AMD today demonstrated its ongoing support for high performance computing by providing massive compute capability, performance and flexibility for the world's number one ranked supercomputer. This ranking, the sixth number-one spot for AMD-based supercomputers in the last five years, highlights AMD's commitment to enabling indispensable computing technology by offering competitive performance at low cost.

The top supercomputer, a Cray XK7 nicknamed "Titan" and containing more than 18,000 AMD Opteron processors, was cited in the latest list of the Top500 Supercomputer Sites and is installed at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Oak Ridge National Labs (ORNL).

Global supercomputer leader Cray Inc. (NASDAQ: CRAY) today announced the launch of the Company's next generation high-end supercomputing systems -- the Cray XC30 supercomputer. Previously code-named "Cascade," the Cray XC30 supercomputer is the Company's most-advanced high performance computing system ever built. The Cray XC30 combines the new Aries interconnect, Intel Xeon processors, Cray's powerful and fully-integrated software environment, and innovative power and cooling technologies to create a production supercomputer that is designed to scale high performance computing (HPC) workloads of more than 100 petaflops.

Global supercomputer leader Cray Inc. (NASDAQ: CRAY) today announced the Cray XE6 and Cray XE6m supercomputers are now available with the new AMD Opteron 6300 Series processor, using its next-generation "Piledriver" core. With a performance-per-watt that is up to 40 percent higher than prior generations, these new AMD (NYSE: AMD) Opteron processors are designed to enhance power efficiency with more application performance within the same power budget.

"Cray supercomputers are specifically designed to allow our customers to easily upgrade their systems so they can take advantage of the latest, most innovative processing technologies while also reducing their total-cost-of-ownership over the life of the system," said Peg Williams, Cray's senior vice president of high performance computing systems. "We believe the new AMD Opteron 6300 Series processors will significantly improve the performance and efficiency for Cray customers upgrading their current Cray XE6 and Cray XE6m systems. We look forward to delivering this capability to our customers."

Global supercomputer leader Cray Inc. today announced the launch of the Company's new series of production hybrid supercomputers -- the Cray XK7 system -- in conjunction with today's debut of the Cray XK7 supercomputer nicknamed "Titan" located at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). Titan is capable of more than 20 petaflops of high performance computing (HPC) power and is the world's most powerful supercomputer for open science.

The Titan system is a 200-cabinet Cray XK7 supercomputer with 18,688 compute nodes each consisting of a 16-Core AMD Opteron 6200 Series processor and an NVIDIA Tesla K20 GPU Accelerator. Titan was upgraded from a Cray XT5 supercomputer nicknamed "Jaguar."

Signaling its commitment to energy-efficient high- performance computing, Intel Corporation today announced that it will work with HP to help design and provide the U.S. Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) with a supercomputing system that will drive research across a number of energy-related initiatives, including renewable energy and energy-efficient technologies. The new High Performance Computer (HPC) data center promises to become one of the world's most efficient installations.

The system is scheduled to deliver full compute capacity in the summer of 2013 and will feature approximately 3,200 Intel Xeon processors including current-generation Intel Xeon processor E5-2670, future 22nm Ivy Bridge based processors and approximately 600 new Intel Xeon Phi co-processors. The total peak performance of the system is expected to exceed 1 Petaflop (equivalent to a thousand trillion floating point operations per second) and it will be the largest supercomputer dedicated solely to renewable energy and energy efficiency research. Leading energy-efficient capabilities of Intel Xeon processors and Intel Xeon Phi co-processors combined with the new HP warm water cooling solution and innovative data center design will result in this facility likely being the world's most efficient data center with a power usage effectiveness (PUE) rating of 1.06 or better.

A group of hackers that claimed responsibility for hacking NVIDIA forums (forums.nvidia.com), which goes by the name "Team Apollo," posted the first piece of its exploits on Pastebin (find it here). The user data dump contains details of every fifth user of the forums. From what we can tell looking at the pasted data (which is now very much in the public domain), the passwords found in the user tables are not salted. NVIDIA was less than honest about that part.

The passwords are stored as raw MD5 hashes, which can be fairly-easily decrypted (when compared to hashes with salt values). To make matters worse, certain MD5 decryption websites have large databases of pre-decrypted MD5 phrases, potentially making decryption these hashes easy. Or you could just use a CUDA-accelerated MD5 decryption tool, which munches through unsalted MD5 hash values at the speed of a small supercomputer. If you have an NVIDIA Forums account, and your passwords on other websites (forums, email accounts, banks) even remotely resemble that of your NVIDIA forums account, it is strongly recommended that you change your passwords on each of those other websites.

AMD today announced that it was selected for an award of $12.6 million for two research projects associated with the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Extreme-Scale Computing Research and Development Program, known as "FastForward." The DOE award provides up to $9.6 million to AMD for processor-related research and up to $3 million for memory-related researchi. AMD's award-winning AMD Opteron processor has powered many of the world's largest supercomputers over the past decade and the company invented the world's first and only Accelerated Processing Unit (APU).

FastForward is a jointly funded collaboration between DOE Office of Science, and National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) to initiate partnerships with multiple companies to accelerate the research and development of critical technologies needed for extreme scale computing, on the path toward exascale computing. Exascale computing is essentially a grand challenge to provide the next level of computational power required to help ensure the prosperity and security of the United States. The DOE's strategic plan seeks to address the nation's most pressing scientific challenges by advancing simulation-based scientific discovery made possible by the world's highest performing exascale supercomputers.

AVADirect, a leading provider of custom computer systems, offers the first personal supercomputer workstation with Dual 8-Core Xeon CPUs, 192GB Memory and Four Graphics Cards. Because of the close partnership with EVGA, AVADirect now offers ground breaking capabilities based on new EVGA SR-X motherboard with wide variety of component combinations to meet the needs of the most demanding professionals or enthusiasts.

Within the past month, manufacturers began to release new motherboards based on the E5 2600 XEON processors. End-users have seen them offered in rackmount and tower configurations from Supermicro, Asus, and Intel. Now, AVADirect is proud to announce that EVGA has released an enthusiast series motherboard that AVADirect offers in a custom configuration. Supported by the EVGA Classified SR-X dual-socket 2011 motherboard, the configuration boasts a whole new level of performance and expandability, including 7x PCI e expansion slots (with PCI-E 16x 3.0 support), 6x USB 3.0 ports, and 8x internal SATA ports; 4 being SATA III 6Gb/s. More importantly, the system will support up to 192GB of certified, Quad-Channel ECC RAM.

NVIDIA today announced that its GPUs will be used by scientists at Germany's Forschungszentrum Jülich, which hosts the Jülich Supercomputing Centre, one of Europe's largest and most powerful supercomputing resources, to accelerate advanced neurological research targeted at unlocking secrets of the human brain.

NVIDIA also announced a new, multiyear collaboration with the center to drive the next generation of GPU-accelerated scientific research in neuroscience and a range of other fields, including astronomy, astrophysics, material science, particle physics, and protein folding. Together the two organizations are launching the "NVIDIA Application Lab," a jointly run and staffed resource for the European scientific community located at the center's facilities in Jülich.

NVIDIA today announced that the SAGA system, India's most powerful supercomputer and the holder of the 85 position on the Top500 list released yesterday, is leveraging NVIDIA GPUs to dramatically improve the design and analysis of the delivery vehicles critical to the nation's space program.

Developed by the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO), one of the six largest space research agencies in the world, the SAGA supercomputer is used to tackle complex aeronautical problems. Harnessing the power of 640 NVIDIA Tesla GPUs and providing up to 394 teraflops of peak performance, SAGA enables ISRO to accelerate and improve the design and analysis of new and existing satellite launch vehicles by enabling more complex and accurate design simulations.

The Intel Xeon processor E5-2600 product family reached a new supercomputing milestone as the fastest adopted new processing technology to power 44 systems, including 3 Petascale-class supercomputers on the 39th edition of the Top500 list announced today.

The "SuperMUC" supercomputer at LRZ in Germany, which ranked fourth on the list, delivers 2.9 PetaFLOPs of performance, making it the most powerful in Europe, as well as the largest installation based on the new Intel Xeon processors E5 family.

AMD today announced its continued leadership in high performance computing (HPC) with 24 of the top 100 supercomputers in the 39th TOP500 list, announced today, while making significant strides in maturing its HPC ecosystem through the addition of several key components that enable end users to continue to benefit from best-in-class price/performance for today's demanding applications.

AMD has continued to work closely with its technology partners to significantly mature its HPC ecosystem, resulting in several new developments including LS-DYNA simulation software optimized for the AMD Opteron 6200 Series processors from Livermore Software Technology Corporation (LSTC), the addition of programming options for AMD graphics processor unit (GPU) technology from CAPS, and the announcement by Mellanox Technologies of its Connect-IB products that will deliver FDR 56 Gb/s InfiniBand speeds to AMD's solution portfolios.

The Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ), in collaboration with IBM, today announced the world's first commercially available hot-water cooled supercomputer, a powerful, high-performance system designed to help researchers and industrial institutions across Europe investigate and solve some of the world's most daunting scientific challenges.

The new LRZ "SuperMUC" system was built with IBM System x iDataPlex Direct Water Cooled dx360 M4 servers with more than 150,000 cores to provide a peak performance of up to three petaflops, which is equivalent to the work of more than 110,000 personal computers. Put another way, three billion people using a pocket calculator would have to perform one million operations per second each to reach equivalent SuperMUC performance. Also, a revolutionary new form of hot-water cooling technology invented by IBM allows the system to be built 10 times more compact and substantially improve its peak performance while consuming 40 percent less energy than a comparable air-cooled machine.

Today AMD announced 11 servers from its customers, including two based on the new HP ProLiant Gen8 platform, will be integrating previously unannounced versions of the award-winning high-performance AMD Opteron 6200 Series processor and the low-power AMD Opteron 4200 Series processor. These servers are based on five new AMD Opteron processors that offer increased performance without an increase in power consumption, providing customers more choice in using the world's best price/performance x86 server processor.

Last month, HP launched two HP ProLiant Gen8 servers using the new AMD Opteron processors and plans to refresh the ProLiant DL585 G7 and the BL685c G7 later this year. Moreover, Dell is also expected to refresh its AMD offering with the latest AMD Opteron processors in the PowerEdge C6145, C6105, R415, R515, R715, R815 and the M915.

Super Micro Computer, Inc., a global leader in high-performance, high-efficiency server technology and green computing, now offers NVIDIA Maximus technology in its latest high-end, enterprise-class X9 SuperWorkstation (7047GR-TRF), allowing users to simultaneously design, render and simulate on the same workstation, avoiding traditional, time-consuming and costly processing downtime. Supermicro's NVIDIA Maximus certified solution integrates an NVIDIA Quadro series graphics processing unit (GPU) dedicated for design and visualization tasks with four NVIDIA Tesla C2075 co-processors dedicated to handling compute-intensive tasks like simulation-an industry-first configuration of NVIDIA Maximus technology.

NVIDIA today unveiled a new family of Tesla GPUs based on the revolutionary NVIDIA Kepler GPU computing architecture, which makes GPU-accelerated computing easier and more accessible for a broader range of high performance computing (HPC) scientific and technical applications.

The new NVIDIA Tesla K10 and K20 GPUs are computing accelerators built to handle the most complex HPC problems in the world. Designed with an intense focus on high performance and extreme power efficiency, Kepler is three times as efficient as its predecessor, the NVIDIA Fermi architecture, which itself established a new standard for parallel computing when introduced two years ago.

NVIDIA unveiled GeForce Experience, a new cloud-based technology that assesses PC hardware and tweaks settings of games to deliver the most optimal gaming experience. GeForce Experience goes a step beyond today's System Requirements Labs applets, and assesses hardware at a much more minute scale, sends information back to a data center that houses supercomputers, which methodically build the perfect game settings for each GPU, CPU, motherboard, and drivers configuration.

Speaking at GeForce LAN Shanghai, NVIDIA president and CEO Jen-Hsun Huang said that PC games require a greater knowledge about the capabilities of the system than required by consoles. To get the most out of PC games, gamers need to dig into its settings and tweak them to work best with the hardware available, and that could be a disadvantage compared to consoles.

The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced that Linux Creator and Linux Foundation Fellow Linus Torvalds is a Millennium Technology Prize laureate. This prize, determined by the Technology Academy of Finland, is one of the world's largest such prizes with candidates sought from across the world and from all fields of technology.

The Millennium Technology Prize is awarded every two years for innovations improving the quality of human life and encouraging sustainable development. Universities, research institutions, scientific and engineering academies, and high-tech companies from around the globe make nominations. The International Selection Committee, nominated by TAF Board, reviews the nominations and determines the year's laureates. The Board makes the final decision on who will be the recipients of the prize, which is together established by Finnish industry and state.

NVIDIA today announced that its NVIDIA Tesla GPUs will be included in HP ProLiant Generation 8 (Gen8) servers, delivering new levels of computational performance for scientific applications at world-class power efficiency.

HP ProLiant SL250 Gen8 CPU-GPU hybrid servers combine the world's most powerful parallel processors, NVIDIA Tesla M2090 GPUs, with new Intel Xeon E5-2600 series CPUs based on the Sandy Bridge microarchitecture.

SGI, the trusted leader in technical computing, announced today that with over 60 miles of InfiniBand cabling in place at the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) Division at NASA Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, Calif., a scientist was able to utilize 25,000 SGI ICE Intel Xeon processor cores on Pleiades to run a space weather simulation.

One particular area of study is magnetic reconnection, a physical process in highly conducting plasmas such as those that occur in the Earth's magnetosphere, in which the magnetic topology is rearranged and magnetic energy converted to kinetic or thermal energy. This field of research is critical, as these disturbances can disable wide scale power grids, affect satellite transmissions and disrupt airline communications.

Scientists at IBM Research (NYSE: IBM)/ (#ibmresearch) have achieved major advances in quantum computing device performance that will accelerate the realization of a practical, full-scale quantum computer. For specific applications, quantum computing which leverages the underlying quantum mechanical behavior of matter has the potential to deliver computational power that is unrivaled by any supercomputer today.

Using a variety of techniques in the IBM labs, scientists have established three new records for reducing the error in elementary computations and retaining the integrity of quantum mechanical properties in quantum bits (qubits) - the basic units that carry information within quantum computing. Furthermore, IBM has chosen to employ superconducting qubits which use established microfabrication techniques developed for silicon technology, providing the potential to one day scale up to and manufacture thousands or millions of qubits.

Troy, N.Y. - Electronics are getting smaller and smaller, flirting with new devices at the atomic scale. However, many scientists predict that the shrinking of our technology is reaching an end. Without an alternative to silicon-based technologies, the miniaturization of our electronics will stop. One promising alternative is graphene - the thinnest material known to man. Pure graphene is not a semiconductor, but it can be altered to display exceptional electrical behavior. Finding the best graphene-based nanomaterials could usher in a new era of nanoelectronics, optics, and spintronics (an emerging technology that uses the spin of electrons to store and process information in exceptionally small electronics).

Welcome to the TechPowerUp 2011 PC technology Christmas special. We hope that you will enjoy reading it while tucking into your turkey, Christmas presents and a little too much wine... In this article, we go through the technology of 2011 that has had the most significance, the most impact and was generally the most talked about. It's not necessarily the best tech of 2011 which is the most significant though, since lemons can be just as significant as the ground-breakers in how they fail to deliver - and the backlash that goes with it.

January: Intel Sandy Bridge i5 & i7

Released on January 9th, the new Intel Core i5 & i7 processors were based on Intel's second generation Core architecture built on a 32 nm production process (HEXUS review). They included an IGP (Integrated Graphics Processor) physically on the same piece of silicon along with HyperThreading. These new dual and quad core processors soundly beat all previous generations of Intel processors in terms of processing performance, heat, power use, features and left AMD in the dust. Therefore, Intel badly needed some competition from AMD and unless you have been living under a rock, you will know how that turned out in October with the launch of Bulldozer. Sandy Bridge was a sound win and is generally considered to be the only architecture worth considering at this point. The i5-2500K is currently at the sweet spot of price/performance. It comes at a stock speed of 3.3 GHz, but typically overclocks to an amazing 4.5 - 5 GHz with a decent air cooler and without too much difficulty in getting there. Models in the budget i3 range were released at various times later. See this Wikipedia article for details.

NVIDIA today announced that, for the second year in a row, the world's most energy efficient petaflop-class supercomputer is powered by NVIDIA Tesla GPUs.

The Tsubame 2.0 system at the Tokyo Institute of Technology's Global Scientific Information Center (GSIC) ranks as the greenest petaflop-class supercomputer on the recently released Green500 list. Published twice annually, the Green500 list, rates the 500 most energy efficient supercomputers based on performance achieved relative to power consumed.

Tsubame 2.0 is a heterogeneous supercomputer (combining both CPUs and GPUs) used to accelerate a range of scientific and industrial research in Japan. With sustained performance of 1.19 petaflops per second while consuming 1.2 megawatts, Tsubame 2.0 delivers 958 megaflops of processing power per watt of energy. It is 3.4-times more energy efficient than the next-closest x86 CPU-only petaflop system, the Cielo Cray supercomputer at Los Alamos National Laboratory, which delivers 278 megaflops per watt.

In an effort to make it easier for programmers to take advantage of parallel computing, NVIDIA, Cray Inc., the Portland Group (PGI), and CAPS enterprise announced today a new parallel-programming standard, known as OpenACC.

Initially developed by PGI, Cray, and NVIDIA, with support from CAPS, OpenACC is a new open parallel programming standard designed to enable the millions of scientific and technical programmers to easily take advantage of the transformative power of heterogeneous CPU/GPU computing systems.

OpenACC allows parallel programmers to provide simple hints, known as "directives," to the compiler, identifying which areas of code to accelerate, without requiring programmers to modify or adapt the underlying code itself. By exposing parallelism to the compiler, directives allow the compiler to do the detailed work of mapping the computation onto the accelerator.