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...

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...