IOL amongst other news agencies are running a story of government meddling in S&T (November 26 2008 at 11:56AM).

Suspended Council for Scientific and Industrial Research scientist Dr Anthony Turton said on Wednesday he had extended an "olive branch" to the organisation.

"I have no anger in my heart, I have no belligerence," he said.

"I have no interest in pursuing this to a higher level: I just want to continue doing my work as a scientist."

Turton was suspended last week after the CSIR ordered him not to deliver a hard-hitting presentation on South Africa's water crisis at a CSIR conference in Pretoria.

I have never met Dr Turton, or even heard of him. And this article certainly is not with regard to HPC. I am commenting here, because this to me is the principle of academic freedom, pure and simple. Further, the issues do touch a nerve, because other experts I know personally, and many trade organisations such as the SA Institute of Civil Engineers (SAICE) and here have been making claims for a long time as to the security of our drinking water.

He seems to be quite well published and here. I am not a civil engineer, but the volume and forums in which Dr Turton published seem quite extensive and reputable.

You can read it at the M&G or here. The article looks solid. There are certainly questionable sections - like the sensationalist Xenophobic pictures. However that is surely his prerogative. It seems that his paper was peer reviewed and accepted. The tone of the article does appear to indicate frustration and questions the wisdom of current policies. This is not wrong. Further, although he does put forward some forthright judgements, ultimately he is constructive.

There is a petition too. I signed the petition on principle.

Slashdot on Wednesday November 19, @05:02PM

"Wow, that's some news this week at SuperComputing 08. Apparently Microsoft Windows HPC Server 2008, with a Chinese hardware OEM (Dawning), made #10 on the Top500 list, edging out #11 by only 600 Gflops. Folks were shocked to see Microsoft getting so serious around HPC; I think we are only beginning to see a glimpse of Microsoft in the HPC field.

Slashdot on Wednesday November 19

In recent months, the concept of 'cloud computing' was all the buzz. European researchers think about another name, the World Wide Grid, which could run on top of the Internet. In an article to appear soon, ICT Results will report about the g-Eclipse project. As the scientists said, 'the g-Eclipse project aims to build an integrated workbench framework to access the power of existing Grid infrastructures. The framework will be built on top of the reliable eco-system of the Eclipse community to enable a sustainable development.' The project started in July 2006 and was successfully completed in June 2008 for a total cost of 2.5 million including a EU contribution of 1.96 million.

IT-Online - HP tops supercomputer list Wednesday, 19 November 2008, 11:38

HP's BladeSystem c-Class server has been named as the world's largest supercomputer. This is the second year in a row that HP has topped the list of the 500 most powerful computers in the world.

HP computers make up 41,8% of the list, with IBM computers making up 37,6%.

Woopee!!
Africa still has one in the Top 500, and it sits in South Africa

Continents  	Count  	Share %  	Rmax Sum (GF)  	Rpeak Sum (GF)  	Processor Sum
Africa  	1  	0.20 %  	23415  	        27850  	                8192

Here are it's vital statistics.

Rank  System  	        Procs	Memory(GB)  	Rmax (GFlops)  	Rpeak (GFlops)  Vendor
128 	 Blue Gene/P Solution     8192	N/A  	        23415  	        27850  	         IBM

AMD has clawed back some market interest in the server area.

http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?t=207607

Shanghai @2,7 to bulldozer anything in virtualization
Shangai @ 2,7 ghz VMmark scores are out, kills any living Intel system out there.

shangai @2,7ghz 2p 8core score : 11,22
http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/vmma...11-12-R805.pdf

harpertown @ 3,33ghz 2p 8core score : 9,15
http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/vmma...0-09-ML370.pdf

shangai @2,7ghz 4p 16core score : 20,35
http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/vmma...11-12-R905.pdf

IEEE Spectrum: The African Hacker By G. Pascal Zachary

With home-brewed code and a little help from Microsoft, a programmer in Ghana launches Africa's first software empire

The first time I meet Hermann Chinery-Hesse, he is pouring diesel fuel from a plastic jug into an electric generator. I am in the West African country of Ghana, visiting his software company, Soft Tribe Ltd.

Chinery-Hesse is chief of the Tribe. He's made a small fortune writing software, working as a systems architect, and selling computer code to hundreds of businesses in his country of 21 million people. He drives a Mercedes. He wears imported Birkenstock sandals. He hails from a prominent family, was born in Dublin, and went to college in the United States. He could be working anywhere on the strength of his Irish passport, yet he's spent the past dozen years in Accra, Ghana's coastal capital and one-time slave-trade hub.

This steamy December morning, with deadlines looming, his electricity is out, his programmers are idle, and he's feeding fuel to a balky 50-kilovolt-ampere generator—one of the three he keeps at the ready.

Having emptied his container and thus delivered power to his 18 programmers—about one-tenth of all full-time code writers in Ghana—Chinery-Hesse relaxes and, for the first time, acknowledges my presence. Stroking his beard, he quips, "If we Africans are to develop, we must want to get our hands dirty."

IEEE Spectrum: Multicore Is Bad News For Supercomputers (First Published November 2008) By Samuel K. Moore

Adding cores slows data-intensive applications

Trouble Ahead: More cores per chip will slow some programs [red] unless there’s a big boost in memory bandwidth [yellow].

With no other way to improve the performance of processors further, chip makers have staked their future on putting more and more processor cores on the same chip. Engineers at Sandia National Laboratories, in New Mexico, have simulated future high-performance computers containing the 8-core, 16‑core, and 32-core microprocessors that chip makers say are the future of the industry. The results are distressing. Because of limited memory bandwidth and memory-management schemes that are poorly suited to supercomputers, the performance of these machines would level off or even decline with more cores. The performance is especially bad for informatics applications—data-intensive programs that are increasingly crucial to the labs’ national security function.

AMD is still widely used at the top end of the HPC spectrum often due to interconnect performance.

Pumping out a sustained 1.64 quadrillion mathematical calculations per second (1.64 petaflops) after a recent technological overhaul, the Cray XT Jaguar is now the world's latest fastest supercomputer (huge disclaimer coming) for non-classified research. And once you see what's under the hood, you'll know why.

IT-Online
Thursday, 13 November 2008, 11:43

In a conventional data centre, 35% to as much as 50% of the electrical energy consumed is for cooling versus 15% in best-practice "green" data centres.

"Virtually all data centres waste enormous amounts of electricity using inefficient cooling designs and systems," says Paul McGuckin, research vice-president at Gartner. "Even in a small data centre, this wasted electricity amounts to more than 1 million kilowatt hours annually that could be saved with the implementation of some best practices."
The overriding reason for the waste in conventional data centre cooling is the unconstrained mixing of cold supply air with hot exhaust air.