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.

CoolIT Systems Inc, the leading supplier of liquid cooling solutions for high-performance desktops, enterprise servers, and high-performance clusters has teamed up with Montreal's Ciara Technologies Inc. in the Demand Liquid Alliance to use Rack Direct Contact Liquid Cooling to enable unparalleled performance at the CPU and GPU level. this joint solution will be showcased in CoolIT System's booth at SC12 in Salt Lake City (Booth #4629).

Experienced with CoolIT's technology, Ciara is once again looking to harness liquid cooling to push the boundaries of computing productivity. "We are overclocking our CPUs in a 1u chassis allowing for densities never seen before. Our customers are demanding unprecedented compute productivity and CoolIT's Rack DCLC allows us to deliver", said Darcy Letemplier, VP of Engineering, Ciara Technologies. Rack DCLC is allowing Ciara to build and test server architecture in a 1u form factor that was previously only available in a 3u chassis.

AMAX, a leader in High-Performance Computing (HPC) solutions, today announced the immediate availability of its latest, most advanced CPU-based HPC solutions built upon the world's fastest 16-core x86 processor, the AMD Opteron 6300 series "Piledriver" CPUs.

The new server solutions target HPC, Big Data, Cloud, and Datacenter users with large scale-out applications seeking the highest performance and scalability to accelerate, transform and advance scientific discovery and business analytics. Multi-threaded workloads are becoming increasingly popular, but also ever more complex and demanding, and users are challenging AMAX to deliver solutions that provide a rich mix of performance, scalability and efficiency -- precisely what AMAX's ServMax server solutions with AMD Opteron 6300 series processors are engineered for.

As big data, high-performance computing (HPC) and cloud-computing applications push the demand for real-time access of data into the zettabytes, Intel Corporation announced today its next-generation data center solid-state drive (SSD), the Intel Solid-State Drive DC S3700 Series, designed to remove storage bottlenecks and maximize multi-core CPU performance. The Intel SSD DC S3700 Series delivers fast, consistent performance and low latencies along with strong data protection and high endurance to help IT personnel support today's most demanding data center applications.

"Today's data explosion creates unique storage challenges for data center professionals," said Rob Crooke, Intel vice president and general manager for the Intel Non-Volatile Memory (NVM) Solutions Group. "High latencies and slow storage I/O can cripple data centers' ability to deliver exciting big data or cloud-computing applications with fast, low latency data access. Intel's next-generation Intel SSD DC S3700 Series breaks through SSD limitations for the data center on all fronts - fast, consistent performance, strong data protection and high endurance -- so IT professionals can deliver on their most demanding technology initiatives."

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."

Specifications of NVIDIA's Tesla K20 GPU compute processor, which was launched way back in May, are finally disclosed. We've known since then that the K20 is based on NVIDIA's large GK110 GPU, a chip never used to power a GeForce graphics card, yet. Apparently, NVIDIA is leaving some room on the silicon that allows it to harvest it better. According to a specifications sheet compiled by Heise.de, Tesla K20 will feature 13 SMX units, compared to the 15 available on the GK110 silicon.

With 13 streaming multiprocessor (SMX) units, the K20 will be configured with 2,496 CUDA cores (as opposed to 2,880 physically present on the chip). The core will be clocked at 705 MHz, yielding single-precision floating point performance of 3.52 TFLOP/s, and double-precision floating point performance of 1.17 TFLOP/s. The card packs 5 GB of GDDR5 memory, with memory bandwidth of 200 GB/s. Dynamic parallelism, Hyper-Q, GPUDirect with RDMA are part of the new feature-set. The TDP of the GPU is rated at 225W, and understandably, it uses a combination of 6-pin and 8-pin PCI-Express power connectors. Built in the 28 nm process, the GK110 packs a whopping 7.1 billion transistors.

Netstor is pleased to announce the release of TurboBox Extreme PCIe Gen3 GPU enclosure series of desktop version NA255A and rackmount version NA265A. These newly-launched GPU enclosures apply the latest PCIe 3.0 technology and PCIe 3.0 x16 (16-lane) host interface with 8Gbps throughput per lane, offering blazing-fast data transfer rates up to 128Gbps between host and enclosure, dedicated for GPU-accelerated applications. The GPU enclosures are designed to have 4 PCIe x16 slots and 2 PCIe x4 slots (optional) on backplane, supporting up to 4 double-width Gen3 GPU cards (backward compatible with Gen2 GPUs) to work with host, server or workstation for areas such as HPC, telecom, and data centers.

AMAX, a leading innovator of High Performance Computing (HPC), dynamic Enterprise IT, and custom Appliance Manufacturing solutions, has updated its storage optimized StorMax NAS product line with Windows Storage Server 2012, the most advanced Windows-based storage OS. The AMAX StorMax NAS series with Windows Storage Server 2012 introduces a host of new features designed to provide high-performance and reliable storage for virtualization applications, and flexible, cost-effective options for shared storage.

"As part of a network-attached storage appliance, Windows Storage Server 2012 helps to reduce the storage costs associated with building modern datacenters and private clouds by enhancing traditional file serving capabilities and leveraging robust, industry standard hardware," said James Huang, Product Marketing Manager, AMAX. "AMAX's enterprise-class NAS solutions based on Windows Storage Server 2012 are perfect for those looking to deploy highly reliable, high-performance shared storage for database needs, or for those looking to deploy a converged private cloud infrastructure with the ability to run either physical or virtual workloads."

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.

Today the Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA) Foundation announced six new members. The HSA Foundation is pleased to welcome Apical, Arteris Inc., MulticoreWare Inc., Sonics, Symbio and Vivante Corporation to the membership roster. Each company adds expertise to the HSA ecosystem by assisting with research, development, production, manufacture, use, and the sale of HSA IP and heterogeneous computing software and solutions.

These new members have joined at different levels including: supporter, contributor and associate. Working closely with the founder members of AMD, ARM, Imagination Technologies, MediaTek Inc., Samsung Electronics and Texas Instruments (TI), the new members will contribute to the growing adoption of HSA in heterogeneous computing.

During HotChips symposium, George Chrysos, the leading architect of Intel Xeon Phi co-processor shared the new architecture details of upcoming Intel's HPC powerhouse. Designed for highly-parallel applications, Intel Xeon Phi co-processor based on Intel Mani Integrated Core architecture will deliver the combination of industry leading performance per watt with the ability to re-use the existing code and applications without necessity of re-writing them.

Equipped with more than 50 cores and built using Intel's latest 22nm 3D Tri-gate transistor technology, new co-processors will be in production this year with first supercomputers from top500 list already taking advantage of this technology. In his blog here, George shares his aspirations and goals during designing the co-processor and summarizes all new disclosed information. The HotChips presentation is also available below.

With the U.S. Government increasingly using high- performance computing (HPC) to address current and future national challenges, Intel Corporation today announced it has been awarded two subcontracts totaling $19 million with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). As part of these two awards, Intel Federal LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary, will be a major participant in the Lawrence Livermore National Security, LLC (LLNS) managed Extreme-Scale Computing Research and Development "FastForward" program aimed at driving advancements in exascale computing.

The DOE has been a leading developer of supercomputing technology for a broad range of critical applications in the space of national security, economy, energy resources and consumption. The "FastForward" program will harness the talents of the national laboratories, academia and U.S. industry to develop the next generation of HPC technologies.

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.

ISC'12 - NVIDIA Tesla K10 GPUs offer performance breakthroughs on popular high performance computing (HPC) applications -- ranging from seismic processing to life sciences to video processing -- according to new benchmarks NVIDIA released today.

Based on the new NVIDIA Kepler computing architecture, the Tesla K10 GPU delivers the industry's highest single precision performance (4.58 teraflops) and highest memory bandwidth (320 GB/sec) in a single accelerator. This is 12 times higher single precision flops and 6.4 times higher memory bandwidth than the latest-generation Intel Sandy Bridge CPUs.

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.

NVIDIA today announced that NVIDIA Tesla GPUs are now available in Fujitsu's PRIMERGY CX400 S1 servers, offering high-performance GPU-accelerated computing to Fujitsu's large installed base of customers in Japan and Europe.

Fujitsu designed the PRIMERGY CX400 S1 server for high performance in a compact form factor by using half-wide, two-socket server nodes -- doubling the number of cores per unit height. The system houses either four 1U hot-plug PRIMERGY CX250 S1 server nodes with two CPUs per node, or two 2U hot-plug CX270 S1 server nodes with two CPUs and one NVIDIA Tesla GPU per node.

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.

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.

Dell today announced that customers such as Morphlabs and Vibrant Media are using Dell microserver technologies based on Intel Xeon processors to power business-critical web 2.0, cloud, and content delivery networks (CDN), as well as high-performance computing (HPC) applications. Driven by the emergence of a growing hardware and application ecosystem, x86-based microservers are rapidly evolving from a niche solution to one with widespread awareness and value.

"We're constantly inspired by the unique ways our customers are leveraging Dell microserver platforms to drive specialized web 2.0, HPC and cloud computing applications," said Forrest Norrod, vice president and general manager, Dell Server Solutions. "As the microserver market and ecosystem have matured, customers like Vibrant Media have validated that microservers are a cost-effective, scalable platform in web 2.0 environments."

Intel Corporation today announced it has entered into a definitive agreement with Cray Inc. to acquire certain assets related to its high-performance computing (HPC) interconnect program. With the agreement, Intel gains access to Cray's world-class interconnect personnel and intellectual property.

The Cray interconnect team is responsible for the award-winning Gemini interconnect as well as the upcoming Aries interconnect, designed to work in Cray's next-generation supercomputer, codenamed "Cascade," which will integrate Intel Xeon processors. The transaction is expected to close before the end of the current quarter, subject to customary closing conditions being met.

TYAN has launched 8 cutting-edge platforms based on the Intel Xeon processor E5-2600 product family. These platforms are designed to deliver the benefits of Intel's latest processor architecture. We offer high peak performance along with outstanding power efficiency and are designed for today's HPC/GPU and general server applications. These products help channel customers build solutions for applications ranging from the largest data centers all the way down to the smallest server room implementations in a quick and efficient way.

Worldwide factory revenue for the high performance computing (HPC) technical server market increased by 8.4% in full-year 2011 to reach a record $10.3 billion, up from $9.5 billion in 2010, according to the newly released International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide High-Performance Technical Server QView. The 2011 results exceeded IDC's forecast of 7.2% year-over-year revenue growth.

Unit shipments in 2011 declined 6.9% year over year as average selling prices grew, indicating a continued shift to large system sales. IBM and HP ended the year in a statistical tie for leadership with 32.6% and 32.1% of overall factory revenue market share, respectively. (Note: IDC declares a statistical tie in the worldwide server market when there is less than one percent difference in the factory revenues of two or more vendors.)

The HPC Advisory Council, a leading organization for high-performance computing (HPC) research, outreach and education, today announced a new NVIDIA GPU-based HPC development center. The new center is part of the HPC Advisory Council's High Performance Center, and will provide remote access to the HPC community free of charge for developing, testing and benchmarking the next generation of HPC applications.

The Center will provide developers with the ability to test their HPC applications on NVIDIA Tesla M2090 GPUs, the world's most powerful parallel processors. Designed from the ground up for HPC, computational science and supercomputing, NVIDIA's Tesla M2090 GPUs provide 512 CUDA cores with 665 gigaflops of peak performance to accelerate even the most demanding computationally intensive workloads.

The design of the E5 Xeon processor is directly related to the vastly growing data center industry as we know it. Oriented toward new cloud-connected features, the Xeon E5 processors will help drive the server and workstation industry like never seen before. E5 processors are offered in three variants: Quad-core, Six-core, and Eight-core chips will help end-users decide what should be utilized for the task in mind.

Intel offers a wide variety of E5 Xeon processors, the E5-2603 quad-core being the low-end of the spectrum, and the E5-2690 eight-core providing high-ranked performance over previous Xeon processors. It is also very important to note power consumption will increase with the capabilities of each chip, but this also creates numerous possibilities for a multitude of configurations. To introduce a more unique experience for each end-user, AVADirect provides over 1000 different combinations of components for configurations that feature the E5 Xeon processors.

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.