Sign up for our Technology Newsletter 
U.S. Wants To Help Supercomputer Makers
Comments Off on U.S. Wants To Help Supercomputer Makers
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
U.S. Takes Back Supercomputing Crown
The U.S., once again, is home to the world’s most powerful supercomputer after being kicked off the list by China two years ago and then again by Japan last year.
The top computer, an IBM system at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, is capable of 16.32 sustained petaflops, according to the Top 500 list, a global, twice a year ranking, released Monday.
This system, named Sequoia, has more than 1.57 million compute cores and relies on architecture and parallelism, and not Moore’s Law, to achieve its speeds.
“We’re at the point where the processors themselves aren’t really getting any faster,” said Michael Papka, Argonne National Laboratory deputy associate director for computing, environment and life sciences.
The Argonne lab installed a similar IBM system, which ranks third on the new Top 500 list. “Moore’s Law is generally slowing down and we’re doing it (getting faster speeds) by parallelism,” Papka said.
U.S. high performance computing technology dominates the world market. IBM systems claimed five of the top ten spots in the list, and 213 systems out the 500.
Hewlett-Packard is number two, with 141 systems on the list. Nearly 75% of the systems on this list run Intel processors, and 13% use AMD chips.