Content about Supercomputing

Supercomputers are usually judged by their speed. How do they measure up in another way?

The name “Puerto Rico” means “Rich Port.” Recently, the island was rich in computing education.

Just what is supercomputing, or “big iron?” E-ScienceTalk’s Manisha Lalloo explains.

Some kids can make anything cute, and these ones are no exception.

DEISA and TeraGrid host joint EU/US Summer School in Italy

Attendees outside the  Santa Tecla Palace on Sicily’s southeastern shore. Image courtesy Summer School

The Santa Tecla Palace on Sicily’s southeastern shore was recently a classroom for a summer school dedicated to fostering collaboration and innovation in computational science among graduate and postdoctoral scholars from Europe and the United States.
A joint effort of the EU’s DEISA and America’s TeraGrid, it provided a multicultural student community the opportunity to learn about high performance computing (HPC) resources, tools and methods.
“We hope to continue with such events every year — alternating between EU and US destinations,” said Hermann Lederer, who presented a DEISA infrastructure and service overview.
Sixty graduate and postdoctoral scholars from 20 nations were selected from more than 100 applications. Participant expenses were paid by DEISA and TeraGrid. &

Announcement - New European Petaflop supercomputer available in 2011

Photo courtesy PRACE

In 2011, the 1.6 Petaflop French supercomputer, Curie, will be installed and available for use. Powered by more than 90,000 processor cores, it will be exclusively dedicated to European research and available for all fields of science, including high-energy and plasma physics, climatology and much more.
“It is crucial to have high computing power to simulate, with the most possible realism, the past of our climate, the current conditions and its future evolution according to various scenarios,” said Jean Jouzel, vice-president of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change).
Scientists and engineers will also be able to use Curie’s simulations to explore the properties of various materials, improve aircraft and car construction, design better drugs, understand the intricate molecular functions of the human body and conduct simulations that are impractical in reality.
Cur

Announcement - PRACE announces second Tier-0 system

Photo courtesy PRACE

The Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe, PRACE, welcomed the upcoming availability of the second Tier-0 system of the European research infrastructure
This second world-class petaflopic supercomputer is financed by GENCI (Grand Equipement National de Calcul Intensif), acting as the French representative in PRACE. It will be located near Paris and operated in a new computing center, the Très Grand Centre de Calcul (TGCC), by CEA (Commissariat à l’énergie atomique et aux énergies alternatives). With a general purpose architecture, it will extend the PRACE high performance computing (HPC) services started with Jugene, an MPP system operated by Forschungszentrum Jülich (Germany), in order to significantly increase the coverage of all the scientific needs of European reseachers.
Supercomputers are central tools for acquiring knowledge and adding value in the 21st century.

Announcement - NZ eResearch Symposium, 26-27 October, Auckland, New Zealand

The University of Auckland’s Fale Pasifika (above) is a traditional symbol of the Pacific Island. This Fale is the second largest such structure in the world. In addition to the traditional fale building, the Center complex includes academic offices, classrooms and a multi-media laboratory. Photo courtesy NZ eResearch Symposium

Register now for the 1st NZ eResearch Symposium online , to be held at the Owen G Glenn Building and the Fale Pasifika, at The University of Auckland.
Our NZ eResearch Symposium is a forum for NZ’s research sector and nascent eResearch community, being those involved in using, developing, and supporting applications and services that take advantage of distributed collaboration platforms for team science, including grid middleware, high performance computing, data infrastructure, advanced video-conferencing, and advanced research networks. This is also an opportunity to meet l

Feature - Surfing for earthquakes

Aftermath of Haiti earthquake. Image courtesy UN Development Program

A better understanding of the ground beneath our feet may come from research by seismologists and an organization called RAPID—a group of computer scientists at the University of Edinburgh.
The very structure of the Earth controls how earthquakes travel and the amount of damage they cause. Therefore, a clear picture of this structure would be extremely valuable to earthquake planners — but it requires the analysis of huge amounts of data.
To help, the RAPID team developed a system that performs the seismologists’ data-crunching, and have made it easy to use by relying on an interface familiar to all scientists: a web browser.
Seismologists measure vibrations in the Earth at hundreds of observatories across Europe, which allows them to study earthquakes as they travel across countries and continents. By measuring the speed and strength of the vibrations at d

Feature - Deciphering the tree of life Image courtesy of Miriam Boon. What’s a bee without its honey, a butterfly without a flower’s nectar? It’s a pretty puzzle posed by the fossil record, which suggests that insects evolved long before flowering plants did. With the rise of genetics, a new window has opened onto evolution – one that could provide a fresh perspective on old problems such as the disparity between insect and angiosperm (flowering plant) evolution. Computational phylogenetics is the development of computational and mathematical techniques that aid in the estimation of evolutionary history, using molecular data such as protein and DNA sequences to construct a “tree of life.” To calibrate their molecular results, evolutionary biologists add the fossil record to the mix, and assume that a new species will evolve at the same rate as its ancestors. “Often they [other researchers] would force the date of angiosperms to correspond

Announcement - Gordon Conference 2010 abstracts due 16 September

The Grand Challenges in Data-Intensive Discovery conference (or Gordon Conference for short) will be held 26-28 October 2010 at the San Diego Supercomputer Center on the campus of UC San Diego.
Science has entered a data-intensive era, driven by a deluge of data being generated by digitally based instruments, sensor networks, and simulation devices. Hence, a growing part of the scientific enterprise is associated with analyzing such data, and such analysis places special demands on computer architectures because the associated calculations have frequent I/O accesses, large memory requirements, and often limited parallelism.
In mid 2011, SDSC will deploy a unique data-intensive high performance computing system called Gordon. Gordon will be a peer-reviewed allocated resource on the National Science Foundation's TeraGrid available to any US researcher. It will have a peak speed of 245 Teraflops and feature very large shared memo

Feature - Egg solution might crack CO2 shell

Image courtesy Szabolcs Sáfár, stock.xchng

High-performance computer (HPC) processing has enabled scientists to crack the question of eggshell formation at the molecular level, thus demonstrating the successful running of large-scale ‘molecular modeling’ at the nanometer level, or  one-billionth of a meter. Using it, University of Warwick scientists Mark Rodger and David Quigley identified a mechanism for the protein, called ovocleidin-17, (OC-17) as a key catalyst in eggshell production.The research might have applications extending from medical research to climate change.    The team conducted its work on HECToR, a new National HPC Service in Edinburgh, UK, which has 5,884 dual-core processors, equivalent to roughly 5,000 desktop computers. They used this powerful resource to understand how particular chicken proteins, located within a hard part of an eggshell, influenced the growth of calcit