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SuperComputer 07

“The more things change, the more they will never be the same.”

SuperComputer 07 is not your typical trade show and SCinet is not your typical network. SC07, held November 10-16, at the Reno Convention Center, provides the ultimate environment for network researchers. The conference includes technical and education programs, workshops, panels, exhibits, demonstrations and hands-on learning.

SCinet serves as the technical platform for show exhibitors to demonstrate the most advanced supercomputing and grid computing applications and experiments. Designed and built entirely by volunteers from universities, government and industry, SCinet will connect multiple 10 Gbps optical circuits to the show floor, and networks around the world. Xnet (eXtreme net) serves as a window in the future of networking, with a venue to showcase the “bleeding-edge” technologies, protocols, and experimental networking applications.

The SCinet team will also enable wireless connectivity throughout the convention center with equipment provided by Trapeze Networks. High speed Internet services will be provided for all SC07 participants through collaboration with Level 3 and CENIC.

The top500 website lists the big iron. Work on the world’s first sustained petascale system for open scientific and engineering research has now begun.

Some of the highlights of the show include;

NCSA (National Center for Supercomputing Applications) showcases Abe, a Dell cluster capable of peak performance of 89 teraflops, and other capabilities.
The SDSU Immersive Visualization Center has been working nearly around the clock collecting images of the San Diego fire from NASA, Google Maps and Predator video.
The first annual cluster challengepits six teams of student programmers with supercomputer vendors to assemble whatever combination of hardware and software can run off of a 30-amp circuit during a 48-hour, round-the-clock challenge.
The Sony PS3 can be used for scientific computing (pdf) with turnkey cluster solutions available from Terrasoft. A “high-end” 32 node cluster costs about $50,000.
NASA will show how its computing resources help with studies of planet formation, stars, and black holes as well as simulations of the Earth’s weather and climate. Among this year’s highlights, a NASA computer model simulated climate from 1880 through the present, and made projections of 21st century climate.
The Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI), in North Carolina, will provide a tour of the the RENCI Second Life Island, and the prototype virtual disaster command center it has developed there. The command center features real-time 3D maps, the ability to interact with avatars from a wide range of government agencies, and views of real-time data from sensors, satellites, the National Weather Service, and other sources.
The UK’s Virtual Observatory (VO) representing the world’s only unified and deployed VO operational service, gives astronomers a ‘one-stop’ access to all the worlds’ astronomy data from their desktop.

GridPP will be demonstrating the Real Time Monitor which shows the world’s largest scientific grid. Data from disciplines such as biomedicine to particle physics can fly to hundreds of sites worldwide and can be followed from your desktop in real time through the vast computing grid.
Super Micro Computer introduced the SuperBlade SBA-7141M-T enables 160 processor cores and 640GB of DDR2 memory in ten blades per 7U enclosure.
Cray introduced the XT5 family of supercomputers, a massively parallel processor (MPP) system includes a new compute blade that quadruples local memory capacity, doubles processor density and improves energy efficiency.
Dan Reed (Reed’s blog), will join Microsoft Research as its new director of scalable and multicore computing (Microsoft Press release). Reed served as director of NCSA at the University of Illinois and was also chief architect of the National Science Foundation’s TeraGrid, a national distributed computing system for researchers which will enable shared data, computing and instrumentation on an international basis. The NEESgrid (National Earthquake Engineering Simulation grid) project and the LEAD (Linked Environments for Atmospheric Discovery) project are his babies.

The recently introduced NEC SX-9 claims to be the fastest vector computer, with single core speeds of up to 102.4 GFLOPS and up to 1.6TFLOPS on a single node. If the performance of the SX-9 is sustained during “official” benchmarking, it will topple Blue Gene/L from the top of the 500 list. Three years ago the NEC-built Earth Simulator was ranked the world’s fastest supercomputer but that machine has since has dropped to 20th position in the current Top 500 list.

On June 26, 2007, IBM unveiled Blue Gene/P, the second generation of the Blue Gene supercomputer. Designed to run continuously at 1 PFLOPS (petaFLOPS), it can be configured to reach speeds in excess of 3 PFLOPS.

Apparently the research and education oriented Internet2 and the switched 10GigE fiber network from the National LambdaRail Project have called off their merger plans. Internet2 was reportedly ready to go, but LambdaRail wanted too many concessions.

Last year, at SC06, Calit2 and Scripp’s Center for Earth Observations and Applications, showcased how advanced applications - from geoscience to bioscience to genomics - can benefit from OptIPuter technologies. OptIPuter (video) is one of the largest Information Technology Research grants ever awarded by the National Science Foundation. Larry Smarr (video) invested a good part of his professional life to make it happen.

Want to be inspired? Check out Larry Smarr’s recent presentations (Calit2 YouTube videos), such as this one from Los Alamos. This is riveting stuff. Smarr is the real deal.

UCSD and the University of Washington received a grant to build the Ocean Observatories Initiative, part of the U.S. Integrated Ocean Observing System. Calit2, Scripps and the San Diego Supercomputer Center, will build much of the cyberinfrastructure. The initial 6-year award is for $29 million, and total funding may reach more than $42 million over the course of the planned 11-year project.

It’s the Grid Today. Internet2, National LambdaRail, TeraGrid, CineGrid, CANARIE, TransPAC2, DANTE (Delivery of Advanced Network Technology to Europe), ESnet and UltraScience Net are the backbones.

Quantum computing may be the game changer. Decepticons easily break the most secure files. Whoever gets there first, wins. D-Wave Systems will strut their quantum computing stuff at the Disruptive Technologies exhibit.

Will planet Earth be better off once it’s monitored 24/7 by UAVs, satellites, sensor networks and broadband everywhere? Who can say for sure. And who controls the data?