While we’re always on the lookout for HPC news, not everything makes it to the front page. Notable items from this week include big boosts for Apache Spark, Containerization, and Lustre.
- AMD Splitting? Reuters reports that AMD may split into two companies along the lines of what HP is doing. One option under consideration is separating AMD’s graphics and licensing business from its server business.
- Apache Spark Catches Fire. The open source Apache Spark platform got a big boost from IBM this week, as the company announced it’s all in to advance Spark development. If you’re wondering what Spark is used for, Ed Dumbill has it all written up for us.
- Best Paper on Resilency. Brian Austin, Eric Roman, and Xiaoye “Sherry” Li of LBNL won the Best Paper Award for “Resilient Matrix Multiplication of Hierarchical Semi-Separable Matrices” this week at the Fault Tolerance for HPC at eXtreme Scale Workshop in Portland.
- Containerization Moves Forward. This week StackEngine announced its Container Application Center, an end-to-end container application management solution. The newly launched product “will help enterprises transition from the costs and inefficiencies of virtualization to the flexibility, mobility and freedom of containerization.” Will it help HPC? Our friends at The UberCloud are already using it.
- DoE Funding for HPC. The U.S. Senate is considering the “Energy Title of America COMPETES Reauthorization Act of 2015,” which sets funding policy for the DoE Office of Science and ARPA-E for the next three years. While the proposed FY16 funding is greater than what was appropriated in FY15, it is still below President Obama’s requested budget for FY16 ($5.34 billion).
- Ethernet Plugfest. Next week, the Ethernet Alliance will host the largest 40G/100G Plugfest to-date. The plugfest represents a complete testing ecosystem for 40 Gigabit (40G) and 100 Gigabit (100G) Ethernet. Additionally, a technical feasibility event on 25 Gigabit per second (25Gb/s) technologies will be held to assess the state of these technologies.
- Jupiter Rising. Wired magazine gives us a rare look at Google-designed Jupiter switches. The company built their own 40 Terabit top-of-rack devices because there was nothing like it on the market.
- Googling Climate Change. Speaking of those guys, their new Google Trends tool offers a fascinating way to explore what people are looking for in 3 billion+ daily searches. In this video, Google Trends reflects the way the world thinks about climate change.
- Lustre Training at ISC 2015. Intel will host an all-day partner training session for the Intel Enterprise Edition for Lustre in Frankfurt on July 16. Register now.
