Monday, August 04, 2003

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The New York Times Supercomputing's New Idea Is Old One
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"Now there is a emerging consensus among American computer designers that the Lego-block approach of chaining together microprocessors fails when it comes to certain classes of computing problems.

"There's a buzz in the air," said Jack Dongarra, a University of Tennessee computer scientist who tracks the world's fastest 500 computers. Scientists and computer designers have been trying to convince the government agencies of the need to invest in designs in the tradition of Mr. Cray, he said. "We're crossing our fingers.""

redux 07.17.03]
Bio-IT World Congress Questions US Supercomputing Efforts

"The U.S. is falling behind Japan in the area of supercomputing, as federal research agencies have shifted their focus toward grid computing in the past decade, according to witnesses at a congressional hearing Wednesday.

The result is that U.S. companies have less access to supercomputing resources because demand from the U.S. government has traditionally driven the supercomputing industry in the U.S., critics of the government's efforts in high-performance computing told the U.S. House Science Committee."

redux 10.16.02]
Genomeweb Craig Venter Goes Shopping for Bioinformatics to Fill His New Sequencing Center

"But Venter has hinted at the characteristics he'd like his IT platform to have. For on thing, he said he'd be interested in IT that "doesn't require the massive air conditioning. The room at Celera cost $6 million before you put the computer in. That makes it pretty expensive," said Venter, whose new center and newly opened research facilities aim at making gene sequencing more affordable and practical. "If for any hospital to interpret the genetic code of their patients they need $100 million computer, this is not a revolution that will go very far."

Consequently, he said he's been "looking at these new green machines being considered at the DOE that have lower energy requirements" and therefore produce less heat. "We're looking at ambient temperatures, massively parallel processors. We're trying to come up with almost the opposite of what we did at Celera: simple, cheap replicable supercomputing."

redux [07.22.02]
Forbes Biotech's Cut-Rate Supercomputer

"For years, small biotech companies have used Linux to manage a lot of data on the cheap. Now that looks like a big business opportunity."

""Linux is an interesting dynamic," says Jeffrey Augen, director of life sciences strategy at IBM. "Most of the small biotech companies in the world today are standardizing on Linux platforms and Linux clusters. Small companies, even startup, round-A companies, are coming to us seeking a level of computer horsepower that traditionally you would see in larger companies.""

redux [06.25.02]
Genomeweb Linux Heavyweight Comes to Pacific Northwest National Lab

"The final version, which could be useful in protein-interaction studies, will include 1,400 next-generation Intel Itanium processors with an expected peak performance of 9.1 teraflops. It will cost $24.5 million and exceed by more than 30 times the speed of PNNL's old supercomputer, which was state of the art when it was installed in 1997."

"According to HP, the system, scheduled to begin delivery in the fall and go fully on-line next spring, will be the world's most powerful Linux-based system."

The New York Times At Los Alamos, Two Visions of Supercomputing
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"Though Q will be almost 200 times as fast, it will cost 640 times as much -- $215 million, compared with $335,000 for Green Destiny. And that does not count housing expenses -- the $93 million Metropolis center that provides the temperature-controlled, dust-free environment Q demands."

" Green Destiny belongs to a class of makeshift supercomputers called Beowulf clusters."

redux [07.13.01]
Scientific American The Do-It-Yourself Supercomputer

"Our solution was to construct a computing cluster using obsolete PCs that ORNL would have otherwise discarded. Dubbed the Stone SouperComputer because it was built essentially at no cost, our cluster of PCs was powerful enough to produce ecoregion maps of unprecedented detail. Other research groups have devised even more capable clusters that rival the performance of the world's best supercomputers at a mere fraction of their cost. This advantageous price-to-performance ratio has already attracted the attention of some corporations, which plan to use the clusters for such complex tasks as deciphering the human genome. In fact, the cluster concept promises to revolutionize the computing field by offering tremendous processing power to any research group, school or business that wants it."

"Above all, the Beowulf concept is an empowering force. It wrests high-level computing away from the privileged few and makes low-cost parallel-processing systems available to those with modest resources. Research groups, high schools, colleges or small businesses can build or buy their own Beowulf clusters, realizing the promise of a supercomputer in every basement. Should you decide to join the parallel-processing proletariat, please contact us through our Web site (http://extremelinux.esd.ornl.gov/) and tell us about your Beowulf-building experiences."