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In 1968 Shirley Chisholm became the first Black woman elected to the United States Congress. In 1972 she launched a campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, breaking another political barrier.
MORE →Reflects the personal views, recollections, and perspective of the author, Mike Davis.
This is a personal recollection on the Move fire on May 13, 1985
High-performance computing (HPC) is the use of supercomputers and computer clusters to solve advanced problems.
HPC integrates systems administration (including network and security knowledge), parallel computing and distributed computing into a multidisciplinary field that combines digital electronics, computer architecture, system software, programming languages, algorithms and computational techniques.[1] HPC technologies are the tools and systems used to implement and create high performance computing systems.[2] Since around 2005, HPC systems have shifted from supercomputing to computing clusters and grids.[1] Because of the need of networking in clusters and grids, High Performance Computing Technologies are achieved by the use of a collapsed network backbone, because the collapsed backbone architecture is simple to troubleshoot and upgrades can be applied to a single router as opposed to multiple ones. HPC integrates with data analytics in AI engineering workflows to generate new data streams that increase a simulation's ability to answer the "what if" questions.[3]
The term is most commonly associated with computing used for scientific research or computational science. A related term, high-performance technical computing (HPTC), generally refers to the engineering applications of cluster-based computing (such as computational fluid dynamics and the building and testing of virtual prototypes). HPC has also been applied to business uses such as data warehouses, line of business (LOB) applications, and transaction processing.
High-performance computing (HPC) as a term arose after the term "supercomputing".[4] HPC is sometimes used as a synonym for supercomputing; but, in other contexts, "supercomputer" is used to refer to a more powerful subset of "high-performance computers", and the term "supercomputing" becomes a subset of "high-performance computing". The potential for confusion over the use of these terms is apparent.
Because most current applications are not designed for HPC technologies but are retrofitted, they are not designed or tested for scaling to more powerful processors or machines.[2] Since networking clusters and grids use multiple processors and computers, these scaling problems can cripple critical systems in future supercomputing systems. Therefore, either the existing tools do not address the needs of the high performance computing community or the HPC community is unaware of these tools.[2] A few examples of commercial HPC technologies include:
In government and research institutions, scientists simulate galaxy formation and evolution, fusion energy, and global warming, as well as work to create more accurate short- and long-term weather forecasts.[5] The world's tenth most powerful supercomputer in 2008, IBM Roadrunner (located at the United States Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory)[6] simulated the performance, safety, and reliability of nuclear weapons and certifies their functionality.[7]
TOP500 ranks the world's 500 fastest high-performance computers, as measured by the High Performance LINPACK (HPL) benchmark. Not all existing computers are ranked, either because they are ineligible (e.g., they cannot run the HPL benchmark) or because their owners have not submitted an HPL score (e.g., because they do not wish the size of their system to become public information, for defense reasons). In addition, the use of the single LINPACK benchmark is controversial, in that no single measure can test all aspects of a high-performance computer. To help overcome the limitations of the LINPACK test, the U.S. government commissioned one of its originators, Jack Dongarra of the University of Tennessee, to create a suite of benchmark tests that includes LINPACK and others, called the HPC Challenge benchmark suite. This evolving suite has been used in some HPC procurements, but, because it is not reducible to a single number, it has been unable to overcome the publicity advantage of the less useful TOP500 LINPACK test. The TOP500 list is updated twice a year, once in June at the ISC European Supercomputing Conference and again at a US Supercomputing Conference in November.
Many ideas for the new wave of grid computing were originally borrowed from HPC.
Traditionally, HPC has involved an on-premises infrastructure, investing in supercomputers or computer clusters. Over the last decade, cloud computing has grown in popularity for offering computer resources in the commercial sector regardless of their investment capabilities.[8] Some characteristics like scalability and containerization also have raised interest in academia.[9] However security in the cloud concerns such as data confidentiality are still considered when deciding between cloud or on-premise HPC resources.[8]
Below is a list of the main HPCs by computing power, as reported in the Top500 list:[10]
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Source: Wikipedia. Article content is retrieved live through the MediaWiki API.
High-performance computing (HPC) is the use of supercomputers and computer clusters to solve advanced problems.
The High Performance Computing Act of 1991 (HPCA) is an Act of Congress promulgated in the 102nd United States Congress as (Pub.L. 102–194) on December 9, 1991. Often referred to as the Gore Bill, it was created and introduced by then Senator Al Gore, and led to the development of the National Information Infrastructure, the funding of the National Research and Education Network (NREN), and the High-Performance Computing and Communications Program (HPCC). The funding allocation was approximately $600 million.
The High Performance Computing Center (HLRS) in Stuttgart, Germany, is a research institute and a supercomputer center. HLRS has currently a flagship installation of a HPE Apollo 9000 system called Hawk 26 PFLOPS peak performance replacing the Cray XC40 system called Hazel Hen, providing ~7,4 PFLOPS peak performance. Additional systems include NEC clusters (NEC SX-ACE systems for testing, NEC Vulcan + Vulcan2 for non-critical computing) and Cray CS-Storm cluster. Known historical configurations: 1996 - Cray T3E / 512 + NEC SX-4 2000 - Hitachi SR-8000 + NEC SX-5 / 32M2 2003 - ? (Opteron/Xeon cluster) + NEC SX-6 2005 - NEC SX-8 2008 - IBM BW-Grid + NEC SX-9 2009 - Cray XT5M 2010 - Cray XE6 "Hermit" 2014 - Cray XC40 "Hornet" 2019 - Cray CS-Storm 2020 - HPE Apollo 9000 "Hawk" + NEC (Vulcan + Vulcan2 + NEC SX-ACE).
Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Center (MGHPCC) is an intercollegiate high-performance computing facility located in Holyoke, Massachusetts, connected to that city's municipal fiber grid and powered by Holyoke Gas and Electric via the Holyoke Canal System and Dam. MGHPCC is a joint venture of Boston University, Harvard, MIT, Northeastern, the University of Massachusetts system, and Yale University; the facility holds the capacity for hundreds of thousands of cores in clusters provided by its affiliates. For example, as of 2016 one cluster used by UMass contained a network of 14,376 cores, both Intel and AMD, and more than 1.1 petabytes of on-site storage on an FDR Infiniband network. The facility maintains capacity for regular expansion, with key partners investing capability upgrades in the current building and more than 4 acres of additional undeveloped space.
Before the 1921 destruction of Tulsa’s Greenwood District, Black residents had created a remarkable center of business and community life. The district included stores, professional offices, entertainment venues and homes owned by Black citizens. Understanding Greenwood means learning what was built—not only what was burned.
MORE →Shirley Chisholm, elected in 1968.
