Reed's Ruminations: The Past, Present, and Future
Reflections on science, technology, and computing — leavened by personal experience
Tag: HPC
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Nothing Left But the Smile …
Like the Cheshire Cat in Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland, it seems increasingly clear that in the high-performance, low latency interconnection network space, we will be left with nothing but the smile. Simply put, the last remaining non-commodity component of HPC clusters – the high-performance interconnect – is in grave danger, due to the global economic…
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Scientific Clouds: Blowin’ in the Wind
Cirrus, stratus, altostratus, cumulus: they are the scientific names of the common clouds. They drift across the sky, reflecting the changing wind and weather. A new front is blowing into computational science, and cloud computing will soon advance scientific and engineering discovery.
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Beyond The Azure Blue
From the first day I arrived at Microsoft, my academic colleagues have been asking me about Microsoft’s strategy for cloud computing and when (or if) there would be public announcements. At our Professional Developers Conference (PDC), Microsoft announced Azure, our cloud computing platform, with on-demand compute and storage to host, scale and manage Internet or…
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Showing Up and Two Corollaries
“Eighty to ninety percent of life is showing up.” The line has been variously attributed to Yogi Berra, Woody Allen or even an anonymous wag. At the recent Cetraro meeting on High-Performance Computing and Grids, Miron Livny extended the “show up and see what happens” maxim by offering a corollary, “Show up and avoid doing…
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HPC and Climate Change: Senate Hearing
On Thursday, May 8, I testified to the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Technology. The full committee hearing was on improving the “Capacity of U.S. Climate Modeling for Decision Makers and End-Users.” The other members of the hearing panel were Jim Hack and I represented the computing and computational science issues, and the…
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HPC Procurements and NRE
In the current issue of HPCWire, John West has some thoughtful comments on the HPC procurement process. In an article entitled, “HPC Innovation in the Era of ‘Good Enough’,” he analyzes the competitive pressures on vendors and procurements and the small margins available to fund non-recurring engineering costs (i.e., vendor research and development).