Stories about: SGI

A research director at Los Alamos National Laboratories said the addition of a peta-scale supercomputer is as big a leap forward as when scientists got their hands on their first computer ever.

Engineers and technicians at IBM are assembling the final pieces of what they hope will soon become the world's most powerful supercomputer - doubling the speed of the today's fastest machine.

SGI and Intel are teaming up to build a supercomputer for NASA that they expect will pass the petaflop barrier next year and hit 10 petaflops by 2012. A petaflop is 1,000 trillion calculations per second.

Silicon Graphics has rebounded enough from its financial woes to expand through acquisition, announcing last week that it has acquired the assets of high-performance cluster maker Linux Networx.

Linux and High Performance Computing go hand in hand. So to see what Australian users have been doing with Linux and HPC, this year's linux.conf.au is holding a Birds of a Feather session on the topic. Before the session kicks off we take time to speak to the BoF coordinator Anthony David. During the working day David works for SGI as the onsite engineer for the Australian Partnership for Advanced Computing (APAC). Here, we ask him about the state of HPC in Australia and where it is heading. The following responses are his own personal beliefs and not that of his employer.

Blender is a popular open-source software package used for modeling and rendering 3-D images. Computerworld recently spoke via e-mail with Tom Musgrove, one of the 35 active core developers on the Blender project. Besides explaining how the tool is used by 3-D artists, Musgrove also addressed complaints about the Blender user interface and discussed directions for future development.

While the kernel 2.6.23 development cycle has not yet run its course, things are getting close enough to the end that it makes sense to start looking at the overall statistics for this release. As of this writing (shortly after 2.6.23-rc6 came out), just over 6,200 non-merge changesets had been added to the mainline kernel repository. These changesets came from 854 developers - a slightly smaller number than we saw for 2.6.22. Just over 350 of those developers contributed one single changeset.

As the number of Linux kernel contributors continues to grow, core developers are finding themselves mostly managing and checking, not coding, said Greg Kroah-Hartman, maintainer of USB and PCI support in Linux and co-author of Linux Device Drivers, in a talk at the Linux Symposium in Ottawa last week.

Once the domain of monolithic, multimillion-dollar supercomputers from Cray and IBM, HPC (high-performance computing) is now firmly within reach of today's enterprise, thanks to the affordable computing power of clustered standards-based Linux and Microsoft servers running commodity Intel Xeon and AMD Opteron processors. Many early movers are in fact already capitalizing on in-house HPC, assembling and managing small-scale clusters on their own.

Part of the fun of working with truly large machines is that one gets to discover new scalability surprises before anybody else. So the SGI folks often have more fun than many of the rest of us. Their latest discovery has to do with the number of kernel threads which, on a 4096-processor system, leads to some interesting kernel behaviour.

LinuxWorld OpenSolutions Summit speaker Jeremy Allison explains some tricky details of Linux/Windows interoperability, what the Novell/Microsoft deal really does for interoperability, and a vision for a future easy-to-administer network filesystem.