Referencing this article. When we talked to a few VC’s previously about APUs, we were asked to show that there would be demand. Kind of hard to do so in advance of the market, but we made rough estimates. Earlier this year, ClearSpeed took its reference design board and started selling it. Sure enough people bought it. Because it does a number of things quite well. At a lower power consumption.

It seems IBM will be building another new NNSA machine. So whats interesting about this, other than IBM getting good press? Well this appears to be part of a growing wave of heterogenous high performance computing systems. Roadrunner appears to be a mix of COTS Opteron hardware, and Cell based blades as Accelerator Processing Units (APUs). Why is that interesting? Programming parallel systems is hard. Programming heterogenous parallel systems is … interesting.

SGI is standing down Irix and MIPS architectures. Likely one of the harder decisions they have had to make, these would not have been selling much as of late. MIPS was hopelessly long in the tooth, and Irix, while one of the better Unixen out there (IMO), was closely tied to MIPS. In the end Irix could not keep and continue to attract applications. When this happens enough, your platform becomes less desireable.

Loaded question. OpenMP may be the simplest to work with. MPI is not. The differences are that OpenMP is integrated as a set of compiler hints and is restricted to shared memory machines. MPI are explicit calls to user level communication routines, that handle data motion for you, you simply point at what to move. While I wish it were that simple in terms of the differences, there are other major ones.

I have updated a post from a while ago. Call this a rant, a vent, whatever. I am saddened that we wasted so much time on this process. This is not a mistake that will be repeated. I like to tell people that if you design something to fail, often that is exactly what happens. Back to business. Update: 4-Sept-2006 We aren’t the only folks to notice that something is not quite right.

I read an amusing article linked to by the fine folks over at slashdot. In the Infoworld article that slashdot points to the title sets the tone. It is entitled “Linux will get buried”. I am going to look at this from an HPC viewpoint. Apple is, and will remain for the forseeable future, a hardware company. All the software that it does, it does for no other reason than to sell hardware.

or, as Chris over at hpcanswers.org asks, Why did Microsoft release C#? And what has this got to do with HPC? Quite a bit. Call it an opportunity that is currently in the state of being missed by the maker of C#. More about that in a moment. Chris postulates Possibly, though I think it is a bit more complex than that. Basically my take on things is that the whole Java fiasco hurt Microsoft … not technologically, not in a market sense.

At BiO Jeff linked to a story from earlier this year on where the bottlenecks really are in computing. The article he linked to was posted in the American Scientist online magazine. The major thesis of the article is that performance is not the only, or as the title implies, real bottleneck, in scientific computing. I might suggest reading the article if you get the chance. I don’t agree with their major thesis implied in the title.

This was the “joke” about tensors that one of my graduate school professors told us when we were trying to grok a sudden notational shift. Took some hard thinking, and then we sorta got it. Well enough to work out a problem. Hopefully to be useful in later life. Well, 17 years (wow…. that long?) later, I am writing some quick code to transform a data set extracted in XML into another data set.

This would normally be OT with respect to HPC, if not for Microsoft starting to compete with one of the fastest growing and sustaining markets. Rather than report all the conversations we have had, I am going to synthesize them into an effective “single” conversation. This has happened about 5 times this week, online, in person, visiting customers, and so forth. Them: “We need low cost and highly secure methods of accessing our cluster resources.