In Data Center Knowledge, Bill Kleyman gives his opinion about economics of HPC in the Cloud. He sees HPC in the Cloud is gaining popularity despite several limitations and cost concerns. This includes: Resource utilization and scale; critical nature of data; Density and consolidation; and Money (and budgets). Kleyman is concerned with an associated performance overhead in the Cloud for HPC. He sees that virtual instances in the cloud are co-located to improve the overall utilization of the cluster, and co-location leads to prohibitive performance variability. Read further...

Patrick Moorhead heavily felt IBM's OpenPOWER presence at the supercomputing conference SC15 in Austin. He reports about it in Forbes magazine. He notes that at SC15, IBM's major announcements were around the acceleration technologies that use the OpenPOWER partnerships which allow for even more performance out of POWER-based HPC platforms. These accelerators, unsurprisingly for Patrick Moorhead, come from some of the biggest and earliest partners in the OpenPOWER Foundation, namely NVIDIA, Xilinx, and Mellanox Technologies. Read further...

French Supercomputing organisation GENCI has published a nice visualisation of how climate models are built and then run on a supercomputer. Do not get scared away by the French title: the video itself is without words. Read further...

In ScienceNode Jan Zverina gives details about the Comet supercomputer in San Diego especially for use by Open Science Grid users. Comet is a Dell-integrated cluster using Intel's Xeon Processor E5-2600 v3 family, with two processors per node and 12 cores per processor running at 2.5 GHz. According to Jan Zverina, each compute node has 128 GB (gigabytes) of traditional DRAM and 320 GB of local flash memory. There are 27 racks of these compute nodes, totaling 1,944 nodes or 46,656 cores. In addition Comet has four large-memory nodes, each with four 16-core processors and 1.5 TB of memory, as well as 36 GPU nodes, each with four NVIDIA GPUs. Read further...