Super Micro Computer, Inc., a global leader in high-performance, high-efficiency server technology and green computing unveils its new generation server platforms supporting the Intel Xeon processor E5-2600/1600 families at CeBIT 2012 in Hannover, Germany this week. This comprehensive product launch showcases the vast array of systems, serverboards and computing solutions Supermicro has deployed delivering higher performance with Intel's newest 8 core, 16 thread processors.

Debuting alongside this launch are innovative, free-air cooled systems designed to withstand 47 C operating temperature environments that make it easier to achieve a better PUE (e.g., 1.05). In addition, Supermicro has created a new platform architecture dubbed "FatTwin", an evolution of Supermicro's Twin architecture, offering enhanced system cooling, power savings, lower TCO and ultimate flexibility to support any application or upgrade path. Major advances in high-efficiency (95%) Digital Switching power supplies and integrated UPS battery backup module technologies provide increased efficiency and high-availability for mission critical applications. When combined with full rack integration services and new Data Center Management software that manages health, power and maintenance of servers in large deployments, Supermicro provides the most complete, scalable computing solutions with maximized performance and the highest levels of efficiency.

SGI, the trusted leader in technical computing, today announced that it is continuing its march toward exascale computing with the integration of the Intel Xeon processor E5-2600 family into all of its high performance compute (HPC) server and storage platforms and product families. Full support for the Intel Xeon processor E5-2600 family in the SGI Rackable, SGI ICE X HPC and SGI Modular InfiniteStorage (MIS) platforms is also now available.

SGI has been shipping Rackable servers to its public cloud customers since September 2011, and is shipping 26.73 teraflops per rack this month in its ICE X platform. The MIS server platform represents the densest storage server platform in the industry today, and is based solely on the Intel Xeon processor E5-2600 family. As the most flexible, high-performance computing platform in the industry, the SGI Rackable line takes advantage of the new Intel Xeon processor E5-2600 family to drive the most dramatic performance improvements in a typical product generation - in some cases up to 2X¹ and beyond the performance of the previous generation for high-performance computing (HPC) workloads.

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.

Intel Corporation today announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement with QLogic to acquire the product lines of and certain assets related to its InfiniBand business. A significant number of the employees associated with this business are expected to accept offers to join Intel.

This acquisition is designed to enhance Intel's networking portfolio and provide scalable high-performance computing (HPC) fabric technology as well as support the company's vision of innovating on fabric architectures to achieve ExaFLOP/s performance by 2018. An ExaFLOP/s is a quintillion computer operations per second, a hundred times more than today's fastest supercomputers.

Asetek Inc., the world's leading supplier of liquid cooling solutions for computers, announced today that it will offer a range of liquid cooling solutions to address a diverse set of cooling challenges facing modern HPC clusters data centers. These challenges range from reducing latency in high frequency trading applications, to increasing performance and density in servers, HPC clusters and data centers and decreasing the amount of energy used for cooling. All of these solutions utilize the company's proven CPU and GPU cooling technology which is commercially deployed today in hundreds of thousands of computers around the world.

TYAN, an industry-leading server platform manufacturer and a subsidiary of MiTAC International Corp., will announce its latest platforms that fully support the latest 32nm AMD Opteron 6200 and 4200 Series processors (NYSE: AMD) at SC11. TYAN will be presenting a live demo of its GN70-B8236-IL, a powerful and cost-effective GPU/HPC 2U server solution installed with two AMD Opteron 6200 Series processors and two AMD FirePro V8800P Graphic Cards at TYAN booth #4202 during the show.

TYAN will be showcasing its broad portfolio featuring AMD Opteron 6200 and 4200 Series processors which ensure that customers experience power efficiency, performance, scalability and management flexibility via features such as AMD Turbo CORE technology and HyperTransport 3.0 Technology. TYAN offers a total of 13 AMD G34 solutions that support the 16-Core AMD Opteron 6200 Series processors which deliver advanced performance for complex workloads and offer flexible scalability for expanding HPC requirements. TYAN also offers six AMD C32 platforms which are compatible with AMD Opteron 4200 Series processors and target applications ranging from general purpose computing to highly-threaded mission-critical applications such as SMB cloud computing, web servers as well as VM applications and virtual machines.

AMD today announced AMD Ready Solutions for servers, a collaborative effort with leading server platform manufacturers to provide a broad portfolio of ready-to-market AMD Opteron 6200 Series processor-based motherboards worldwide through authorized AMD distributors the day of the launch. Because the upcoming AMD Opteron processors will drop into the existing socket infrastructure, leading motherboard manufacturers such as ASUS, Supermicro and TYAN are able to bring fully validated and rigorously tested platforms to market even more quickly. These new platforms address market demands and customer requirements for a wide range of server workloads, including high-performance computing (HPC), cloud computing, virtualization, enterprise and database applications and Web/email servers.

"With AMD Ready Solutions for servers, our customers can find complete and verified server platforms in the channel the day of launch," said Paul Struhsaker, corporate vice president and general manager, Commercial Business at AMD. "The combination of the existing socket infrastructure already in place with AMD Ready Solutions will enable faster and easier upgrade paths to new levels of server performance and scalability."

At the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC), Kirk Skaugen, Intel Corporation vice president and general manager of the Data Center Group, outlined the company's vision to achieve ExaFLOP/s performance by the end of this decade. An ExaFLOP/s is quintillion computer operations per second, hundreds times more than today's fastest supercomputers.

Reaching exascale levels of performance in the future will not only require the combined efforts of industry and governments, but also approaches being pioneered by the Intel Many Integrated Core (Intel MIC) Architecture, according to Skaugen. Managing the explosive growth in the amount of data shared across the Internet, finding solutions to climate change, managing the growing costs of accessing resources such as oil and gas, and a multitude of other challenges require increased amounts of computing resources that only increasingly high-performing supercomputers can address.

NVIDIA today unveiled the Tesla M2090 GPU, the world's fastest parallel processor for high performance computing. In addition, the Tesla M2090 GPU achieved the fastest-ever performance in a key measure of scientific computation. Equipped with 512 CUDA parallel processing cores, the Tesla M2090 GPU delivers 665 gigaflops of peak double-precision performance, enabling application acceleration by up to 10x compared to using a CPU alone.

In the latest version of AMBER 11, one of the most widely used applications for simulating behaviors of biomolecules, four Tesla M2090 GPUs coupled with four CPUs delivered record performance of 69 nanoseconds of simulation per day. The fastest AMBER performance recorded on a CPU-only supercomputer is 46 ns/day.

AMD today announced a distinguished line-up of keynote speakers as well as technical session topics for the inaugural AMD Fusion Developer Summit (AFDS), which will be held June 13-16, 2011 at the Meydenbauer Center in Bellevue, Washington.

Industry keynote presentations will be delivered by esteemed industry experts from AMD, ARM and Microsoft. In his keynote "Heterogeneous Parallelism at Microsoft" Herb Sutter, Microsoft principal architect of Native Languages, will showcase upcoming innovations to bring access to increasingly heterogeneous compute resources directly into the world's most popular native languages.

TYAN, an industry-leading server platform manufacturer, and a subsidiary of MiTAC International Corp., will showcase its latest HPC and GPU Computing platforms at the AMD Server Summit. TYAN will also introduce the S8010 motherboard, which supports a single AMD Opteron 4100 series processor, and is ideal for cost-effective virtualization and cloud computing applications.

TYAN has an extensive line-up of motherboards and systems that support the AMD Opteron 6100 series processors that are specifically designed for High-Performance and General Purpose GPU Computing. The S8232 motherboard supports twelve DDR3 memory modules per processor and four PCI-E 2.0 x16 slots to provide the highest performance for memory-intensive HPC and GPU computing environments. TYAN's S8812 motherboard supports four AMD Opteron 6100 series processors to provide 48 processing cores for the most demanding applications.

TYAN, an industry-leading server platform manufacturer, and a subsidiary of MiTAC International Corp., today announced four server platforms that are fully compatible with AMD FireStream GPU compute accelerators.

The AMD FireStream GPU compute accelerators are general purpose graphics processing units that deliver exceptional floating point processing capabilities, and are used widely in HPC, cloud and enterprise-scale applications, helping reduce cycle times with up to 2.64 TFLOPs of single precision performance.

AMD today announced additional infrastructure and channel support for its AMD Opteron 6000 Series platform, the world's first 8- and 12-core x86 processor, addressing the needs of server customers worldwide with its unprecedented price/performance/watt. Since introducing the AMD Opteron 6000 Series platform earlier this year, the continued expansion of channel support and product lineups has helped drive a broad portfolio of highly customized solutions, available for small and medium businesses, enterprises and HPC environments.

Adding to the growing list of AMD Opteron 6100 Series-based channel products deployed in high-performance computing (HPC) environments, a major institution of higher education in Europe recently selected 2U, GPU-optimized Twin servers from AMD channel partner Supermicro for its flagship supercomputer. Furthermore, a nationally ranked research university in the United States recently deployed a 324-node/100 Teraflops system from AMD channel partner Appro to help solve critical research science using AMD Opteron 6100 Series processors.

NVIDIA's Tesla 20 series GPU compute processors have made their way into CRAY's latest supercomputer, the XE6. In these, Tesla units are installed into blades, which are networked using Cray's fast Gemini system-interconnect increasing the throughput, or efficiency of these GPUs in HPC applications. "The combination of new Gemini system interconnect - paired with NVIDIA's Tesla - will provide XE6 a powerful combination of scalability and production-quality, GPU-based high performance computing (HPC) in a single system," said Cray VP Barry Bolding. According to him, the supercomputing giant's move to adopt Tesla into its blade systems (which populate the high-end segment) is after seeing the technology mature on the company's mid-range and deskside systems. Bolding noted that the company will collaborate further with NVIDIA in advancing GPU compute processors for HPC applications.

Leadtek has decided to make its SpursEngine video processor more palatable to production houses and studios, by multiplying its performance by four. SpursEngine accelerates video encoding/decoding performance of full HD MPEG-2 or MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 videos many times over compared to the CPU, it uses the CELL Broadband Engine architecture, the same which is used in supercomputers, PlayStation 3, and HDTVs in various forms. The WinFast HPCC1111 from Leadtek uses four SpursEngine chips on a single board, that connects to the system over a PCIe bridge chip, through PCI-Express x4. With the new HPCC1111, one can encode full HD MPEG-2, or MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 in real time, or even faster than real time, if the rest of the hardware permits. SpursEngine has already made its way to single-chip cards and mobile workstations. Scheduled to release in Japan this September, the HPCC1111 is expected to cost JP ¥99,000 (US $1,175).

A team led by NVIDIA has been awarded a research grant of $25 million by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the U.S. Defense Department's research and development arm, to address what the agency calls a "crisis in computing." The four-year research contract, awarded under DARPA's Ubiquitous High Performance Computing (UHPC ) program, covers work to develop GPU technologies required to build the new class of exascale supercomputers which will be 1,000-times more powerful than today's fastest supercomputers.

The team -- which also includes Cray Inc., Oak Ridge National Laboratory and six top U.S. universities -- is being funded by DARPA to address the challenge that conventional computing architectures are reaching the practical limits of energy usage and will not meet the challenges of exascale computing. The research team plans to develop new software and hardware technology to dramatically increase computing performance, programmability and reliability.

During the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC), Intel Corporation announced plans to deliver new products based on the Intel Many Integrated Core (MIC) architecture that will create platforms running at trillions of calculations per second, while also retaining the benefits of standard Intel processors.

Targeting high-performance computing segments such as exploration, scientific research and financial or climate simulation, the first product, codenamed "Knights Corner," will be made on Intel's 22-nanometer manufacturing (nm) process - using transistor structures as small as 22 billionths of a meter - and will use Moore's Law to scale to more than 50 Intel processing cores on a single chip. While the vast majority of workloads will still run best on award-winning Intel Xeon processors, Intel MIC architecture will help accelerate select highly parallel applications.

Intel has once again shelved plans to come back to the discrete graphics market, with the much talked about GPU codenamed Larrabee. In a recent post by Director, Product and Technology Media Relations Bill Kircos on the company blog, it was detailed that the company's priorities at the moment lie with releasing industry-leading processors that have the graphics-processing horsepower for everyday computing. The Intel HD graphics will only get better with the 2011 series of Core processors based on the Sandy Bridge architecture, where the iGPU core will be completely integrated with the processing complex.

An unexpected yield of the Larrabee program seems to be that Intel has now perfected many-core processors. Since Larrabee essentially is a multi-core processor with over 32 IA x86 cores that handle graphics workload, it could as well give Intel a CPU that is Godsent for heavy-duty HPC applications. Intel has already demonstrated a derivative of this architecture, and is looking to induct it into its Xeon series of enterprise processors.

AMD announces availability of a new server platform featuring the world's first 8- and 12-core x86 processor for the high-volume 2P and value 4P server market. The AMD Opteron 6000 Series platform addresses the unmistakable needs of server customers today - workload-specific performance, power efficiency, and overall value - while delivering more cores and more memory for less money. Leading OEMs including HP, Dell, Acer Group, Cray, and SGI are introducing new systems based on this highly scalable and reliable platform.

"As AMD has done before, we are again redefining the server market based on current customer requirements," said Patrick Patla, vice president and general manager, Server and Embedded Divisions, AMD. "The AMD Opteron 6000 Series platform signals a new era of server value, significantly disrupts today's server economics and provides the performance-per-watt, value and consistency customers demand for their real-world data center workloads."

Corsair, a worldwide leader in high-performance computer and flash memory products, today announced a 24GB Dominator triple-channel DDR3 memory kit designed for high-performance desktop and workstation computing applications.

Corsair's 24GB Dominator DDR3 memory kit has been rigorously tested in high-performance platforms based on the Intel X58 motherboard chipset for Intel Core i7 [Bloomfield] processors. It comprises six 4GB DDR3 DIMMs that operate at a frequency of 1333MHz, at latency timings of 9-9-9-27, with 1.65V VDIMM. The 24GB Dominator memory kit also features Corsair's patented DHX+ heatsink technology for optimal cooling and reliability. The modules, equipped with signature American Racing Blue heatsink fins, are found on select Corsair Dominator DDR3 memory for Intel Core i5 and Core i7 platforms in 8GB and 12GB kits.

Intel's ambitious attempts at building a discrete GPU have been shelved, as reports emerge of the company canceling the silicon's first implementation as a GPU, but rather as a "software development platform for internal and external use." In a statement issued to Internetnews.com, Intel spokesperson Nick Knupffer explained the company's current position of Larrabee, saying that development of Larrabee's silicon (the chip) and software were behind schedules. "Larrabee silicon and software development are behind where we hoped to be at this point in the project," he said. "As a result, our first Larrabee product will not be launched as a stand-alone, discrete graphics product, rather it will be used as a software development platform for internal and external use."

Larrabee as a discrete GPU made a lot of news in its short public-life, it was given much credibility as it was coming from Intel, an IT industry heavyweight. Earlier this year, Intel demonstrated a Larrabee-based product (including actual product design of the "Larrabee card"), at last month's SC'09 show. The company seemed to have avoided calling it a discrete GPU, instead a "computational co-processor for the Intel Xeon and Core families." It was reasonable in calling it that, since by design, Larrabee is a many-core processor which uses 32 IA cores interconnected by caches. At SC'09, Intel demonstrated its computational power which peaked at over 1 TFLOP, but not before overclocking it.

Intel Corporation and NEC Corporation today have agreed to jointly develop High Performance Computing (HPC) system technologies that will push the boundaries of supercomputing performance. NEC will bring these technologies to market in future supercomputers based on the Intel Xeon processor. NEC's expertise in this field coupled with the Intel Xeon processor's outstanding performance and its accelerating vector capabilities such as AVX will allow for higher performance supercomputers, satisfying customer demand for Intel architecture based products.

NEC will also continue to sell their existing SX vector processor-based products. A vector processor can perform a mathematical operation on several numbers simultaneously.

"Intel's substantial investment in the Intel architecture, including the development of processors, chipsets, software compilers and other related products has expanded the usages of Intel Xeon processors in both the volume and high-end HPC market segments," said Richard Dracott, general manager of Intel's High Performance Computing Group. "Now with NEC further innovating on Intel Xeon processor-based systems, Intel is poised to bring Intel Xeon processor performance to an even wider supercomputing audience."

NVIDIA Corporation today unveiled the Tesla 20-series of parallel processors for the high performance computing (HPC) market, based on its new generation CUDA processor architecture, codenamed "Fermi".

Designed from the ground-up for parallel computing, the NVIDIA Tesla 20-series GPUs slash the cost of computing by delivering the same performance of a traditional CPU-based cluster at one-tenth the cost and one-twentieth the power.

Following AMD's recent success of its 6-core Opteron processor in the TOP500 supercomputer list, Intel has sensed a market for "HPC-optimized" processors, which the company expects will be out in the first half of 2010. These could be either variants of the Nehalem-EX multi-socket capable processors, or that by design, Nehalem-EX suits HPC (high-performance computing) applications better.

These 6-core processors will carry clock speeds higher than 8-core Xeon processors around that time. The processors will be able to work in systems with up to 256 processors (logical CPUs). In addition to these Intel also announced that it will be releasing a beta version of its Ct technology by the end of this year. Ct makes parallel programming in the C and C++ programming languages easier, by automatically optimizing code to exploit multi-core and many-core systems.

Unveiled at the footnote of the GPU Technology Conference 2009, by none other than NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang, NVIDIA's Fermi architecture looks promising, at least in the field of GPGPU, which was extensively discussed upon in his address. The first reference board based on NVIDIA's newest 'GT300' GPU is a Tesla HPC processor card, which quickly became the face of the Fermi architecture. Singapore HardwareZone, and PCPop caught some of the first closeup pictures of the Tesla accelerator, and the GPU's BGA itself. Decked in a dash of chrome, the Tesla HPC processor card isn't particularly long, instead a great deal of compacting by its designers is evident. It draws power from one 8-pin, and 6-pin PCI-E power connectors, which aren't located next to each other. The cooler's blower also draws air from openings in the PCB, and a backplate further cools the GPU (and possibly other components located) from behind. From the looks of it, the GPU package itself isn't larger than that of the GT200 or its predecessor, the G80. Looks like NVIDIA is ready with a working prototype against all odds, after all, doesn't it? Not quite. On close inspection of the PCB, it doesn't look like a working sample. Components that are expected to have pins protruding soldered on the other side, don't have them, and the PCB seems to be abruptly ending. Perhaps it's only a dummy made to display at GTC, and give an indication of how the card ends up looking like. In other words, it doesn't look like NVIDIA has a working prototype/sample of the card they intended to have displayed the other day.