If it isn't one thing...

On the day after Sheldon Cooper declares "Ubunutu: You are my favorite linux-based operating system" (followed immediately by the phrase 'crap' in my house), three new pieces of news on hybrid computing models cross my desk.

The first is a story in Scientific American on the work Wu Feng and his colleagues are doing at Virginia Tech. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=opencl-smooths-supercomputing Wu has long been on the leading edge of what defines power efficient computing and the placement of data next to compute.

The second was the announcement from IBM & NVIDIA that you can buy GPUs in a IBM server chassis. When IBM does it, it must be real? Or has the canceling of the next generation of Cell leave Dave Turek grasping at straws?
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13924_3-20005218-64.html

I'm going to close with another reference to Wu, the prolific Hokie. His group published a paper last month identifying missing genes in the microbial DNA sequences to date. The compute model was an "ephemeral supercomputer" of 12k cores across seven sites within the US. This may not look like hybrid computing, but it is about moving data independently of compute in order to manage the latencies between the compute nodes.

None of the compute Wu's team is doing, or the Tesla examples from NVidia tackle the really hard, communication dependent problems such as multiphase physics or simulation with dynamic meshing, but they do demonstrate that there are plenty of problems to be tackled with intelligent programming and massive parallel processing.

I still believe in the hybrid computing models and explicit data placement. Though my friend Mark may feel that he can show that density and efficiency of general purpose compute engines will subsume the specialty silicon market, we are certainly not yet there.

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.