Notes from the Floor: SC11

By Bio-IT World Staff  

November 18, 2011 | This week’s Supercomputing 11 (SC11) conference in Seattle was full of news and product announcements across the industry, many of which featured companies active in life sciences. Here’s just a sampling of what caught Bio-IT World’s eye and ear.   

Top500 announced their newest list. The Top 10 order didn’t change, but the space between systems did.   

AccelerEyes launched ArrayFire, a freely-available GPU software library supporting CUDA and OpenCL devices.  

Jason Stowe (of Cycle Computing) was working the Amazon Web Services booth. AWS theorized a bit on the cloud’s role in high performance computing in a blog post mid-week, and announced a new type of instance—CC2, or Cluster Compute Eight Extra Large—at the event.   

Bright Computing is a company worth watching for their cluster management capabilities in the cloud and new status as an Amazon Web Services Solution Provider.   

Convey Computer announced a partnership with Nimbix (PDF) to deliver Convey’s unique hybridcore architecture and bioinformatics personalities as a cloud-based HPC solution, and a doubling of its Graph500 performance (PDF).   

Cray won a University of Illinois' National Center for Supercomputing Applications contract, and announced the Sonexion 1300 system, an integrated file system, software and storage product.  

Along with Cray, NVIDIA announced a parallel-programming standard—OpenACC—with the Portland Group (PGI) and CAPS enterprise. NVIDIA’s co-founder and CEO, Jen-Hsun Huang, hosted a keynote session at the event.   

The DataDirect Networks booth was busy as they released newer storage offerings tied to their Storage Fushion product line.   

Globus Online celebrated its first birthday at SC11, and are currently doing effective large file transfer.   

NETLIST introduced its new 32GB Virtual Dual Rank HyperCloud Planar-X RDIMM, enabling up to 768GB in a standard two-processor server.   

Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Myricom, and Juniper Networks demonstrated “wide-area” 100 Gigabit Ethernet (100 GbE) between the ORNL and Juniper Networks booths.   

ScaleMP pushed virtualization and showcased their products with partners HP, IBM, AMD, and AdvancedHPC.   

SGI hosted an impressive booth and introduced their Next-Generation ICE X Scale-Out Bladed HPC Cluster. The SGI-Cloudera partnership is also worth watching.   

Platform Computing made a big splash, as they always do. Now that Platform is owned by IBM it could get even more interesting.   

Bull had a solid presence and launched a new generation of ultra-dense petascale supercomputers, though it’s not yet clear how much that will affect life sciences.