Computerworld - High-performance computing (HPC) has almost always required a supercomputer — one of those room-size monoliths you find at government research labs and universities. And while those systems aren’t going away, some of the applications traditionally handled by the biggest of Big Iron are heading to the desktop. One reason is that processing that took an hour on a standard PC about eight years ago now takes six seconds, according to Ed Martin, a manager in the automotive unit at computer-aided design software maker Autodesk Inc. Monumental improvements in desktop processing power, graphics processing unit (GPU) performance, network bandwidth and solid-state drive speed combined with 64-bit throughput have made the desktop increasingly viable for large-scale computing projects.
The San Diego Supercomputer Center has taken a significant step forward for scientific processing by developing the first of its kind High-Performance Computing (HPC) system which utilizes flash memory. Commonly used in household electronics such as digital cameras and cell phones, flash is generally considered a faster storage medium than traditional hard drives due to the fact that there are no moving parts, as opposed to the traditional drive which stores information on magnetic plates which must be individually accessed.
For those out there that love both retro computing and weird computer architectures, this one is for you. The “Non-Von” was a “Non-Von Neumann” computer that came out of Columbia University in the early 1980’s. Most computers are considered “Von Neumann” computers, and consist of a unified memory, holding instructions and data, that a computer repeatedly fetches and processes from. The Non-Von works like a content-addressable memory, with lots of very simple processors, each having their own local memory. It is a single-instruction/multiple-data (SIMD) machine, with instructions being simultaneously broadcast to all of the processing elements (PEs) in the machine. The PEs are arranged in a binary-tree structure, with each PE connecting to a parent and two child nodes. The top of the tree connects to a typical computer that executes instructions on the Non-Von cluster. Annotated link http://www.diigo.com/bookmark/http%3A%2F%2Fchrisfenton.com%2Fnon-von-1
The chipmaker is teaming up with content developer OTOY to develop and deploy applications, high-definition (HD) content and even games in the cloud using a massively-parallel supercomputer.
High-performance Linux clustering, Part 1: Clustering fundamentals Introducing the basic concepts of High Performance Computing with Linux cluster technology
was blown away when I saw the photos below of MareNostrum, currently the 9th largest supercomputer in the world and the largest in Europe, which is installed in a former chapel at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC). Wow.