About Interesting Topics
This is an area for detail & discussion on emerging technologies, interesting articles, and proposed research computing/data services that could be of interest to the research computing community at the University of Manchester.
Technologies
Apps
Benchmarking
Good Enough Will Have To Do - from Linux Magazine.
Biologically Inspired Design
Books
Business Benefits of HPC
Optimizing Mechanical Computer-Aided Engineering with Sun Systems
Making the Business Case for High Performance Computing: A Benefit-Cost Analysis Methodology
Microsoft High Performance Computing in Computer Aided Engineering
Leading Global Organizations to Discuss High Performance Computing as a Competitive Asset
NetApp Accelerates Time to Market with New Engineering and High-Performance Computing
Leveraging on demand HPC capabilities for innovation driven growth and competitive advantage
The Changing Business Case for Supercomputing: An Industrial Perspective
High-performance computing enters the reach of today's enterprise
Ferrari takes Microsoft's new High Performance Computing for a spin
Ferrari Using Windows for Supercomputers as High-Performance Computing Fuel
Cisco: High-Performance Computing Solution for Manufacturing and Computer-Aided Engineering
Application Software for High Performance Computers: A Soft Spot for U.S. Business Competitiveness
The Role of GRID Computing within Engineering Simulation and Design
Bob Graybill Starts National Clearinghouse Firm for HPC Services
High Performance Computing: Are we just getting the wrong answers faster?
Supercomputing Center Partners with Technology Council to Promote Regional Business Innovation
Grids - A Low Cost, High Speed Alternative to Traditional High-Performance Computing
High Performance Business Computing is growing up to supercomputing in its own kind
Case studies
A subsection on case studies external to the University of Manchester
Cell/PS3-Related Links
Cloud Computing
ISC Article on Cloud - Another summary article.
Low Latency Clouds - HPC in clouds? Things are getting a little closer (a long way to go though).
Low Performance Computing - Article about shift in research computing provision (and change of focus of OGF).
Cloud Computing Testbeds - Nice overview of currently available testbeds.
Cambridge rents out HPC for the Cloud - How Cambridge are planning to cover high MRF costs.
Clouding of the Grid - Insightful view on Clouds and their relationship to Grids and HPC. The two linked articles on using Amazon EC2 to build an HPC cluster are also worth a look ([1],[2]).
Sun Cloud - The Reg article on Sun's new open cloud approach.
Microsoft's Dan Reed describes the parallels between cloud and HPC.
Infoweek overview of the current state of commercial cloud offerings.
Berkeley's cloud overview article (12.2.09)
That’s cloud computing. But not as we know it, Jim The Register polls potential cloudies (cloud users) Dec2008
What clouds and grids can learn from each other - interesting article by Wolfgang Gentzsch.
Pair (1,2) of articles from On-Demand Enterprise (formerly Grid-Today) about the grid-cloud connection. Illustrating the similarities and differences.
Humourous take on cloud computing by Ted Dziuba in The Register.
Co-processing and new approaches
Also see University GPU Club
Intel Larrabee - Great HPC Wire article featuring Larrabee.
Pervasive GPGPU computing - also has details of DirectCompute, Microsoft's answer to OpenCL (why not support OpenCL?).
nVidia Fermi Announcement - The follow on from Tesla lands.
AMD's answer to nVidia's GPGPU push.
Article detailing Larrabee New Instructions, LRBi.
Intel's Ct - C for Throughput computing.
More Intel Larrabee infomation.
CUDA and Numerical Weather Prediction - using CUDA for WRF kernels
Some specifics of OpenCL - with the standard now ratified, this HPCWire article provides some specifics
nVidia CUDA Programing guide: PDF @ nVidia or local PDF copy of v1.1 (Dec2008)
Chapel - a new language from Cray for parallel code development.
Moore's Lawless - High level overview from the Reg on David Patterson's SC08 talk.
OpenCL - HPCWire overview of the forthcoming standard (Update article).
High-end coprocessors: An overview - Nice overview from TG Daily
Intel Larrabee - Like NVIDIA and its CUDA API this approach has massive potential for research computing. Another HPCWire article
Ct - Intel's answer to distributing workloads in multithreaded architectures?
Processor revolution - Interesting HPCWire article that partially related to the above.
Paper on GPUs for molecular modelling, by Matt Harvey et al.
Compilers and More: Optimizing GPU Kernels - Optimising computational kernels on GPGPUs, an article in HPCWire by Michael Wolfe of PGI.
Pritchard, S. (2008). Games need to be taken seriously. Financial Times.
GPGPU pages on the DISCO site at Daresbury labs. UoM campus users can get access to the evaluation machines at DL. Contact RCS for help and details.
Lucid HYDRA Multi-GPU Technology Launches - End of SLI and CrossFire? a hardware solution to get heterogeneous GPUs to work together.
CPU technologies
Intel's Nehalem - report from Daresbury's DisCo team.
Data-centric Computing
Dataflow - techniques and available hardware
The Fourth Paradigm - free book from Microsoft Research. With contributions from UoM researchers.
DASH - a data-centric approach to supercomputing.
Using data mining for strategic advantage in higher education
SGI Webinar featuring how The Genome Analysis Centre (TGAC) use their UV System in Bioinformatics
Data Storage
Disk-bound Computations
Fusion io case study - Fusion io can help solve the problems of disk i/o latency, fusion io claims latency is sub 50 microseconds.
Exascale
See Petascale
Funding
Greener Computing
HPC in other UK academic Instritutions
Other HPC centres - Page detailing other leading university's HPC facilities
Interactive Supercomputing
Jobs
Recent HPC jobs - details of Research Computing positions
Petascale and Exascale
Performance/Profiling
“The Landscape of Parallel Computing Research: A View from Berkeley” (a.k.a. the “Thirteen Dwarfs” paper).
Security Interest
Virtual Machines
Visualization
InfoVis.net a collaborative project promoting Information Visualization that produces a occasional newsletter with in depth articles.
The Rainbow/Spectral Colour Palette and why you shouldn't use it!
The return of SGI to visualization.
Web 2.0
Web 2.0 Doesnt Matter - Dr Lee Margetts reflects on the technology that makes the RCS Community Wiki possible.