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The Titan supercomputer at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory has been upgraded, tackling complex climate change calculations with 20 petaflops worth of new processors. Under the (considerable) hood its NVIDIA’s “Kepler” GPUs and AMD Opetron 6274 processors doing the heavy lifting, though NVIDIA can’t resist pointing out that its graphics chips are in fact carrying 90-percent of the overall load. The GPUs, more commonly found powering gaming rigs, help make Titan “the world’s fastest supercomputer for open scientific research.”

That research will include simulating physical systems, such as weather patterns, or progressions in energy, climate change, efficient engines, materials, and other fields. However, unlike most supercomputers, where access is jealously guarded, Titan takes a more open approach to access.

Researchers from schools and universities, government labs, and private industry can access Titan – by arrangement, of course – to crunch their own data. Final testing is still underway by the laboratory and Cray, and the supercomputer’s first year will be dominated by work on the Department of Energy’s Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) program.

“The improvements in simulation fidelity will accelerate progress in a wide range of research areas such as alternative energy and energy efficiency, the identification and development of novel and useful materials and the opportunity for more advanced climate projections” James Hack, director of ORNL’s National Center for Computational Sciences, said of the new machine.

In total, there are 299,008 CPU cores, sixteen to each of 18,688 nodes; each node also has an NVIDIA Tesla K20 graphics accelerator. The cores are used to guide the simulations, while the GPUs are relied upon to do the actual data crunching; altogether, it’s more than 10x faster and 5x more power efficient than the Jaguar supercomputer Titan replaces.

In fact, Titan can simulate 1-5 years per day of computing time, whereas Jaguar took a day to work through around three months worth of data. ORNL says it’s the equivalent of “the world’s 7 billion people being able to carry out 3 million calculations per second.”

Titan supercomputer goes live with potent CPU/GPU tag team is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
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When you were at high school, math was probably an uninspiring string of algebra you had to crunch through. Get to the cutting edge of computational fluid dynamics, though, and it all starts to look a hell of a lot more pretty. More »

In Insert Coin, we look at an exciting new tech project that requires funding before it can hit production. If you’d like to pitch a project, please send us a tip with “Insert Coin” as the subject line.

Parallel computing is normally reserved for supercomputers way out of the reach of average users — at least at the moment, anyway. Adapteva wants to challenge that with its Parallella project, designed to bring mouth-watering power to a board similar in size to the Raspberry Pi for as little as $99. It hopes to deliver up to 45GHz (in total) using its Epiphany multicore accelerators, that crucially, only chug 5 watts of juice under normal conditions. These goliath speeds currently mean high costs, which is why they need your funds to move out of the prototype stage and start cheap mass production. Specs for the board are as follows: a dual-core ARM A9 CPU running Ubuntu OS as standard, 1GB RAM, a microSD slot, two USB 2.0 ports, HDMI, Ethernet and a 16- or 64-core accelerator, with each core housing a 1GHz RISC processor, all linked “within a single shared memory architecture.”

An overriding theme of the Parallella project is the openness of the platform. When finalized, the full board design will be released, and each one will ship with free, open-source development tools and runtime libraries. In addition, full architecture and SDK documentation will be published online if-and-when the Kickstarter project reaches its funding goal of $750,000. That’s pretty ambitious, but we’re reminded of another crowd-funded venture which completely destroyed an even larger target. However, that sum will only be enough for Adapteva to produce the 16-core board, which reportedly hits 13GHz and 26 gigaflops, and is expected to set you back a measly $99. A speculative $3 million upper goal has been set for work to begin on the $199 64-core version, topping out at 45GHz and 90 gigaflops. Pledge options range from $99 to $5,000-plus, distinguished mainly by how soon you’ll get your hands on one. Big spenders will also be the first to receive a 64-core board when they become available. Adapteva’s Andreas Olofsson talks through the Parallella project in a video after the break, but if you’re already sold on the tiny supercomputer, head over to the source link to contribute before the October 27th closing date.

Continue reading Insert Coin: The Parallella project dreams of $99 supercomputers

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Insert Coin: The Parallella project dreams of $99 supercomputers originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 28 Sep 2012 12:19:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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If you’re a computational engineer, there’s no question about what you do with the Raspberry Pi: you make a supercomputer cluster. Researchers at the University of Southampton have followed their instincts and built Iridis-Pi, a tiny 64-node cluster based on the Raspberry Pi’s usual Debian Wheezy distribution and linked through Ethernet. While no one would mistake any one Raspberry Pi for a powerhouse, the sheer number of networked devices gives the design both some computing grunt and 1TB worth of storage in SD cards. Going so small also leads to some truly uncommon rackmounting — team lead Simon Cox and his son James grouped the entire array in two towers of Lego, which likely makes it the most adorable compute cluster you’ll ever see. There’s instructions to help build your own Iridis-Pi at the source link, and the best part is that it won’t require a university-level budget to run. Crafting the exact system you see here costs under £2,500 ($4,026), or less than a grown-up supercomputer’s energy bill.

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Supercomputer built from Raspberry Pi and Lego, managed by humans rather than Minifigs originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 13 Sep 2012 14:03:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Ten-core, 2.4GHz Xeons? Pshaw. IBM is used to the kind of clock speeds and brute force power that lead to Europe-dominating supercomputers. Big Blue has no intentions of letting its guard down when it unveils its next generation processors at the upcoming Hot Chips conference: the company is teasing that the “zNext” chip at the heart of a future System z mainframe will ramp up to 5.5GHz — that’s faster than the still-speedy 5.2GHz z196 that has led IBM’s pack since 2010. For those who don’t need quite that big a sledgehammer, the technology veteran is hinting that its upcoming Power7+ processors will be up to 20 percent faster than the long-serving Power7, whose current 4.14GHz peak clock rate may seem quaint. We’ll know just how much those extra cycles mean when IBM takes to the conference podium on August 29th, but it’s safe to say that our databases and large-scale simulations won’t know what hit them.

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IBM pushing System z, Power7+ chips as high as 5.5GHz, mainframes get mightier originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 04 Aug 2012 02:17:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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