The global race to Exascale computing but the worlds governments recieved a boost last week, when the European Union released a statement on it's current approach.

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University of Edinburgh’s Advanced Computing Facility (ACF) announced plans for the next generation of UK Super Computers for Science. This includes the combined power of the UK's HECToR and BlueGene/Q

The announcement included details on HECToR Phase 3 with a £13.9 million grant from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC).

Professor John Womersley, Chief Executive Officer of STFC spoke of the prominance of High Performance Computing in UK Science.

The UK's BlueGene/Q and HECToR are both ranked at 800 Teraflops with approximately one Petabyte of storage.
They perform simulations across a range of scientific disciplines and are funded by four of the UK Research Councils, EPSRC, STFC, NERC and BBSRC.

Some times good things come in small packages. We've loved the idea of the low cost Pi Linux box since it was announced. The promise of allowing people to create the next generation of technology that is muti-core clusters and smart networked was really compelling.

Raspberry is Pi Foundation's 700MHz ARM11 CPU $25 Linux computer. While much is speculated it is claimed that the Broadcom graphics hardware in the Raspberry Pi offers twice the performance of the iPhone 4S GPU and soundly beats NVIDIA's Tegra 2. What this means for experimental pipe-lined jobs is far from certain. So far the Pi computer has ben demonstrated running smoothly a H.264-encoded 1080p video.

We welcome any further informaiton regarding Pi's usage in experimental/hobiest custering, CUDA and other parallel activities. Email us at info@scalabiliti.com

Source : http://www.raspberrypi.org/

Super dense (Arm) servers is an area we have been tracking for some time. Now SeaMicro steps into the game, kick starting a super dense intel server.

The SM10000-XE uses 1/2 the power, takes 1/3 the space, and delivers 12x the bandwidth of today’s equivalent servers. Packing 64 Xenon (256 2.4 Ghz cores) on a sandy bridge platform.

http://seamicro.com/node/224

With funding from Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), the University of Manchester is heading up a large interdisciplinary network focusing on numerical algorithms and high performance computing.

Overseen by Professor Nick Higham and Professor David Silvester of the School of Mathematics, the network aims to support interaction and collaboration between UK numerical analysts, computer scientists and developers and users of software and HPC.

http://www.mims.manchester.ac.uk/na-hpc/index.php

Perhaps paving the way for traditional SQL Vendors, Google's researchers published a paper describing Tenzing, a query engine built on top of MapReduce. Remarkably for Google this is a less disruptive technology since Tenzing supports a mostly complete SQL language syntax with some extensions.

The Tenzing is more than just a research concept, it is live and working at Google internally. Tenzing currently serves 10000+ queries per day over 1.5 petabytes of compressed data.

Tenzing combines enterprise characteristics such as heterogeneity, high performance, scalability, reliability, metadata awareness, low latency, support for columnar storage and structured data, and easy extensibility. Looks like we have a new old solution that boosts performance with a less disruptive syntax.

Source : Google Research

• Nginx, web server has seen a huge growth in it's popularity due to its ability to easily handle high-volume traffic. Nginx next release, due in early 2012, will be more pliable for shared hosting environments.
• The OpenStack cloud computing platform has gained support from several technology firms due to its scalability.

• We've discussed various NoSql technologies through out the year. Perhaps 2012 might be the year of Stig a nosql db for social networking sites. The data store's architecture allows for inferential searching, enabling users and applications to look for connections between disparate pieces of information.

• A storage system for the scalable, distributed age GlusterFS is one of the fastest growing storage software systems on the market, as downloads have increased by 300 percent in the last year.

In a recent (youtube) talk, see link below twitter demonstrated the smart use of Sql (MySql) and no-sql ( Hadoop, Cassandra , Vertica) technologies.

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JPMorgan has once again deployed a new FPGA-based supercomputer to help in it's efforts to process and analyse data. The previous supercomputer was used to speed up batch based processes, specifically around the end-of-day risk calculation. They claimed a time reduction from 8 hours to 238 seconds (a reduction of approx 99.2%).

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Details are emerging of China's latest Super computer, called the Sunway BlueLight MPP. It was installed on September at the National Supercomputer Center in Jinan, China. It will use in part 8,700 ShenWei SW1600 chips.

The ShenWei SW1600 is the third generation CPU by Jiāngnán Computing Research Lab. It achieves 140 GFLOPS floating point performance from its 16 cores RISC architecture. The CPU is a national key collaborative laboratory project by Jiāngnán Computing Research Lab and High Performance Services & Storage Technologies.

In addition the Sunway installation uses a sophisticated water-cooling system.

The UK-based mobile chip giant Arm announced a smaller, cheaper, more efficient Cortex-A7. It's efficiency is due in part to the 28nm process that makes it five times smaller than the current offerings like the Cortex-A8.

However that was not the biggest surprise, the new A7 can also be combined with much higher-power cores like the Cortex-A15 on the same chip. This will allow the processing unit to switch between two totally different processing units depending on how much power is needed at the time. Perhaps the least imaginative part is their name of “Big.LITTLE” computing,”

Netcraft server report shows a significant up-tick in the usage of Nginx. This bares out experience where
Nginx is used as a fast reverse proxy and static data server for highly scalable applications

via Netcraft Survey Report