Microsoft announced today that it is releasing Windows HPC Server 2008 R2. This release of Windows HPC Server 2008 R2 is part of Microsoft’s Technical Computing Initiative. Windows HPC Server has the ability to scale out to thousands of nodes.
What is new in this release?
First, Microsoft is announcing the ability of Windows HPC Server to distribute Excel worksheets across a cluster. For companies with large worksheets, this could potentially reduce the amount of time that it takes to compute an Excel worksheet. It does not need to be said, but this is not your traditional HPC problem.
Second, Microsoft is announcing the ability of Windows HPC Server to integrate Windows 7 workstations into the compute cluster. I can easily imagine that some companies may have idle Windows 7 workstations at night. That idle time could be used to solve problems overnight. In fact, at my first job with McDonnell Douglas (now part of Boeing), one of my colleagues used PVM to run on SGI workstations overnight. This is something that Windows HPC Server can now do with Windows 7.
Third, Microsoft is announcing the ability of Windows HPC Server to integrate with Windows Azure. Windows Azure is Microsoft’s cloud platform offering. Now I am pretty skeptical of clouds for simple reason: “What about the security of my data?” If I am a corporation, I do not want my competitors to gain access to my data in the cloud. Microsoft assures me that they have 9 layers of security to prevent this. For it to really take off for HPC computing, the public cloud will have to meet the local security policies of the corporation or government.Update: Microsoft “will release an update to Windows HPC Server that allows customers to provision and manage HPC nodes in Windows Azure from within on-premises server clusters in the near future.”
Researchers at the San Diego State University’s Immersive Visualization Center have been working with the US Department of Defense and the US Navy to analyze data from various high-altitude imaging systems (planes, satellites, etc) to create interactive tools for visualization of the data. Ofter many years of arguing over classifications and availability, the technology is finally available for use and opening up whole new avenues of situational awareness for emergency responders, military commanders, and the public in general.
“If you stretched the time scale out for weeks at a time, months at a time, and then even years at a time,” Hatoum said, “you could really see the pattern — how they knew what routes we were taking — the fact that they would concentrate on different sectors based on what was going on that week.”
Here’s your collection of the posters presented at the NVidia GPU Technology conference 2010. I tried my best to take the pictures at resolution high enough that you can still read them. I have them at resolution even higher still, but filesize limits began to become a problem. If there’s any particular poster you want in higher resolution, post in the comments and I’ll share them individually!
Last week we posted an image from Chandra showing the Rosette Nebula. Today we have a 60 second podcast about that image.
Narrator (April Hobart, CXC): This spectacular image shows the Rosette star formation region, which is located about 5,000 light years from Earth. X-rays from the Chandra X-ray Observatory reveal hundreds of young stars clustered in the center of the image and additional fainter clusters on either side. Optical data from the Digitized Sky Survey and the Kitt Peak National Observatory show large areas of gas and dust, including giant pillars that remain behind after intense radiation from massive stars has eroded the more diffuse gas. The combination of the X-ray and optical data lead astronomers to believe that stars are still forming in the central cluster of the Rosette, known as NGC 2237. Astronomers are also using these data to piece together the history of this gorgeous region. The Rosette Nebula has long been a favorite target of amateur astronomers in the constellation the Unicorn. The wispy colorful structures in the optical data can sometimes be seen by small telescopes from the ground here on Earth.
I live in a nicely kept, integrated community. However, just across the city lines the racial and income mixture changes dramatically. You could use the time honored phrase that they are on the wrong side of the tracks, and it just so happens that there is a railroad separating the two distinct areas.
Bill Rankin takes a look at neighborhood boundaries in Chicago. Using United States Census data, he graphs dots that represent 25 people. Each dot is colored by ethnicity. In some areas, one can see the quick transition from one neighborhood to another. In others, the transition is more subtle.
My alternative is to use dot mapping to show three kinds of urban transitions. First, there are indeed areas where changes take place at very precise boundaries — such as between Lawndale and the Little Village, or Austin and Oak Park — and Chicago has more of these stark borders than most cities in the world. But transitions also take place through gradients and gaps as well, especially in the northwest and southeast. Using graphic conventions which allow these other possibilities to appear takes much more data, and requires more nuance in the way we talk about urban geography, but a cartography without boundaries can also make simplistic policy or urban design more difficult — in a good way.
It’s been while since we reporting on NextIO and their impressive PCI-Express virtualization and expansion technology. Looks like they’ve been busy tho, and have just announced their newest product: The vCORE Express. It’s a tiny 1U expansion system that is the first 1U to support the new Fermi-powered NVidia Tesla M2070 GPU’s.
vCORE Express is designed especially for parallel computing applications using NVIDIA Tesla 20-Series GPUs in cluster and datacenter deployments. With four massively parallel CUDA-enabled GPUs in a 1U system, vCORE Express brings economies of scale to GPU customers by delivering the same performance of a traditional CPU-based cluster – all at 10 percent of the cost and five percent of the power consumption.
That right, four Tesla M2070′s in a 1U space. The press release is a bit light on technical details, but you can read the Spec Sheets on the new website. From the announcement, it sounds like NVidia has basically shut down their own internal 1U Tesla product and handed it over to NextIO to manage, which is smart since NextIO already has the necessary skills and technology to pull it off. From their FAQ:
Q: Why is NextIO taking over the NVIDIA Telsa S-Series Product?
A: NextIO is focused on consolidating and virtualizing I/O. This includes traditional IO such as storage and network, but also GPU computing. The partnership of NVIDIA and NextIO is a perfect fit; allowing NVIDIA to continue focusing on their core competency of GPU development and NextIO to augment our product line of consolidated I/O to fit the needs of GPGPU customers.
I have a meeting with NextIO Wednesday and I’ll be sure to get you more information then!
Full press release after the break.
Update 9/22 7:14am – New header graphic, with corrected spelling. Read more…
I cannot read French that well, since I only had it in high school many decades ago, but this is what Google translate says about the film.
Twenty-first century, a young man discovers a photo lab forgotten by his ancestors. 1854, a young woman a little dreamy wishes to be shot the portrait, making a somewhat particular.
Produced in May 2008, 2K relief in the context of my dissertation study “Making a film in relief.” Duration: 6min OPTIMIZED FOR A SCREEN 13M BASIC
· “Best Short Film in relief” – 3D StereoMedia 2009 · “Best Stereoscopic Storytelling” – Invazion 3D Festival 2009 · Honorable Mention – StereoClub of Southern California 2009 · 2nd prize – 35th NSA Convention 2009
If you’ve wanted to try some heavy-ended GPU compute, but haven’t had the time or money to build your own superpowered cluster, PEER 1 is here with an interesting offering. They’re expanding their traditional datacenter and virtualized hosting servies to include GPU cloud support, and for a limited time they are offering free access for folks to try it out.
PEER 1 Hosting in the UK has launched a supercomputing cloud service based on the Nvidia Tesla S1070 and M2050 GPU computing systems. We’re talking serious computing power here; the S1070 is a 1U rack mount that contains 960 processor cores and four teraflops of computing power.
You may have seen some people tweeting about the sweet slogan NVidia came up with for this year’s GTC Coffee Mug. Here’s a picture so you can revel in it yourself.
La Niña occurs when the water is cool across the equatorial Pacific Ocean. Its opposite is El Niño, which is when water is warm across the equatorial region of the Pacific Ocean. This is important because La Niña and El Niño can affect tropical weather conditions, including the formation of tropical systems. In addition, La Niña can lead to less rainfall along the coasts of South and North America.
In the image to the right, we can see where cool water (shown in blue), stretches across the equatorial region of the Pacific Ocean. However, it is not uniform. There are pockets of warm water interspersed with this cooler water.
Acquired by the Ocean Surface Topography Mission/Jason-2 satellite, this map shows a 10-day average of sea-surface height centered on September 6, 2010. Because water expands with rising temperatures, satellites can use sea-surface height as a proxy for temperature. Areas where the water surface is higher (and therefore warmer) than average are shades of red-brown, and areas where the water surface is lower (cooler) than average are blue. Normal conditions appear in white.
Researchers at the San Diego State University’s Immersive Visualization Center have been working with the US Department of Defense and the US Navy to analyze data from various high-altitude imaging systems (planes, satellites, etc) to create interactive tools for visualization of the data. Ofter many years of arguing over classifications and availability, the technology is finally available for use and opening up whole new avenues of situational awareness for emergency responders, military commanders, and the public in general.
Here’s your collection of the posters presented at the NVidia GPU Technology conference 2010. I tried my best to take the pictures at resolution high enough that you can still read them. I have them at resolution even higher still, but filesize limits began to become a problem. If there’s any particular poster you want in higher resolution, post in the comments and I’ll share them individually!
If you’ve wanted to try some heavy-ended GPU compute, but haven’t had the time or money to build your own superpowered cluster, 
VizWorld.com 
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