Content about HPC

You may think XSEDE is nothing more than access to high-performance computing resources. But did you know XSEDE offers a full range of training opportunities to teach your scientists and engineers how to work with supercomputers?  

The South African Center for High Performance Computing (CHPC) held its ninth national meeting in December last year. At the event, eight hard-working teams fought to be crowned champions of the student cluster competition.

Computer simulation has the power to enable small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to become more innovative and competitive. However, the cost of purchasing both the necessary hardware and software is often a major barrier to uptake.

Help is now at hand in the form of the CloudSME platform, through which simulation software packages and managed IT infrastructure can be rented on demand via a simple pay-per-use model.
 

The Center for Computational Astrophysics in Japan recently upgraded its ATERUI supercomputer, doubling the machine’s theoretical peak performance to 1.058 petaFLOPS. Eiichiro Kokubo, director of the center, tells iSGTW how supercomputers are changing the way research is conducted in astronomy.

The shock financial crisis that started in 2007 provided a vivid demonstration of the unstable nature of our global financial system. Yet, academics from the Zurich University of Applied Sciences in Switzerland argue that a lack of globally-agreed standards for modeling financial contracts means that accurate comparison of risk exposures between banks is still almost impossible today.

iSGTW recently attended the ISC Cloud '14 conference in Heidelberg, Germany. The event focused on the intersection between cloud and high-performance computing (HPC), with in-depth first-hand reports on the latest technological developments in these fields. Researchers from a wide range of organizations discussed their work and offered practical recommendations about how to best utilize cloud-based computing.

Domenico Talia will speak about big-data mining and knowledge discovery at ISC Big Data in Heidelberg, Germany, on 1-2 October. Talia, who is a professor of computer engineering at the University of Calabria in Italy, will explain how cloud computing can offer effective support for addressing both the computational and data-storage needs of big-data mining and parallel analytics applications. In an in-depth interview, he tells iSGTW about his research in this area and argues that it’s time for the public sector to invest in big-data, so as to provide better services to citizens.

eResearch NZ 2014 was recently held at Waikato University in Hamilton, New Zealand. This was the fifth year of the conference, which once again brought together a wide range of researchers and high-performance computing experts from across the country, as well as from further afield. 

Researchers are using PRACE supercomputing resources to tackle the seasonal flu bug. By modeling the process through which viruses insert their genetic material into our cells, they hope to further development of vaccines.

After serving fusion research for four years, Europe's High Performance Computer for Fusion has now completed its operations, with fusion modeling work moving to the significantly more powerful Helios computer in Rokkasho, Japan. Helios is a Japanese-European facility and has a peak performance of around 1.5 petaFLOPS.