What it's like to play with the Jaguar Supercomputer

Back on a recurring theme. I was just pointed to this on CNN Money.  Of course I remember the TV crew coming but didn't know it had been aired.

The comments after the article, as usual, are the most fun.
I liked this one: "It's amazing we went from the first computers that filled entire floors which a bunch of blinking lights and engineers in lab coats monitoring them all the time to ... a computer filling an entire floor with blinking lights and engineers in lab coats monitoring all the time. Nothing changes, just the scale."

The Tennessee Titan..

..may be ready for the next football season. And, no, I didn't accidentally omit the plural.

The Tennessee Titans (plural) are themselves in good shape but apparently "still  missing a few pieces here and there to be a really good team".  The same could be said for the Tennessee Titan, the ORNL DOE supercomputer.

Frank Munger reports that the remaining GPUs needed for the new system may be delivered in August-September - in time maybe for the new football season. The question remains as to whether Titan will win the Supercomputing Superbowl - the Top500 competition. We'll know the answer later on - maybe in time for the February Football Fiesta itself.

The DOE:Industry Supercomputing Summit.....

.....in Austin TX, from which I just came back, brought together Industrial R&D and National Lab research directors. Secretary Chu gave an entertaining talk on three hours of sleep describing how computations on DOE facilities have led to potentially commercially important new designs of trucks, buildings etc and I had the pleasure of sitting next to the CEO of Ramgen, a company that has used the supercomputer to design a new, efficient jet engine. Only complaint is the usual one - the quality of the breakfasts, which seems to have been downgraded since the "Scientists Gone Wild" news report some years ago....

Drug Discovery Research at Oak Ridge

Well, I've been involved to some extent in human health research for a while, including participating in research suggesting a common pharmacophoric footprint for AIDS vaccine design and in helping design experimental methods for detecting single tumour marker molecules in serum.

Now we appear to be on the road to working with Milton Brown and his colleagues at Georgetown University in prostate cancer research, as part of a new NIH Clinical and Translational Science Award center. Milton heads the Drug Discovery Center at Georgetown Medical School. The idea here is to use Oak Ridge's supercomputers to help design molecules of potential therapeutic use. Jerome Baudry will play a leading role in this research from our side. I'm kind of excited about what might happen.....

Biology and Medical Research at the Exascale

...a glimpse into the future, but the challenges in reaching the exascale are formidable, not the least in mastering the power requirements and the consequences of regular core failures in systems of 100 million cores.