December 13, 2004
Concurrent with the launch of the world's first Intel and SGI Parallel Application Center (PAC), Objectivity announced Objectivity has concluded its "First Project" using the outstanding PAC resources. The project is the first step of a retest of a previous 32-bit UNIX benchmark, done this time on the 64-bit standards-based high-performance SGI Altix platform. This project demonstrates how the breakthrough technologies of Objectivity, Linux, Intel and SGI together meet the rapidly growing demand for managing very large and complex data.
Objectivity was quickly accepted to participate in using the Intel-SGI Parallel Application Center because the architecture of Objectivity's database, Objectivity/DB, is ideally suited to the SGI Altix architecture. Objectivity/DB can take advantage of the unmatched processor scalability of Altix to support the addition of more database clients; Intel Itanium 2 processors are the leading database performance engines; and the superior system I/O of Altix enables ultra-fast data flow and communications, and the addition of more Objectivity databases in a federation.
The previous UNIX benchmark, performed with SGI on a 32-processor SGI Origin server running the IRIX operating system, explored the performance boundaries of commercially available database, file system, and hardware technologies. The tested system demonstrated the throughput of a linearly scalable combination of Objectivity/DB, SGI NUMAflex supercomputer architecture and SGI InfiniteStorage Shared Filesystem CXFS, simultaneously ingesting, processing and querying data objects and the relationships between them at a rate of over 32 Terabytes per day.
Un-tuned performance measurements from this First Project show excellent throughput on-track to beat the earlier benchmark results. With tuning and optimal storage configuration, the next step projects are expected to achieve ingest rates exceeding the previous UNIX benchmark for scalability and performance in the 64-bit High Performance Computing and Very Large Database environment.
"Intel-SGI Parallel Application Center has provided us with an excellent environment where we can build upon our previous scalability benchmarks," according to Jay Jarrell, president and CEO of Objectivity. "These benchmarks and the efforts of our customers continue to establish Objectivity as the world's largest database."
The Intel and SGI Parallel Application Center provides a leading-edge environment for organizations, developers and ISVs to optimize applications for the Intel Itanium 2 processor-based SGI Altix platform, reducing software development time and cost. The Parallel Application Center, located in Swindon, UK, delivers a fully managed platform and all the tools required for organizations to port, optimize, validate and evaluate application scalability and performance on the 32-way Intel Itanium 2 processor-based SGI Altix 3000 system.
The ever-growing complexity of scientific and engineering problems continues to pose new computational challenges. Thus, we present a novel federation model that enables end-users with the ability to aggregate heterogeneous resource scale problems. The feasibility of this federation model has been proven, in the context of the UberCloud HPC Experiment, by gathering the most comprehensive information to date on the effects of pillars on microfluid channel flow.
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Large-scale, worldwide scientific initiatives rely on some cloud-based system to both coordinate efforts and manage computational efforts at peak times that cannot be contained within the combined in-house HPC resources. Last week at Google I/O, Brookhaven National Lab’s Sergey Panitkin discussed the role of the Google Compute Engine in providing computational support to ATLAS, a detector of high-energy particles at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
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Frank Ding, engineering analysis & technical computing manager at Simpson Strong-Tie, discussed the advantages of utilizing the cloud for occasional scientific computing, identified the obstacles to doing so, and proposed workarounds to some of those obstacles.
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May 23, 2013 |
The study of climate change is one of those scientific problems where it is almost essential to model the entire Earth to attain accurate results and make worthwhile predictions. In an attempt to make climate science more accessible to smaller research facilities, NASA introduced what they call ‘Climate in a Box,’ a system they note acts as a desktop supercomputer.
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May 16, 2013 |
When it comes to cloud, long distances mean unacceptably high latencies. Researchers from the University of Bonn in Germany examined those latency issues of doing CFD modeling in the cloud by utilizing a common CFD and its utilization in HPC instance types including both CPU and GPU cores of Amazon EC2.
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05/10/2013 | Cleversafe, Cray, DDN, NetApp, & Panasas | From Wall Street to Hollywood, drug discovery to homeland security, companies and organizations of all sizes and stripes are coming face to face with the challenges – and opportunities – afforded by Big Data. Before anyone can utilize these extraordinary data repositories, however, they must first harness and manage their data stores, and do so utilizing technologies that underscore affordability, security, and scalability.
04/02/2012 | AMD | Developers today are just beginning to explore the potential of heterogeneous computing, but the potential for this new paradigm is huge. This brief article reviews how the technology might impact a range of application development areas, including client experiences and cloud-based data management. As platforms like OpenCL continue to evolve, the benefits of heterogeneous computing will become even more accessible. Use this quick article to jump-start your own thinking on heterogeneous computing.