelerit Blog, Jörg Lotze writes that a recent case study shows how financial services firms can improve the efficiency of their existing compute grids with multithreading. It becomes clear that a multi-threaded parallel application is far superior to the grid approach traditionally used in banks. The multi-threaded application...

In this RCE Podcast, hosts Brock Palen and Jeff Squyres discuss the Chapel parallel programming language with Brad Chamberlain and Sung-Eun Choi from Cray. Chapel strives to vastly improve the programmability of large-scale parallel computers while matching or beating the performance and portability of current programming models like MPI. Download...