“We’re highly confident that we’re going to get more money, and we do believe it’s going to enhance employment here, and in Silicon Valley,” said Lewis Braxton III, deputy director of Ames Research Center in Mountain View. He said it is too early to know how many additional local jobs would be created by NASA’s proposed new emphasis on unmanned space missions, climate change research, an extension of the International Space Station and plans to partner with private companies to launch astronauts into orbit.

The potential boon may extend to Ames’s HPC center as well

…Braxton said he could imagine more work for Ames’ supercomputer facility and additional partnerships, such as the center’s cooperation with Google, in which NASA has tapped Google’s expertise to help make its spacecraft more autonomous, and building on partnerships, such as one with Cisco Systems, to integrate the world’s climate change databases.

Related posts:

• NASA Ames Hits 70 Year Mark
• NASA Ames Director Named Best of 2009
• NASA and SGI kick it up a notch: 1 PFLOPS in the Pleiades

Sun Studio offers a unique set of optimization features dedicated to processor instruction set that help me squeeze out the best perf out of C, C++ or Fortran code. Yet these options are so numerous that it can be a bit daunting to look into them.

If you are in a rush, you can use the  -fast option. What it really does is triggering a set of other options for maximum runtime performance.

What I like about the post is that it talks about options, and gives those just learning enough information to make their own decisions. To whit

Yet -fast has its own drawbacks. First, the options triggered might change from one compiler release to another. Also, the values for -xarch -xcache -xchip specify the processor for which to optimize, and -fast decides of these values based on the processor on which the compiler runs, which can deffer from the processor on which the code will eventually be executed. This is why I usually stay away from -fast.

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• PGI and NVIDIA team up on new CUDA compiler
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• NVIDIA’s CUDA Fortran compiler in beta

During Bement’s tenure as NSF director, he oversaw the foundation’s annual budget of more than $7 billion that supports the research and education of roughly 200,000 scientists, engineers, educators and students across the United States. As part of the White House’s American Competitiveness Initiative in 2006, he guided initiatives that supported the training of the U.S. work force to operate in a high-tech global economy.

House Research and Science Education Subcommittee Chairman Daniel Lipinski (D-IL) had this to say

“As Chairman of the Research and Science Education Subcommittee, which is responsible for the National Science Foundation, it was my privilege to work closely with Dr. Bement to improve and elevate the NSF. Dr. Bement never forgot either his engineering roots or his time in the Midwest. As an engineer, he could not see a problem without wanting to solve it, and he did a great deal to enhance America’s competitiveness and respond to our STEM education challenges. And as a Midwesterner, he did so with grace and soft-spoken but determined leadership. Our loss will be Purdue’s gain, and I wish Dr. Bement well in his return to academia.”

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• House Science Committee budget hearings
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• HPC R&D Act leaves committee

The TPC-Energy specification outlines methodologies for measuring energy consumption in data processing servers, disk systems, and system components associated with typical business information technology environments.

…The TPC-Energy specification augments existing TPC Benchmark Standards, including TPC-C, TPC-E and TPC-H, by outlining requirements to measure and report energy metrics in conjunction with each benchmark. TPC-Energy enables manufacturers to provide power metrics in the form “Watts per performance,” where the performance units are particular to each TPC benchmark. As vendors publish TPC-Energy results, customers will be able to identify systems, via the TPC Web site, that meet their price, performance and energy requirements.

TPC-C is for online transaction processing, TPC-E is for databases, and TPC-H is for data warehouses, so you quickly get the idea these benchmarks don’t directly translate to HPC. Still, understanding the approach may be useful to those looking for ways to extend our benchmarks to include an energy dimension. The TPC-Energy report is available from the council’s Web site.

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• TPC video overview of the new energy efficiency spec
• HP and Dell get first servers listed with new Energy Star spec
• New Energy Star spec for servers

• FY11 President’s budget looks positive for science and tech
• “Anyone walking into a datacenter should break a sweat”
• SPEC MPI2007 benchmark scales to 2048 cores
• NASA goes further with its computational portal project
• BOXX demos hefty SolidWorks Workstations

And if you aren’t subscribed to our email updates already, your friends are probably pointing and laughing at you behind your back. Show them you aren’t hopelessly behind on every day’s technology news by signing up for the full text daily email, or the daily digest with the fancy graphics.

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It’s time to boot up the cerebral right side and balance those cortical hemispheres!

For global fame, peer recognition and a beautiful coffee mug featuring YOUR winning Haiku, simply submit your best haiku and win!

We’ll keep the rules super simple:

• No more than three lines.
• Make at least one seasonal reference.
• Keep it data center relevant.

Reference at wikipedia in case you need to brush up on what a haiku is. Here’s an example to get you started

Be strong, blade server
Stay in your rack and burn hot
You are beautiful

You can tweet, email, or post your entry, which must be submitted by Feb 15. Instructions in the post. Winner is announced in the last week of February and gets his or her haiku printed on a mug. Awesome!

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• HPC Driving Data Center Architecture Change
• HP Intros 20-Foot Container Data Center
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• Power Efficiency Estimator
  The new Power Efficiency Estimator is designed to help data center operators compare different scenarios of power topologies and technologies inside of their facility. It takes factors such as workload, availability, and space constraints into consideration and generates a report that is designed to improve decision-making in a facility. The Power Efficiency Estimator will be available by the end of the first quarter of 2010.
• PUE Calculator
  The new PUE Calculator allows data center operators to easily input their facility’s specific data at regular intervals to determine their PUE. Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE), a metric created by The Green Grid, determines the amount of energy used by the facility and the IT gear inside of it. The PUE Calculator will be available by the end of the first quarter of 2010.

TGG also announced a new whitepaper extolling the virtues of virtualization, and a new online course

“Data Center 101: Constrained Capacity,” to help data center managers and operators get familiar with industry lexicon and solutions to everyday data center challenges.

More on what TGG has been up to in the announcement.

Related posts:

• Green Grid releases datacenter efficiency white papers
• Green Grid concludes forum, announces tools
• The Green Grid launches new datacenter metrics

TCTO is re-establishing basic research programs in a broad range of rapidly emerging computing-enabled technology areas such as social media, synthetic biology, high-performance computing, and networking, as well as employing a diverse range of innovation strategies including broad community programs, competitions/challenges, and crowd sourcing.

…The talk is inspiring and informative. Watch the streaming video here.

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• Patterson says erasing Tether’s DARPA legacy vital to Nation’s future IT leadership
• Sun Wins DARPA Contract
• You can put a supercomputer in a pizza box? DARPA wants to talk to you.

Today, February 4, Microsoft and the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) announced a collaborative project where Microsoft will offer individual researchers and research groups (selected through NSF’s merit review process) free access to advanced client-plus-cloud computing. Our focus is on empowering researchers via intuitive and familiar client tools whose capabilities extend seamlessly in power and scope via the cloud.

In this partnership Microsoft will expend resources on porting PC applications to work in a cloud environment — with the idea presumably being to jumpstart the shift to cloud computing for scientific computing

By extending the capabilities of powerful, easy-to-use PC applications via Microsoft cloud services, our objective is to broaden researcher capabilities, foster collaborative research communities, and accelerate scientific discovery by shifting the focus from infrastructure to empowerment. This is a potentially profound shift in how we innovate in the 21st century.

In the past when Microsoft has stepped up to offer free tools to the scientific community some have complained that this is market dominance in disguise — get the kids hooked on the free sample, and they’ll buy the good stuff. What I see in this case, however, is a glimpse of the benefits I was hoping for when Microsoft got in to HPC in the first place. In order to truly democratize high performance computing (Reed refers to this in his post more eloquently as “enfranchising the majority”) we have to transform the tools of computing so that they are relevant on the platforms that everyone has access to. The problem is that there is a very limited commercial model for doing this today. Because of its scale Microsoft can afford to make an investment in this market that very few companies can, before the bottom line evidence exists. This is a Good Thing.

As Fred Brooks once remarked, “We must build tools so powerful that full professors want to use them, and so simple that they can.” Simplicity really, really matters. It is for this reason that Excel spreadsheets, high-level scripting languages and domain-specific client toolkits are now the lingua franca of multidisciplinary innovation, the harbingers of invisibility.

…Sadly, our technical computing experiences have been dominated and shaped by a focus on technology and infrastructure, rather than empowerment and simplicity. We talk routinely of data and software repositories, toolkits and packages; of cyberinfrastructure and technology roadmaps. In our technological fascination, it is all too easy to lose sight of the true objective. Infrastructure exists to enable. If it is excessively complex, cumbersome or difficult to use, its value is limited. The mathematician Richard Hamming’s admonition remains apt: “The purpose of computing is insight, not numbers.”

Dan’s post is passionate and smart; I recommend you read it. Yes there are technical challenges, and as my colleaque points out cloud computing isn’t great for everything. But nothing is great for everything. If you have to start somewhere, “enfranchising the majority” is a great place to plant your flag.

Related posts:

• NSF Teams with Microsoft on Scientific Cloud
• Microsoft announces free tools for manipulating scientific data
• CERN builds private cloud for researchers

We’re proud of the fact that Ranger has been so widely requested and used for diverse science projects,” said Jay Boisseau, principal investigator of the Ranger project and director of TACC. “It supports hundreds of projects and more than a thousand users — and you don’t attract that many projects and researchers unless you’re running a great, high-impact system. Ranger is in constant demand, often far in excess of what we can provide.”

Ranger consists of 15,744 quad-core AMD Opteron processors, housed within a Sun Constellation cluster.  Beginning Feb 4, 2008, Ranger has enabled 2,863 users across 981 unique research projects to run a total of 1,089,075 jobs and 754,873,713.8 hours of processing time to date.

Ranger enabled the open science and engineering communities to address challenging problems in areas such as astrophysics, climate and weather, and earth mantle convection at unprecedented scales,” Muñoz said. “Ranger truly was a vanguard in NSF’s “Path to Petascale” program and is a testament to what can be done when ‘thinking out of the box.’”

Ranger was a first in many aspects of building and integrating large-scale, commodity HPC.  As a result, the lessons learned in operation has made its way back into many projects.  Infiniband technologies, Lustre, OpenMPI, MVAPICH, and Sun Grid Engine have all reaped the benefit of Ranger’s scale.

These software packages have been significantly improved because of the Ranger project, and are now downloaded by people building clusters in other places. Thus, the Ranger project has had a huge impact on other clusters and the science done on those clusters around the world,” Boisseau said.

Congrats to Ranger and the folks at TACC for advancing the deployment of such super-scale machines.  For more info, read the original article here.

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• TACC’s Ranger Gets an Upgrade
• TACC Ranger video
• Take the Ranger tour