Computing Written by Martin Courtney, Computing, 17 Jun 2010

1.5 million volunteer PCs create mass processing power to recognise protein crystallisation

The World Community Grid (WGC) has enlisted the help of 1.5 million systems worldwide to give cancer research scientists sufficient computing power to identify crystallised protein, helping them determine how cancer is formed and, potentially, how it might be prevented.

Begun in 2007, the Help Conquer Cancer project has so far sifted through more than 100 million images of 12,500 unique proteins that could be linked to cancer, captured in the course of 19.2 million experiments.

Sponsored and co-ordinated by WCG founder IBM, it allows researchers to get results up to six times faster than if they were using alternative supercomputer or mainframe resources, or making the same calculations manually. For more go to www.worldcommunitygrid.org/index.jsp

IT-Online SKA bid a step closer, Thursday, 17 June 2010, 11:39
Here is an article about the SKA with a little gem at the end - it appears that the CHPC - after all that - is nothing more than a processing node for KAT.

Tellumat has completed the feed cluster sub-assemblies for the KAT 7 radio telescope that is currently being erected at Carnarvon in the Northern Cape.

The units, destined for each of the KAT 7 array’s seven telescopes, will receive and amplify data captured in the form of radio frequency (RF) emissions from celestial bodies. Tellumat’s delivery to KAT 7 also includes software to process the data, allowing for a close study of the cosmos.
The KAT 7, whose construction was commissioned by the Department of Science and Technology, could ultimately lead to South Africa winning the right to host the Square Kilometre Array (SKA). Four countries bid for the privilege, which will bestow immense scientific prestige on the victor, but only South Africa and Australia remain in the running.

Computing

Combined Windows and Linux offers faster processing, claim firms

Written by Iain Thomson in San Francisco

V3.co.uk, 02 Jun 2010

Microsoft and Novell have reported strong interest in their high performance computing (HPC) system based on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and Windows HPC Server.

The companies said that 33 organisations have signed up to use the system in the financial, healthcare, higher education and technology sectors, including Deutsche Bank AG, Honeywell International, Japan Petroleum Exploration and Texas Instruments.

"Many customers are realising the benefits of the Microsoft and Novell HPC technical solution that streamlines management functions, reduces internal support requirements and enables greater interoperability without having to dedicate time and resources to devise workarounds," said Joe Wagner, senior vice president and general manager of global alliances at Novell.

"Through our successful initiatives in the Joint Interoperability Lab, we've been able to anticipate the mixed-source IT requirements necessary in today's business environment."

The new Top 500 has been updated. (06/2010) The CHPC's machine is now ranked 461, RMax=25440.00 GFlop, RPeak=30860.80 GFlop and efficiency 82.43%. The CHPC was ranked 128 in Nov 2008 (with a Blue Gene/P Solution, RMax=23415.00 GFlop, RPeak=27850.00 and efficiency 84.08 )and 311 in Nov 2009 with the current system (Tsessebe, SunBlade X6275 and X6250, Xeon X5570 and E5450, Infiniband QDR/DDR).

I am wondering what the plan is now? With all this capacity built surely something should happen?

BBC News
By Jonathan Fildes Technology reporter, 8:09 GMT, Monday, 31 May 2010 9:09 UK

China aims to be become supercomputer superpower
China is ramping up efforts to become the world's supercomputing superpower.

Its Nebulae machine at the National Super Computer Center in Shenzhen, was ranked second on the biannual Top 500 supercomputer list.

For the first time, a second Chinese supercomputer appears in the list of the top ten fastest machines.

However, the US still dominates the list with seven of the top ten computers, including the world's fastest, known as Jaguar.

The Cray computer, which is owned by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, has a top speed of 1.75 petaflops.

One petaflop is the equivalent of 1,000 trillion calculations per second.

From DDJ@techwebnewsletters.com:

You just never know when a smattering of partial differential equations or harmonic analysis will come in handy. At least, that's what a pair of University of Pennsylvania mathematicians discovered, unraveling in the process the solution to a 140-year-old, 7-dimensional equation that's stumped mathematicians for more than a century.

HPCwire:
April 07, 2010

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa, April 7 -- The first-ever feature-length 3D animation film to come out of South Africa, "Lion of Judah", hits local screens later this year -- and it owes its existence to a massive bank of supercomputers that are working overtime to finalise the movie for our screens.

The movie, created at local animation studio Character Matters, is in final production with the assistance of the Centre for High Performance Computing (CHPC) in Cape Town.

HPCwire April 13, 2010, by Michael Feldman, HPCwire Editor

The 21st century has seen a plethora of supercomputing centers sprouting up across the globe. While the US, Western Europe, and Japan are still the dominant HPC territories, rapidly developing countries such as China, India, Brazil, Russia, and Saudi Arabia are quickly ramping up their HPC infrastructures. Of all the regions, though, Africa is still mostly an HPC desert. But in Cape Town, South Africa, the three-year-old Center for High Performance Computing (CHPC) aims to change all that.

Funded by South Africa's Department of Science and Technology (DST), CHPC is tasked with providing high-end computational resources for research organizations and businesses in South Africa and throughout Africa. Since it opened its doors in June 2007, CHPC, under the direction of Dr. Happy Sithole, has been busy building up its HPC infrastructure and gathering users. Because it is a regional HPC center -- essentially covering a whole continent -- its resources have to serve a wide array of clients and applications.

ITWeb by Leigh-Ann Francis, Johannesburg, 19 Apr 2010

Latency in the skills pipeline and the undervaluation of education fuel SA's ICT skills crisis, says ScrumSense.

It is the responsibility of every ICT professional to contribute towards alleviating the skills crisis, says ScrumSense's Marius de Beer.

It is the responsibility of every ICT professional to contribute towards alleviating the skills crisis, says ScrumSense's Marius de Beer.
SA's ICT skills pipeline is broken, with the skills being fed into industry not matching the needs. For reasons that can not be explained, South Africans do not have respect for education, which is most likely why this has happened.