A group of Stanford researchers recently ran a complex fluid dynamics workload across more than a million cores on the Sequoia supercomputer. It’s an impressive feat and might foretell a future where parallel programming becomes commonplace even on our smartphones. Read more »
Early attempts at cloud-based video gaming were a flop. Roy Bahat, of OUYA, says it’s still a worthy pursuit, but should be based on a new generation of games built specifically to take advantage of the cloud’s supercomputing strengths. Read more »
When you mix a researcher, a massive online encyclopedia and a supercomputer, the result is a collection of insights and visualizations into what Wikipedia looks like mapped across time and space. It looks a lot like how our history books might look merged and graphed. Read more »
An effort to build a telescope that can see back 13 billion years to the creation of the universe is prompting a five year €32 million ($42.7 million) effort to create a low-power supercomputer and networks to handle the data the new telescope will generate. Read more »
Los Alamos National Laboratory is trying to build to an exascale computer, which could process one billion billion calculations per second. The man in charge of executing that vision, however, sees a big obstacle toward building it. That problem, discussed at Structure:Data, is resilience. Read more »
Looks like Oracle has some competition when it comes to selling big iron for big data. On Wednesday, Cray, the Seattle-based company best known for building some of the world’s fastest supercomputers, announced it’s getting into the big data game. Read more »
The discovery of a new type of chemical bond by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign shows exactly how supercomputers and big data are combining to become the microscope of the future. Read more »
In the past decade supercomputers were dressed-up versions of Intel’s x86 machines, but increasingly supercomputers are borrowing innovations (and silicon in the form of ARM-based chips or DSPs) from the mobile and big data realms to add speed without guzzling too much power. Read more »
President Obama’s budget is asking for $126 million for the Department of Energy to reach a supercomputing milestone — exascale performance. Research paid for by these millions could create more power-efficient silicon and networking technologies that will benefit information technology in general. Plus we’d get faster supercomputers. Read more »
Next week, Jeopardy! champions will square off against IBM’s Watson supercomputer in a contest that could alter way humans view their place in the world. Developing the complex algorithms necessary to carry out such determinations wasn’t easy, and IBM didn’t operate alone. Read more »
