I'm still in the marking time stage - at a new job with a much broader focus than the newest technology. As one might imagine, I'm already heading toward a way to use the cutting edge to help put out the messages for which I get paid.

meanwhile, I track the mutli-core, multi-silicon progress as best I can. The news is everywhere. We really want to have more compute at less power. The race is on between general purpose CPUs whose power is less than 10W per core and specialized silicon, whose wattage is creeping up.

Have Intel & AMD figured out that the market really doesn't need to go faster, just more throughput? Or are the specialized silicon vendors just overreaching in their bid to loo and feel more like general purpose CPUs?

marking time

Note to self...
I started this blog because I have been working on the cutting edge of faster computing. Thanks to my position, resources and connections I regularly attended events with many people smarter and more expert in the field of computing than I am. Others in this field could and have benefited from my exposure. Clearly, this hasn't been happening lately.

Accelerating Security...

Courtesy of Amir at Reconfigurable Computing...

Co-CPUS, and FPGAs in particular, are excellent crypto crackers. When I started thinking about using a co-processor as a security solution, I never thought of these applications. Crypto cracking is one of the few examples I know where the co_CPU is overwhlemingly faster than the x86 core. It helps that crypto cracking is really *just* an algorithm, while most of us use more complex applications.

It's worth reading Amir's summary and especially the video from Shmoo.


PS: I was off the conference circuit for a while. For those of you who know my personal life, it was an excellent extended summer vacation...

HPCSW: The Presentations

I've been on hiatus from conferences for several months. So, my first order of business is to clean up old posts and comments.

1. HPCSW Presentations are on line. There is a lot of discussion about how hard it is to program more cores. I still can't get the statement that several people made there, which was "I really want flat coherent memory." In another post, I need to highlight some of those requests and responses.

http://www.hpcsw.org/presentations/index.shtml

2. RSSI is this week... I'm not there, but another of our intrepid correspondents will be.
http://rssi.ncsa.uiuc.edu/

Spring Announcement Season

I don't have much editorial to add here... The move to commercialize Accelerated Computing is on. To sell to a commercial, not research, customer requires solutions - defined as software and hardware working together on an application. Below are the links to three recently announced solutions...

1. Mitronics with not-so-new news, pushing the Bio stack they showcased just about one year ago at ISC. The demoed it (again) at BioIT World April 28th . They are also promoting the new personal SDK. I don't have experience with it, but would love to hear a story or two.... For the Bio demo news go here. For more on the SDK go to their home page, http://www.mitrionics.com/.
2. Acceleware does EDA for the Koreans. In an example of working really hard at it, Acceleware has partnered with SPEAG, a specialized simulator for EM (Electromagnetic readiation), to sell an GPGU version of their SW as a turnkey solution. Korean handset radiation simulation is not the only use. Boston Scientific also uses the solution. They claim 25x speed up.
   
3. Angstrom, a Boston area system builder, has announced formal support GPGPU with both a hardware platform and an accelerated GPGPU library. The library is a plug in for Atlas, a well known linear math library. So this isn't really a solution, but it's a step in the right direction.
   

Speaking of BioIT World... Joe Landman was there. His post from the floor is here. It doesn't cover Accelerated Computing, but he deserves the plug.

GPGPU Cluster for France

French Supercomputer to be Intel plus Nvidia's Tesla...

I didn't see this covered too broadly, but it is a notable event

French hybrid supercomputer to exceed 300 TFLOPS by 2009

French supercomputing institute Grand Equipement National de Calcul Intensif (GENCI) along with former nuclear research institute CEA (Commissariat à l'Energie Atomique) has asked Bull to make the first hybrid PC cluster in Europe. The new machine will be housed south of Paris in Bruyères le Châtel, a data centre also used by military institute CEA-DAM. The Bull Novascale series machine will be composed of 1068 cluster nodes, each consisting of eight Intel processor cores and an additional 48 GPU application accelerators with 512 cores each. The supercomputer will also have 25 TB of RAM and 1 PB of hard drive storage.

Tweaking the Parts

Back on March 26, Jay provided his commentary on HPCC & Steven Wheat's keynote in these pages.

Now John E. West has added to the discussion instigated by Wheat. "If high performance computing wants to continue to be a distinguishable market space, it needs its own research and development activities." So, when is that funding coming?

In the article for HPC Wire there are numerous suggestions for improving the process. There are several suggestions for ways to fix the procurement process and a call by Dan Reed, now of MSFT, for a coordinated national HPC R&D effort.[1]

Fundamentally, the bottom line is the economics aren't working right now.

Ed Turkel's statement about tweaks on commodity systems is naive about the real economic costs of delivering commodity components. By definition commodity systems are mature markets with brutal margins. When you focus on holding the margin even the most modest tweak in the components is expensive. To support tweaks, you need modular designs to isolate the HPC embellishments from your mainstream delivery, or you need an industry that thinks these will be table stakes in the near future.

We're going to see how expensive and sustainable tweaks in silicon are in the GPGPU market. AMD & NVIDIA are delivering GPUs with functionality that no video display system will ever use. It's a real live experiment in action.
I just hope someone is watching... Oh yeah, we are :)


[1] Dear President, I want America to spend more money on really big computers... See Michael Feldman's HPC Wire Editorial on that one I won't touch that discussion on these pages. At least not yet.