Techno Musings

This year’s Supercomputing 2010 (SC10) event was held in New Orleans. The initial estimate on the attendance was approximately 13,500. Based on the other various conferences that I’ve attended in the past, mostly storage-focused, this has a lot of end users and “real customers” in attendance.

The Best “Video Game” Ever
Michael Hay and I have posted about Cartesian scaling in a few blogs over the past couple of months. This is yet another Cartesian scaling related blog, but with a little more game. As you know Cartesian scaling is the combination of vertical and horizontal scaling. In the old days, computers [...]

The Storage Playoff on the Industry’s Proving Grounds
The pressure is on for team Performance Disks which lists on its roster 10Krpm and 15Krpm magnetic disk drives in various capacities with FC/SAS interfaces. The challengers are the  dynamic duo of FC/SAS interfaced Solid State Disks and high capacity – good enough performance - SATA interfaced drives. [...]

So I have been beating the drum of special purpose computing or hybrid computing through several posts and talking about it as something which will eventually happen.  Well with CSIRO’s recent deployment of a hybrid compute platform that uses NVidia’s Tesla processor cores, Intel Xeons, and a Hitachi NAS Platform system serving 80TB of Hitachi [...]

Last week at SC09 IBM announced that a Bluegene/P system with 147,456 CPUs and 144 terabytes of main memory was able to simulate the cerebral cortex of a cat.  Personally I find this kind of work extremely exciting and really on the bleeding edge of computer science.  One of the examples of how the simulation was [...]