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U.S. Wants To Help Supercomputer Makers
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Five of the top 12 high performance computing systems in the world are owned by U.S. national labs. But they are beyond reach, financially and technically, for many within the computing industry, even larger ones.
That’s according to U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) officials, who run the national labs. A new program aims to connect manufacturers with supercomputers and the expertise to use them.
This program provides $3 million, initially, for 10 industry projects, the DOE has announced. Whether the program extends into future fiscal years may well depend on Congress.
The projects are all designed to improve efficiency, product development and energy use.
For instance, Procter & Gamble will get help to reduce the paper pulp in products by 20%, “which could result in significant cost and energy savings” in this energy- intensive industry, according to the project description.
Another firm, ZoomEssence, which produces “powder ingredients that capture all the key sensory components of a liquid,” will work to optimize the design of a new drying method using HPC simulations, according to the award description.
Some other projects in the initial implementation of what is being called HPC4Mfg (HPC for Manufacturing) includes an effort to help Global Foundriesoptimize transistor design.
In another, the Ohio Supercomputer Center and the Edison Welding Institute will develop a welding simulation tool.
The national labs not only have the hardware; “more importantly the labs have deep expertise in using HPC to help solve complex problems,” said Donna Crawford, the associate director of computation at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, in a conference call. They have the applications as well, she said.
HPC can be used to design and prototype products virtually that otherwise might require physical prototypes. These systems can run simulations and visualizations to discover, for instance, new energy-efficient manufacturing methods.
Source-http://www.thegurureview.net/computing-category/u-s-wants-to-help-supercomputer-makers.html
Japan Takes 1st Place On Supercomputer List
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A Japanese computer has earned the number one spot on the Top 500 supercomputer list, ending China’s short reign of just six months. At 8.16 petaflops (quadrillion floating-point calculations per second), the K computer is more powerful than the next five systems combined.
The K computer’s performance was measured using 68,544 SPARC64 VIIIfx CPUs each with eight cores, for a total of 548,352 cores, almost twice as many as any other system on the Top500 list. The computer is still being put together, and when it enters service in November 2012 will have more than 80,000 SPARC64 VIIIfx CPUs according to its manufacturer, Fujitsu.
Japan’s ascension to the top means that the Chinese Tianhe-1A supercomputer, which took the number 1 position in November last year, is now in second spot with its 2.57 petaflops. But China continues to grow the number of systems it has on the list, up from 42 to 62 systems. The change at the top also means that Jaguar, built for the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), is bumped down to third place.