The International Supercomputing Conference (ISC’11) in Hamburg just ended yesterday, and there’s plenty in terms of a video blog, social media feed, live-stream etc. to check out. There is quite some stuff happening in terms of hardware-developments in HighPerformanceComputing (HPC), also with respect to applications in the Life Sciences. Probably the main headline is that there is a new Nr.1: The new japanese supercomputer K (@ Riken) now packs more of a punch than the next five systems on the top500-list combined, displacing the Tianhe-1A, who took pole position last October.
The K computer system at Riken's laboratory in Kobe, west Japan. Photograph: Riken/EPA
However, some things have not changed:
* Linux is still the dominant OS
* Big Blue (IBM) still dominates the market, followed by HP and Cray
* The trend towards GPU acceleration continues (although the “K” doesn’t use them)
* massively parallel processing (MPP) systems continue to increase their share
for more in-depth-info, see http://www.hpcwire.com/
#1 by cistronic on 2011/06/26 - 10:51
The development of parallel, GPU based, databases fits in the HPC category, but is also interesting with respect to the issues of previous posts on noSQL and Literature mining – so rightfully http://www.parstream.com/ was named one of the developments to watch by nVidia.