Students from high school to grad school levels are invited to participate in a programming contest at XSEDE13 high performance computing conference, which takes place in San Diego on July 22-25. Created as an opportunity to showcase student expertise in a friendly yet spirited competition, the XSEDE13 Student Programming Competition aims to introduce the next generation of students to the high-performance computing...

Over at TOP500.org, Michael Feldman from Intersect360 Research writes that the recently retired 1 Petaflop Roadrunner supercomputer set the stage for today’s hybrid supercomputers. In retrospect, Roadrunner could be viewed as a something of a design cul-de-sac, created by the artificial goal of the petaflop milestone. But it’s notable that even in the contrived race to a quadrillion flops, something of worth endured. Although the PowerXCell 8i...

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...